Humor made Battlefield: Bad Company a "niche" title, says DICE

The sense of humour in the Battlefield: Bad Company series makes it the game more of a "niche" product than the mainline Battlefield titles, DICE executive producer Patrick Bach has said.

"It is a discussion about niche and mass market, I think," said DICE executive producer Patrick Bach in an interview with OXM. "If you make your product more niche, you'll get more happy fans, but that audience will be smaller--some people won't care, some people will love it."

"When we did the original Bad Company and the sequel, we got a lot of criticism. Why would I play this? It's not a serious shooter, I don't care about this. I want a serious shooter with a more hard-boiled angle. And we thought it was fun! We loved it, we thought it was a great game. The narrative was amazing and the characters were amazing."

"So it's not that we've buried the crew, so to speak," continued Bach. "I love franchises that don't take themselves too seriously."

But to make a game with the broadest appeal then developers need to be "neutral" with humour, Bach argued. "But it is true that for some reason if you want to make a game for the masses, you need to be more neutral when it comes to things like humour, because humour is very personal. Some people love it, some people hate it."

"I think that games in general can be anything," continued Bach. "Sometimes you get the feeling that the community and the press only think there's one type of game, the ultimate game, and for me it's becoming more and more diverse, much like the movie industry, which I think is a good comparison."

"When you started out it was quite serious, because it was an expensive business to make a movie, so you'd [effectively] have this stage drama that you'd film, but then you start to add comedy to it and make money off that, and turn it into a genre, and now you have all types of genres, where it isn't just based on comedy, drama, documentary, or whatever--it's also how you consume those movies," concluded Bach.

"Trust me, the Bad Company [team] isn't forgotten, they are just on a very long vacation," said DICE creative director Lars Gustavsson in October. "They are out there, they're coming back."

As of July 2011, Battlefield: Bad Company 2 had sold over 9 million units to retailers.

Battlefield 4 is out now.