Published earlier today on Eurogamer.net, EA CEO Andrew Wilson and DICE general manager Karl-Magnus Troedsson described the Battlefield 4 launch as "unacceptable." And they're right — it was. For quite some time after launch it was unacceptable. Personally, I continued to have problems three months after launch, which is when I stopped playing.
I don't care if it was a client-side or server-side problem… the fact that there were so many problems for so many people for so long is the issue here. And I particularly don't care for the excuse given by Wilson for the cause of the problems.
Ambition and innovation.
Whenever you hear the word innovation, just realize a bunch of crap is about to follow, and that crap is being spewed because $$$ for the Battlefield Hardline. The quote from Andrew Wilson is:
Think about what Battlefield 4 was: 64 player multiplayer, giant maps, 1080p, Levolution that was changing the gameplay design in an emergent way. There is a chance there are things you are going to miss through the development cycle. And you end up in a situation we had with Battlefield 4 […] But when you do things like that you can never guarantee. It would be disingenuous for me to sit here and say, 'we will never have an issue again,' because that would mean we were never going to push the boundaries again. And I don't want to be that company. I want to be a company that pushes to lead and innovate and be creative. But you can start to do things that give you a better handle and a better view about what the potential challenges might be.
So let me get this straight, you had months and months of issues with players not even being able to play the game because you were too ambitious and tried to innovate? Pushing boundaries is what caused the game to crash repeatedly every time I entered a match? You'd figure a team that creates a game where you die if you're out of the map's boundaries for too long would realize that those boundaries probably shouldn't be pushed.
Wilson also said, "What was happening with Battlefield 4, even as we were pushing all of this innovation, was a lot of it we couldn't test until really late in the phase. I believe it was unique […] You could go down the really conservative path, which some people did in the industry, and your game didn't have any of those problems, but you also got the feedback of, it just feels the same as it used to."
I'm not saying to not try to "innovate." I'm not saying to not try something new. I'm saying don't have issues that shouldn't have been there for so long and then tell us it's because you tried radical new things and were trying to be creative. There's nothing creative about getting the message "Battlefield 4 has stopped working." Those are errors from rushing a game to make it in time for the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One launch.
Go ahead and give whatever backhanded apologies that you want. There is no excuse for what happened with Battlefield 4. By saying that as a company "You're looking forward," it's kind of like General Motors saying "We have learned a great deal from this recall. We will now focus on the goal of becoming an industry leader in safety."
EA and DICE, right now you're spinning all of your negatives into a positive by saying that you're all innovators and no one else is. You try new things and others stay conservative. And that's a lie. Just say you messed up and your customers deserve better. We don't need to be told about your pushing of boundaries.
You can follow Senior Editor Lance Liebl on Twitter @Lance_GZ. Or you can email him at [email protected].
You can follow Senior Editor Lance Liebl on Twitter @Lance_GZ. Or you can email him at [email protected].
