In January 2007 I started work at DICE, with a fairly broad goal of heading up new, more experimental projects for the studio. After a month or two of settling in, I found myself in the office of Sean Decker, the Battlefield franchise Executive Producer. He began talking about the games industry in South Korea. That market has become well known in the past few years for creating a new way of delivering games, where they are free to download and play, but where a small number of users pay for inexpensive items called 'micro-transactions', which provide revenue for the project. EA has a FIFA game over there that is doing very well.

DICE have always been keen on trying new things in the online gaming area, and this way of delivering games struck us as pretty interesting, so we started wondering if this might also work in the western world. I volunteered to lead the project - the direction I got from Sean at this stage was (if I remember correctly) 'historical feel', 'existing technology', 'level up one character?' and 'heroic'. I've posted a scan of my first page of notes here. A few people at DICE had previously been working on concepts and ideas for this project over the previous months and I met with them and began working through some more notes as I fleshed out the high-concept.