Battlefield 3 is one of EA's biggest franchises, and the one it used to take on the Call of Duty series most directly. But DICE is a large studio, and the publisher has claimed it's taking careful steps not to tie the developer down to one franchise.

"The DICE guys are roughly 300 people in the Stockholm studio," EA Games VP Patrick Soderlund told OXM UK. "Not all of them are working on Battlefield things, and that's intentional, because we don't want to become a Battlefield factory"

He suggested that employees can get bored with repeated franchises, so the company moves people around. "The minute we start saying 'you're going to make a Battlefield game for the rest of your life', they're going to go some place else," he said. "So for them to make great Battlefield games there need to be other things for them to do as well."

Sonderland didn't mention what those other projects might be, but a former EA boss claims it's a much-anticipated sequel. "It is general knowledge in the Stockholm dev scene that Mirror's Edge 2 is in production at DICE," said ex-EA Easy studio general manager Ben Cousins. This is second-hand information, though, so take it with at least a few grains of salt.