In an interview with OXM executive producer on Battlefield 4 Patrick Bach commented that, whilst DICE has not been fully behind the supporting technology at work the game is still expected to contain fewer bugs than other DICE titles at launch.
“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.”
DICE did consider delaying the release of Battlefield 4 so that more power could be drawn from the next generation of consoles yet they seem confident that the fixed release will not impact too heavily on the title. Bach continues, “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.”
Other benefits include the alpha and beta testing of the multiplayer which has flagged up several bugs to the developers.
“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.”
With the game set for release this October 29th for Xbox 360, PS3, PC, Xbox One and PS4 there will likely be a few bugs running around. Will this impact you decision to buy the game at launch? Let us know what you think in the comments below.