DICE’s Patrick Bach has defended Rockstar’s problems with Grand Theft Auto Online, saying that it’s understood that there will always be problems with an online multiplayer game. When it comes to the upcoming Battlefield 4 though, will the online performance be anything like Battlefield 3, which also faced problems on its debut?
Speaking to OXM, Bach stated, “Well, we’ve had the beta. We’ve had an alpha. But we’re back to the ambition or ‘over-scoping’ problem again. We have been changing a lot of things under the hood in the game, which are quite hard to see at a glance – when you’re playing the game you’ll feel the benefits, but you might not understand what we’ve gone through to get there.
“Sometimes you have to more or less pull out the whole engine to get +10 horsepower. You can’t just keep ‘boosting’ your game to get there. And with that comes, of course, bugs. 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.”
The multiplayer beta is currently on-going for Battlefield 4 and its showcased its fair share of bugs. “I think in general our beta was kind of at the point we thought it would be at, from a bugs perspective. When you release a beta, the build is quite old, because you have to go through all these steps.
“We had our list of known bugs, and the list the beta testers sent back, and they were quite well-matched. The funny thing is, the first hour the game goes live with a beta like this, we have more testing that hour than we’ve had in the entire project. It gives us a big chunk of information that we need to then cater for. I would hope it would be a smoother experience than we’ve had before with any previous Battlefield game.”
Battlefield 4 will be launching on October 29th in North America and November 1st in Europe for Xbox 360, PS3 and PC. A PS4 version will launch on November 15th in North America and November 20th in Europe, with the Xbox One version launching November 22nd.