Battlefield 4 looks pretty amazing owing to the new Frostbite 3 engine that will hold the game together. With each passing day counting down to the title’s release, there are numerous details that are being revealed, and one of them now states that the game will not support any kinds of mods. Surprised? Not really.
DICE, responsible for handling the developmental duties of the game, is quite sure that the response the game has received in its initial days of reveal will continue and become ever greater once the game comes around officially. So it sounds like a sensible decision for DICE by declaring that Battlefield 4 shall not walk the same path as that of Battlefield 3 (mod-wise).
DICE general manager, Karl-Magnus Troedsson, in an interview with PCGamer, confirmed that DICE will not release any SDK or similar modding tools for its upcoming shooter. The reason that Troedsson shows for this decision is the fact that DICE needs to make sure that it has the right set of tools available for the game, alongside the right security for the parts (if any) of engine it would decide to let loose for the game.
When asked if Battlefield 4 will be moddable, Troedsson stated: “We get that question a lot. I always answer the same thing, and then the community calls me bad names. We get the feedback, we understand it. We also would like to see more player-created content, but we would never do something like this if we feel we couldn’t do this 100 percent.”
“That means we need to have the right tools available, we need to have the right security around this regarding what parts of the engine we let loose, so to say. So for BF4 we don’t have any planned mod support, I have to be blunt about saying that. We don’t.”
He added that although this decision is currently final, the company is also thinking about the future “where we are going with the product, et cetera. So user-created content is something that’s very interesting to us, but I’m sorry to say that we will not have mod support in BF4.”
Interestingly, Troedsson doesn’t ever say that the engine will be too complicated for modders to get into it and create what they like, and if we are to learn something from history, the modders will get to work on the engine as soon as the game is made official, even if DICE is not interested.
But as far as EA and DICE are concerned, the decision to leave out mods for the new game arrived from the fact that the companies have invested a lot of money in the game’s additional DLC packs, and releasing a mod for the game at this point might hurt the sales figures of those DLC packs
Battlefield 4 is currently planned for an Oct. 31 release on PC, Xbox 360 and PS3. A possible arrival for Xbox One and PS4 will happen at a later date.