While he neglected to sling any specific mud at Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, EA executive vice president Patrick Soderlund believes that Battlefield 3 multiplayer will make players "feel loyal" to the game, even in the face of Activision's annual juggernaut. "We all respect what Call of Duty brings and what they're going to come with," Soderlund recently told IGN, though he believes EA has "an industry-leading multiplayer game that will make people want to stay with us, frankly."

Soderlund sees Battlefield 3's multiplayer as a service that allows players to "continually get updates and new content and hopefully improvements to the product as we go." One such piece of content will be this December's "Back to Karkand" DLC, which Soderlund promises will contain more destruction than the current multiplayer maps. "It's a different level, even more so than in BF3," he said, adding that the DLC team made a "deliberate decision" to ratchet up the destruction for the upcoming content. Sounds like fun, so long as it doesn't destroy the servers too.