If Sony or Microsoft dropped a PlayStation 4 or Xbox 720 tomorrow, developers of Battlefield 3 DICE would be ready to go. DICE’s executive producer Patrick Bach says that his team is “desperate to move on into the next generation.” With both Microsoft and Sony sticking to their guns of a 10 year life cycle for their respective PS3 and Xbox 360 consoles, Bach and co. might have to wait a little longer. Bach’s confident that the engine for Battlefield 3 is scalable to new platforms because “we [DICE] have been looking at not only the PC technology today but also speculating what will happen tomorrow when it comes to these things. So everything from our [DICE’s} streaming technologies (to) rendering technologies is scalable onto future platforms.” There’s no doubt that Battlefield 3 is a pretty looking game, with many critics arguing it rivals the Call of Duty games or even exceeds it in terms of graphics, but there’s always more that can be done with the hardware. If a console is out for only four years and a next-gen game with all the bells and whistles takes 2-3 years to develop, have developers really pushed the system to its edge? Take a look at the PS2, the quality of games from year one is radically different from the quality in year 10.