Seems the game is too complex for us modders, and so mod tools will be missing from the PC release of BF3.

Posted by INtense! on Jul 6th, 2011

Battlefield has had a proud history on ModDB with mods including Project Reality, Forgotten Hope 2, First Strike and others dominating our annual mod of the year awards. Despite this, news has just come out (and confirmed our fears) that Battlefield 3 will not include mod tools, and instead EA are looking at other ways to "appease" the modding community. DICE executive Patrick Soderlund speaking to German Gamestar magazine (via Battlefieldo) confirmed this in the video below:

When asked about modding, Patrick said:

It’s going to be very difficult for people to mod the game, because of the nature of the set up of levels, of the destruction and all those things… it’s quite tricky. So we think it’s going to be too big of a challenge for people to make a mod.

Earlier in an interview with Game Informer Patrick was uncertain how modding would look for BF2. Given this was over 4 months ago and no decision has been made since then, it sounds like even basic tools maybe some way off (assuming they are in the pipeline to be made at all):

We will not deliver mod tools in the way that we delivered them for Battlefield 2 ... Creating mod tools today - dumbing them down - takes a lot of energy and what we are discussing more every day is, 'Where do we put our focus?' ... Right now our focus is to create the best possible multiplayer, single-player, and co-op game -- the core game of Battlefield 3," he added. "We're still discussing how we handle modifications of any kind.

This news follows in the footsteps of CoD: MW2 who also shunned the mod community despite a lot of success and great ideas coming from CoD 4 modders. Hopefully they will realize their mistake and do a backflip, as CoD did with Black Ops bringing back mod support.

After all to back up their claim of BF2 been a PC first, consoles second game - it is critical that they put their weight behind the PC community and enable them to unleash their modding creativity on the game.