Fairly often games are released with the sole intention of catering for the casual gamer, with perks, achievements and other such rewards for effort in-game.

It is rather uncommon that a game is released with it's sole audience as the competitive gamer, and Battlefield 3 is no exception. As with Call of Duty 4 and many other online games, it has been the job of the third party modder to develop addons to make competition viable. Without these modifications the game just simply isn't equipped to provide an entirely level playing field with no advantage for those that have earned more special in-game perks, guns or abilities.

Battlefield 2 had a competitive scene for quite some time, but it has seemingly died off over the past couple of years with it's former player base crying out for a game to revitalize the dying scene and provide an apt competitive environment, and for many Battlefield 3 was looked at to be that lifeline. It is unfortunately bad news for those that hoped Battlefield 3 would bring about an all new competitive scene, as DICE exec Patrick Söderlund has stated to a German magazine that there are no plans to develop modding tools for the game.

This does not mean it will be impossible to modify the game, however if what Patrick says is true, it will be extremely difficult.

Patrick Söderlund said the following to GameStar magazine:

As of now, we are not going to make any modding tools. If you look at the Frostbite engine, and how complex it is, it’s going to be very difficult for people to mod the game, because of the nature of the set up of levels, of the destruction and all those things… it’s quite tricky. So we think it’s going to be too big of a challenge for people to make a mod.