Senior VFX Artist at DICE, Nadab Göksu, has written an insightful blog entry on Battlefield 3's blog discussing the visual adaptations going into the game's upcoming Close Quarters DLC expansion.
Göksu's task was to make sure that the VFX in Close Quarters made sense with the new, closer-in form of combat that the DLC will be offering. Battlefield maps are traditionally huge, and when you see a blast of particles from a destroyed vehicle, it's no big deal because the particle effects aren't going to hinder your vision very much as you have more space to work with.
In Close Quarters, however, that's not always the case. When you're in a tight hallway, and pillars are being reduced to rubble all around you, Göksu wanted to make sure that you could still see the action realistically...
We have a lot more destruction than in previous games, so if we were to use the set of FX from the base game, the rooms and corridors in Close Quarters would be literally filled with smoke for long periods of time, potentially ruining the gameplay.
Secondly, the whole art direction for this expansion pack centers around destruction. I wanted to emphasize this by having a lot of debris and very violent dust explosions that burst and dissipate quickly so that they don’t take over the scene. The focus here should be on debris rather than smoke. Combined, these two tenets governed a lot of the FX work for Close Quarters.
The full post is an amazing read for anyone mildly interested in VFX in games or Battlefield as a franchise. Check it out at http://blogs.battlefield.com/!
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