Patrick Bach of DICE tells GameZone (translated by CVG) that the console versions of Battlefield 3 will have more “compact” maps, compared to its PC counterpart.

Noting the 24-player maximum on the PS3 and Xbox 360 versions, Bach explains that to keep the experience the same, the development team had to make some cutbacks without hurting the quality of the game.

“Everything is a compromise. It’s not that we’re evil or stupid. We didn’t choose not to have more players – we would love to do 64 players on console but then we would have to cut away so much; people would get very upset that it looked worse, played worse and wasn’t as fun as the PC version. We would never do that because the fun is always more important,” Bach said.

Bach also confirmed that there will be jets in the console versions and that maps would more or less be the same, just scaled back in size.

When we say they are smaller, it’s not that we have cut them in half. But we tried to compact them slightly to keep the action up. If you compare it to Battlefield: Bad Company 2, the maps weren’t really small on console. We actually had huge maps even for console. We have the same kind of angle on it right now [in Battlefield 3]. We want to create the same experience for PC as for consoles.”

[CVG]