Battlefield 4 isn’t necessarily in the best state these days, what with bugs in multiplayer and lawsuits threatening both EA and DICE for the very same reasons. Nonetheless, DICE executive producer Patrick Bach has spoken to OXM about the long term quality of their next-generation Frostbite 3 engine. The interview, interestingly, took place before Battlefield 4’s release.
“I think we made the right move a couple of years ago when we actually started, a couple of years before Battlefield 3 was even announced, we said what do we want games to be five years from now?
“And we can see now that the level of “next gen”, if you want to call it that, on Frostbite is pretty stable. We’re still, I would argue, one of the best looking next gen games – I don’t want to say the best-looking next gen game, but we have an engine that truly takes advantage of the next gen machines.”
Bach had warned at the time about bugs. He believes that while it would have made more sense to keep it simple, especially with the launch of next gen consoles, DICE wanted to push things as far as possible. “If we’d wanted to play it safe, we wouldn’t have created a new version of Frostbite – we would have stayed on the right side of the fence. We are trying to push things as far as possible. That doesn’t mean you will have loads and loads of bugs, of course.
“Talking about an engine as a finite thing in space and time is slightly misleading. Engines are constantly in development and they’re constantly changing. And that’s something you particularly see with Frostbite, there’s a lot of under the hood stuff that goes on, so it’s a constantly evolving animal. There are all these things from all those different game studios being rolled back in. It’s never going to ‘run out’, per se.”
What are your thoughts on the recent problems affecting Battlefield 4? Do you believe it’s just the darkness before the light? Let us know what you think in the comments.