Battlefield 3 launched on the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC on in late October of 2011. Approximately a month and a half later, the game's first expansion arrived: "Back to Karkand." Aside from a handful of tweaks since, EA's DICE studio has kept relative radio silence. So much so, in fact, that one prominent Battlefield fan site publicly declared its own silence until DICE spoke up (the developer released a missive the following day).

It is with this recent history -- now four months since Battlefield 3's last content drop, and another three months before "Close Quarters" is set to launch -- that we approached a recent interview with DICE general manager Karl-Magnus Troedsson. In short, what in the world is taking so damn long?

"The reason that we haven't followed up with even more content more quickly, there's a couple of practical reasons," Troedsson told us. "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." Troedsson also argued that DICE's approach was thematic, not "piecemeal" (Call of Duty's approach), which was a deliberate choice on his studio's part.

"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 said. Could his studio have gotten out this content earlier? "Probably," he said, but DICE ran into its own limitations. "Sometimes we have limitations to what we can and can't do."

But without any other announced projects, and EA's Danger Close taking responsibility for its own multiplayer section in the coming Medal of Honor game (DICE handled the previous game's multi), it's unclear what other responsibilities are keeping DICE from pushing out Battlefield 3 support content more quickly. We'll just havet to assume the majority of the studio is head down on a super secret sequel to Mirror's Edge. Obviously.

Beyond "Close Quarters," DICE has two more content packs announced for Battlefield 3, including "Armored Kill" in fall and "End Game" in winter. And yes, Call of Duty's Elite DLC drops continue monthly.