There’s a new post over at The Battlefield Blog detailing the inspiration for the game’s new Close Quarters expansion. It’s stuffed with cool little anecdotes from the lead designer Niklas Fegraeus, as well as a new timelapse video showing off some impressive destruction.

Fegraeus was a semi-pro Counter-Strike player back in the day, taking part in tournaments and playing in the Cyber athlete Professional League. It’s those years, coupled with a seminal scene from of The Matrix, that inspired him to create Close Quarters.

“When I finished up Back to Karkand,” he says, “I already knew I needed to start on our next themed expansion pack for release in June. This time, I really wanted to expand Battlefield 3 and give players even more experiences to choose from. But I didn’t know how to approach it.

“Then I remembered those nights at my sponsor’s Internet café, where I and my clan for hours on end practiced the best way to attack a well-defended room, using only a few grenades and the business end of our rifles.”

Fegraeus continues, “There is something very unique about an indoor fire fight. You have to cover angles in new ways, use sound to track your enemies, navigate with much more careful precision and most importantly, you’re never safe. Danger is always no more than a few meters away. It’s a scenario that always makes me feel 100% in the fight. There is no dull moment, you’re always on your toes, on the edge.”

The lead designer also detailed his conversations with art director Jhony Ljungstedt, a process that lead to the team drawing on The Matrix for further inspiration.

“Seeing Neo and Trinity turn a lobby into rubble in slow motion did leave a huge impression,” says Ljundstedt “and [it] hadn’t ever been properly done in a game. We both agreed and Jhony said he really wanted to be able to create that sensation.

According to Fegraeus, Ljundstedt said, “Imagine tearing a place down using only bullets, watching chunks being torn off the walls, littering the floors like a dropped bag of grey marbles.”

Interesting stuff then, and there’s tons more in the blog post itself. You can check it out through the link above, but before that have a look at the timelapse vid. It’s destructo-tastic.

Battlefield 3: Close Quarters blows up in June.