Over the last week, Battlefield and Medal of Honor fans have received a lot of exciting news, with new content coming for both franchises. Medal of Honor: Warfighter, a sequel to the 2010 reboot, was officially unveiled at GDC last week and with it, DICE finally announced the Battlefield 3 DLC plans. The latter is something some fans have gotten vocal about over the last few months because of an apparent lack of updates and DLC since the game released in October.

Now, we have the Close Quarters, Armored Kill and End Game DLC packs coming later this year for BF3, but not until June. So, what's the hold up? Why is the DLC coming out 7-8 months after launch when Call of Duty has monthly content drops? And why are the updates taking so long?

Speaking with Joystiq at GDC last week, DICE general manager Karl-Magnus Troedsson explains the timing and their goals with Battlefield 3's DLC and hints that they're working on other things which may or may not have limited their ability to focus on BF3.

"The reason that we haven't followed up with even more content more quickly, there's a couple of practical reasons. Part of that is that we just need to spend a lot of focus getting the game out. The ambition was to get more packs out earlier, but sometimes you have to prioritize between the base product and what you're doing afterwards."

"If you prefer to have smaller piecemeal packs every now and then, you can go with that. We prefer to do something bigger that has a specific theme, that has maps, weapons, assignments, persistent upgrades, all this kinda stuff."

Troedsson continues, explaining that DICE ran into limitations that have slowed them down on the update and DLC front, which can mean only one thing. A lot of the staff is working on their next project. Is it Battlefield: Bad Company 3 for the consoles? Is it the inevitable Battlefield 4 (not likely)? Or is it something non-Battlefield related as the DICE GM also hinted at to Joystiq:

"We also have an ongoing plan that those products should not only be Battlefield... though I cannot say more than that."

Mirror's Edge 2? All of these games, along with Danger Close Games' upcoming Medal of Honor: Warfighter are utilizing DICE's Frostbite 2 engine and we know DICE isn't helping with MOH this time around as they did with the multiplayer component of the 2010 reboot, so they are certainly working on another major unannounced project. Let's not forget that DICE's Patrick Liu went on record in October 2011 stating that he believes gamers are ready for a Mirror's Edge sequel. Hint hint.

What would you like to see next from DICE and are they doing enough with Battlefield 3 to compete with Call of Duty?

-

Follow me on Twitter @rob_keyes.

Source: Joystiq