It has been another busy year for EA Dice. The Stockholm-based studio, founded 20 years ago by a bunch of ex-demo scene coders, is now one of the prize assets in the Electronic Arts armoury, its Battlefield series providing the only serious military shooter competition to the Call of Duty behemoth.

But while development on Battlefield 4 was rumbling on, the team announced two exciting new projects: a sequel to its innovative 2008 adventure, Mirror's Edge, and a re-boot of Star Wars: Battlefront – the multiplayer shooter set in the vaguely familiar sci-fi movie universe.

To find out more about these projects, we spoke to Patrick Söderlund, once CEO of Dice, and now executive vice president of EA Studios. We wanted to find out about the difficulties of creating super-connected games in the modern era, but also the potential of the PS4 and Xbox one going forwards...

So Battlefield 4 is now out on both current and "next generation" consoles – what were the challenges of working on a cross-generational title?

Any team trying to launch a game on five platforms is going to have a tough time – especially with two platforms that are, to some extent, unknown. There are two ways to handle this - you can go with current gen and then up-res as best you can, or you lead on the next-gen, try and get as much as possible out of those platforms and then then downsize the game so that it fits on a PS3 or Xbox 360.

The first way is probably the easier approach – you try to scale up as much as you have time to do. I think that's probably how many of our competitors looked at it. We took the other approach with this game - and with Need for Speed for that matter: both lead on next-gen and then pushed the current gen machines. That caused some development challenges, but I think it's going to give EA a stronger line-up on next-gen consoles. I hope it's going to pay off. You never know!

You've obviously had some major stability issues with the PS4 version of Battlefield. Are you happy those are being sorted out now?

Listen, we have to do a better job of getting games into the market that are as bug-free as possible. What I would say is, games are becoming more and more complex – even though we'll run a beta and we'll do massive amounts of testing, there are certain things, especially in an online-focused environment, that you won't catch. I wish I could day that we will, but I don't think we'll ever catch everything. I think we've got better at it, but I certainly think we're not where we need to be in terms of getting games to market that offer a friction-free experience.

What we need to do, and what we are doing is, when we launch a game, we have to work very quickly to work course-correct to fix issues and then to get fixes into the hands of the consumers. I have to say that gamers have been good with us – they realise that we work hard, I think we've had eight or nine server updates since the launch of the PC side. We try and do an update every second day to improve the game experience, and there are patches in the works for the PS3 and Xbox 360. I bet we'll have to do the same thing on the next-gen machines. But our commitment to making the best gameplay experience on a continual basis is there. We devote a lot of time and effort toward making the game better as we go. But I think we need to do a better job as a company in making sure that what comes to market is in as good a shape as it possibly can be.

We saw a lot of controversy and anger of over the troubled launch of GTA Online recently, too. Do you think developers need to communicate to gamers how complex it is to bring an online experience to millions of users?

It is very difficult to be honest – even for the best coders in the world who have been building operating systems for years. Look at Apple – I don't know how many updates I've downloaded for Maverick so far. It works, but there have been some problems with it. I don't blame Apple - we live in a world where consistently updating is part of the norm. Look how often all the apps update on your phone. I think consumers are fine with that, but the problem comes when you put something into the market that doesn't work at all. And you know what? That should be a problem. We should be criticised for that.

Fortunately, that hasn't been the case with Battlefield – there have been some issues and I think we've done a good job rectifying some of them and we'll work around the clock do do the rest. If you look at GTA though, that was a game that had done tremendously well for Rockstar, so there was a very large installed base waiting to go online; when they switched it on, I still think they were surprised by the sheer load.

And I bet you they tested everything, I bet they were nervous but felt pretty confident, but then scale does so much to your systems. The number one reason for things going wrong is scale. We do a lot of testing and load balancing, we do everything we can, but my personal experience tells me there's no such thing, at this point at least, that can emulate real physical load. It's so hard to simulate that because there are so many different user cases that you can't simulate in a test environment. So should players be patient and allow us to update games when they come out? Yes. Should players expect base functionality for something they've purchased? Absolutely. I think if there are two people screaming at you out of a thousand, you can ask for patience, but if there are 500 out of 1,000, you've got to change something, right? You've got a problem.

Does Dice see any intriguing new design possibilities in the next-gen hardware?

The machines actually offer up more differences than people may think. The first thing you'll notice is obviously the better graphics - that's an easy thing to understand. But I think as people get their hands on the consoles, they'll realise that the Xbox 360 and PS3 were designed when the world looked very different; there was no such thing as Facebook or Twitter or Instagram. People's consumption behaviour around entertainment was entirely different too.

So the new machines are more prepared for today's world - they're much more about social, viral experiences. The PS4's Share button, when you start using it, you understand the power of it, the ability to express yourself via a console – that's going to be very important. Xbox One has the Upload studio where you can capture and comment on material – it fits more with how people want to express themselves.

The second thing is the peripherals that come with the machines, the updated Kinect, the PlayStation Eye – they will allow games to detect finger movements! Before, Kinect saw you as a big lump maybe with arms and in the best case scenario with two legs. The fidelity of the new camera is so much better - you'll see very different gameplay experiences and applications around movement that you haven't seen before. You and I don't know what they are yet, but that will offer up some interesting possibilities.

And voice commands is something that is beginning to become real. When you talk to the Xbox One and it does the things you want it to - that's really cool. It's like migrating over to the iPhone 5s. This whole fingerprint thing - I thought why would I ever need that? Until I started using it. Now I can't use my iPad because it doesn't have that feature. I want all my devices to have it.

I would say the new consoles are really exciting.

We're entering into an age of persistent worlds and seamless interchange between single and multiplayer. Can a legacy title like Battlefield exist in that era?

I would say that we probably have to modernise the experience to some extent. But listen, if you try the multiplayer today on PS4 or Xbox One you'll find it's a very different Battlefield game than what you would have played on Xbox 360 a few years ago. Not only does it run at a higher frame rate, you see things you haven't seen before. You have the dynamic battlefields, the dynamic maps – people may say that Levolution is a gimmick, but it isn't at all, it adds an extra layer to the gameplay. Those elements are on the current generation consoles but the experience is multiplied on next-gen.

And look at the work we've done on extending the experience to tablets and phones. It's starting to feel like a different experience. When I play on PS4, I find it hard if I don't have my tablet next to the screen displaying the mini-map. I can drag my squads around with my finger. I never thought I'd use a second screen in that way. And with the Commander app I can sit on a bus and play against my friends who are playing multiplayer live on their PCs or consoles – and the fact that I can also talk to them via VoIP on my iPad is just crazy.

So the game has evolved immensely. But the mantra at Dice is, let's not do anything with these technologies just because we can. What are the meaningful gameplay extensions? If we're going to do a Commander app that works on a tablet, let's make sure it works the way we want it to work. And if it doesn't let's not do it at all. That's how we need to look at everything on the next-gen machines - they offer up a bunch of possibilities, but doing stuff just because we can, to fill up the back of a box, then we're in a world of hurt. But if we can push ourselves and look for meaningful innovation, then I think there will be rewards.

As a veteran Battlefield fan, I can definitely see the possibilities of very large persistent environments. For me the game has always been about freedom and scale - I think having a cloud-based map supporting hundreds of players in seamless skirmishes … that's very exciting.

To us as developers … we have to look at ourselves, every version we do of something, we have to say to ourselves, okay, if we make another one – and the big word there is 'if' – we'd better make sure it has an impact, that it changes and feels like a meaningful evolution of the brand. If you stagnate, you're better off moving to something else. I sit the floor above the Battlefield development team and there is no lack of ideas down there! It's just a matter of, how many of them are feasible and how many can we do.

There are thousands of ideas, liked the one you just described. One of the things I think is cool in Battlefield 4 is the geo-leaderboard - you can find out who in your neighbourhood is, say, the best best assault player. That's cool. And so let's take that a step further and say, what if we had servers where it pulls in just things as simple as weather and day time from the local area. If the server is in Stockholm and it's sunny, what if the map is sunny, too? What if it's snowing and dark in Moscow? Okay, let's have the servers there playing snowy and dark maps. You look at the possibilities and realise you can do so many more things in the cloud-enabled world than we couldn't do before. That's frankly one dumb idea from me, but it's kind of cool! You're right, though, you have to keep evolving.

I know you won't say much about Mirror's Edge 2, but let's cover it briefly. When the original came out, I really loved that game, and wrote a blog post attacking other critics for not understanding the concept of innovation. Do you think the world is more ready for it now?

Mirror's Edge is something that's very close to my heart - I was extensively involved in the first one. I think it's fair to say the game was unique, it was innovative in so many ways – even today, there's no game that looks like it. It is very distinctive in look and feel – you only have to see a single screenshot to know exactly what game it is. I also think we managed to create an iconic heroine that people really like.

But let's be honest - some of the execution around the movement was not up to the standards that it should have been. In essence, I think you're right, I think we should have been more rewarded for innovation. At the same time, I look at some of the criticism that was around back then and say, yes you're right, we should have polished it further, we should have figured out some of these problems around falling all the time. It had a lot of promise and we delivered on 75% of it.

And that's why it's taken us quite a while to get to a concept that we really like. Once we started to think about Mirror's Edge on a next-gen platform, we were thinking about correcting the problems we had the first time, but also going back to the roots of what Mirror's Edge actually was and what we wanted to do with it. During that search, we found a concept that we liked. So is this the time right for Mirror's Edge now? Absolutely. Do I think we'll come out with a game that keeps the innovation but redefines what the game should have been? For sure. We have a very talented group of people working on it, it's one of the games I'm most excited about in our portfolio. I can't wait to show people what we're doing with it.

And you had one of the great female game characters of the last console generation. Is it frustrating that Faith is still in a very small minority of women game avatars who aren't overtly sexualised? Do you think the industry can grow out of that in the coming generation?

I really hope so. For the sake of humanity, we have to, right? The way Faith was designed it was a very deliberate decision. We wanted to create a character who felt powerful, who was agile, lethal, but yet had a look that people would be attracted to. I think the team did very well; it was about respect for women. There are too many bad examples in our industry of women displayed in a video game with certain body parts that are ... over-tuned and very small clothes. That doesn't represent anything that I want to be involved with or that EA wants to be involved with. I think the time has come for more characters like Faith. And if you see the fan following we have, we have people who have tattooed themselves to look like her. I didn't really realise how powerful she was until I saw that reaction from everyone. I didn't realise she was an icon. It doesn't matter whether it was – Sweden, the UK, Japan or the US – people gravitated toward her. They had a connection with Faith. That was cool.

And now, what the team has been able to do with the evolved version of Faith is keep that integrity but yet make her feel even more interesting. It feels like there is more depth to her now. And once people see the story and see what we've done with her, they're going to be really interested. They'll want to know more.

And very quickly - Star Wars: Battlefront. Now that EA Dice has begun development, has an exciting prospect suddenly turned into a hugely daunting one? Star Wars has quite a few "keen" admirers…

We need to be humble! The idea of doing it is really cool, but then, it's "uh-oh, how do we do this?" We have to treat the brand with respect but then put our personal flavour on it. That's the only way that makes sense to us. I think we're there now; the team knows exactly what it's doing, and I can tell you that some of the things you'll see … they're mind-blowing. But it took a while, it was almost as though we did have to sit down and say, oh shit, how do we treat this with the respect that it deserves – and to be very blunt, how do we not screw it up?

How did you get past that?

Once you get familiar with that thought, you quickly have to move on and think, okay, how do we make this awesome? How are we going to make people love what we've done? That's where we are right now. Another good thing is, we didn't really know what it would be like to work with Disney and LucasFilm – Dice has never worked with a licensor before in that sense, we've always developed our own IPs. We didn't know what to expect! But now we know them, we know they share our passion, they share a lot of the same views as we do – it has become a lot easier.

Now, we're over the honeymoon period when everyone is nice to each other, we're into production, but the relationship is getting stronger. The same aspiration is there to make something unique and not to follow some of the previous attempts to make great games from a movie license - attempts that failed. We think, how do we become what Warner Bros did with Batman? How do we become that iconic computer game that respects the license, that brings it forward? If we can do that we'll be fine.

And it really has to be Dice's version of Star Wars, right? Just as GoldenEye was Rare's version of James Bond and Arkham Asylum is Rocksteady's vision of Batman…

Yes, and I can tell you that's been the spirit of the collaboration from day one. When Disney understood that Dice was going to develop this, they were like, "cool, do what you think, stay in touch." So far it's been very good. I'm very happy with how the team is working.

And from outside of Dice, from EA's other studios, what's coming that interests you?

Fifa 14, which is very good on next-gen, and Need For Speed: Rivals, which may surprise some people. The system they've introduced – All Drive – which seamlessly connects multiplayer and single-player and allows player worlds to interact - it's a really exciting idea. It took them a while to get it to work, with a lot of UI tweaks – how do you make sure you're only interrupted by a friend if you want to be? But once they got their heads around that, they created something that feels very different. Going from single to multiplayer is a very seamless experience.

And again, I do wonder if we'll see that seamlessness coming in to the Battlefield universe?

I certainly hope so.

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