In the lead up to the hugely anticipated Battlefield 3, DICE continue to share their development process on the official Battlefield Blog. The latest update features more details on the planned map pack "Back to Karkand", discussing another of the remade classic Battlefield maps that it will feature, the iconic Wake Island.

What guided the design for Wake Island back in the original game?

The basic premise was that we looked at how real-life Wake Island [from the Pacific Theatre in WWII] looks today. We knew we couldn’t do it to scale, but that kind of one-to-one fidelity wasn’t really of interest to us. Funny thing is, it was in fact downscaled so much due to a decimal error in programming. The map was originally meant to be bigger, but the involuntary downsizing created a very cool and concentrated gaming experience.

One new piece of Wake Island BF3 concept art can now be found here on AusGamers.

The Back to Karkand map pack will be available "post launch" for free to customers that pre-order Battlefield 3 and at a yet-to-be-specified purchase cost to those that buy the game after release.

The map pack is being developed by the same internal DICE team that handled the recent Vietnam DLC for Battlefield Bad Company 2.

Battlefield 3 is due on PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 in holiday season 2011.