EA DICE's Technical director for the Frostbite engine Stephan Boberg has written via Twitter that the newest Battlefield 3 game will feature more then 48120 unique assets.
Mr. Boberg wrote via Twitter: 48120 unique assets and counting... #BF3
What are assets and what do they mean for us Battlefield 3 gamers?
The length of development of modern games is influenced by a number of factors, such as genre, scale, development platform and amount of assets and a complete game development lasts take from one to three years to be completed.
Assets are basically a collection of data files used to support gameplay, and are managed through frameworks such as Microsoft's XNA Framework Content Pipeline.
To understand better, game assets can be easily described as bitmaps, models, textures, and sounds that can be found within game.
This basically means that Battlefield 3 game will feature a large variety of textured models that will be empowered with great graphical and sound effects supported by FrostBite 2 engine and will make Battlefield 3 one of the biggest eye-candy games that were ever released.