Good morning, I’m now back in the office here at DICE and we have a sunny day outside the office!
My producer Patrick Liu have also been busy and have gone more into some parts of the game on his blog that I want to communicate to all English speaking fans!
I will go into more into our Replenish ammunition system and how our three classes works in the game!
Replenish ammunition
Many people have been wondering how our “unlimited ammunition” works. Unlimited ammunition is really an unfortunate word, replenish explains much better what we want to do!
Imagine yourself running around trying to find a crate to fill up your ammo, but instead the crate comes to you!
Bundles
The AT rifle and Rifle grenades have about 2-3 shots in each “bundle”. You can fire one rocket, reload and then fire another rocket pretty fast. But when your “bundle” is emptied a timer starts ticking, this is the replenish time. The time is being carefully monitored and tweaked under our playtests!
Imagine yourself that under this time you would otherwise be forced to run 100m to the nearest ammunition crate, and then run 100m back again to be able to fire your next round. Running back and forward like that is no fun!
With replenish you wont get any grenade or AT spam. And even if the snipers have “unlimited” ammunition they have been proven to be found pretty fast under our playtests so there is no exploit there either!
The system have been proven to work great under our playtests and we have people from hardcore ace pilots to dedicated snipers. So once again you will have to trust us with this one. We wanted to test something new and it’s the same principal with the regenerating health-system we have. Which have been proven to work great in other games also.
All the changes we have made is to remove all the obstacles that would have stopped you from firing at your enemy!
Classes
As you have seen we have “only” three classes. We choose this because we wanted to make three very distinct classes, and it’s also a lot easier to balance three classes than for example seven classes. Many of course misses the “medic” class but with regenerating health we couldn’t find any good area for this class and the regenerating health, in this game, overrules the medic class in this case.
Infantry and Rifleman have grenades, Scout have expack. All classes have some kind of melee weapon. Infantry have a wrench, Rifleman a bayonet and the Japanese Scout have a katana sword!
Infantry: Close combat soldier, your run-and-gun type. Suites beginners very well that want to spray with the Thompson SMG. But he is also the only support-class with his repairing wrench and the most effective anti-vehicle soldier with his AT rifle!
Rifleman: Best in the middle range distance. Have a semi-auto (M1 Garand) and iron sight. The class for the more skilled player that wants to have the best control of his shots. Also have Rifle grenades against soldiers and any walls that may be in the way!
Scout: The sniper class. For all the lone wolves 
Equipped with a pistol for those close combat situations and expacks to blow up.. yeah, anything!
Theoretically all classes can take out a tank sooner or later but I wouldn’t go against a tank as Rifleman, but with expacks you also need to get pretty close to do any damage…
There have been comments about PC vs. X360, PS3. But I can only say that I cant comment on any of those things at the time being.
I can only explain and comment on the game design and gameplay experience in Battlefield 1943.
