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Battlefield 3's campaign earned a mixed response at launch, but over a decade later it's proven a nexus for nostalgia over the FPS campaigns of the Xbox 360 era, with extensive praise for the single-player mode going viral earlier this year. As it turns out, some of those campaign missions were built from the bones of a very different Battlefield 3 - one that would've been more like an MMO than a traditional FPS.
That's according to DICE veteran David Goldfarb, speaking during an interview with NoClip. Goldfarb worked on the campaign for both Bad Company and its sequel, and during the latter's production, he says much of the studio was working on "the big project," which would have been "a very different BF3."
As Goldfarb puts it, this version of Battlefield 3 was "more of an MMO, really." Details on what the game would've looked like are light, and a struggle to figure out how a Battlefield MMO would work might be why the project was ultimately killed. Codenamed Venice, the project was DICE's "main project for a number of years," according to NoClip, but it "never really found stable design ground and was eventually sunset."
Once that Battlefield 3 was cancelled, the leads of the Bad Company 2 team were brought in to help build a more traditional sequel, with single-player, co-op, and multiplayer aimed at competing against Call of Duty. Goldfarb would take the lead of the single-player campaign, and while the Battlefield 3 we eventually got was effectively a whole new game, the MMO version did offer some enticing raw materials.
Goldfarb says the team "had a bunch of assets that were left over from [Project] Venice. One of them was Paris. So it was like, 'What are we gonna do with Paris?' And then... 'Well, we clearly need to make a [single-player] mission in Paris.'"
That eventually became the Comrades mission, with the Russian Spetsnaz in Paris. "It's gotta be in Russian," Goldfarb argued once the story of the level was set. "Not gonna do some fucking bullshit. The whole mission's gotta be in Russian."
If it seems like Battlefield 6 has been a long time coming, just remember that the road of game development has never been without its bumps. That's as true in 2025 as it was in 2011.
