Battlefailed 4 – Ship it!

I was holding off on this post for a while. I wanted to give DICE (and EA) the benefit of the doubt. I am a big fan of the franchise and thus, biased as I am, I did not want to talk negatively about this game or the studio. But after more than a month of playing, which was spent waiting for fixes really, I feel I have to admit that being a fanboy is not enough. Not this time.

The game is plagued by a multitude of issues. I am not going to list them all here (though I will use some examples later on), because this not a random gamer rant. If you want to know what’s wrong with the game just google “BF4 bugs”, or similar, to find out.

Instead I am going to point fingers. That’s what the internet is for.

Most people blame EA. It’s easy, because everyone and their dog hate EA. And of course there is some truth in that assumption that EA just pushed the game out regardless of quality. Releasing before Call of Duty, hitting the new console launches, taking advantage of Black Friday, Christmas shopping and all that.

There is a perfect, fine tuned, marketing machine working in the background, which has set dates and needs to hit key points – a delay of even a week can throw a spanner in the works there. But every publisher and every marketing person understands that if you ship something fundamentally broken, then the negative backlash will impact a franchise far more, and in the long run cost far more, than a delayed launch and a mistimed marketing campaign.

No, EA is not necessarily the culprit here (although they do conveniently forget the issues when coming up with marketing shit like this. The buck stops with 2 entities: DICE, the studio behind the game, and console makers.

I have huge respect for DICE as a studio. Generally speaking the quality of work they have done over the years as well as their innovation in a lot of areas has been outstanding. Most of the people, who work there, are top notch developers. But for 2 games in a row now they have delivered a product which is, in many ways, unplayable. The game has massive issues on every platform it released. Issues like massive framerate drops during (and even persistent after) Levolution moments in the game, certain maps freezing on load (consistently) as well as audio and physics loading issues on start of every round (currently I avoid using a vehicle in the first 2 min of a game – because I can’t hear anything and physics/collision often result in weird glitches). These are highly visible and, in my opinion, game breaking.  Not to mention the issues of a less grand impact, but which are still hugely annoying, such as horrible menu flow, the need to visit Battlelog to change weapons and loadouts, outside of an actual round, overlapping text in menu items, random team swaps and and and and and.

Battlefield 3 had similar issues on launch. Back then people brushed over it, overlooked it, because it was a new engine which delivered some amazing results and there had not been a proper Battlefield for a few years. So the hype took over and people were more awed than angry. But finding the same, or similar, issues in the new version either points to a lack of testing, wrong kind of testing, or (which would be even worse) a complete disregard of the problems. It most certainly shows that nothing has been learned in 2 years. It feels like BF4 is simply a map pack for BF3, which has advanced some things, but regressed a lot more.

Perhaps a certain pride has set in with the studio, a certain arrogance.

“We are DICE, we ship Battlefield. It sells 20 million copies. People will buy it anyway. We can fix things after, if we absolutely have to.”

I don’t know. Or perhaps DICE feels that EA setting a release date forces them to push something out the door. Perhaps they feel the blame lies with the publisher, for setting a release date every 2 years.  That certainly puts a lot of pressure on. But it is the studio management which ultimately has to sign off on these timelines and the delivery goals.

There are a lot of senior people at DICE, some of them have been working on the franchise for a decade or more. Battlefield is arguably one of the strongest franchises EA has. Surely that should give DICE enough of a mandate to push back.

 “No. It we will not be ready by October 2013. We can ship the game in a proper state in March 2014.”

I wonder if that statement was ever uttered towards EA. If not, it should have been. In my opinion it is the responsibility of the developer to be honest, to push back and to make the publisher understand if a release date is not achievable. Particularly if the developer is DICE, who has the expertise, the track record and a billion dollar franchise to their name.

EA might set the date, and might take the majority of the blame, but there is only one entity who can actually affect the quality of the game, and that is the developer.

The other parties to blame here are Sony and Microsoft, the platform holders. Many gamers still don’t know this but every game actually has to go through a submission process with the respective platform holder. Sony and MS will test the game, and the games have to conform to rigorous (and often really fucking stupid) rules. 99% of games will not pass submission if there are any apparent bugs in it at all – I have seen a failed submission (from Nintendo by the by) for the game freezing when the player “pushes all buttons at the same time while holding the right ministick up and the left ministick down”.  Shit like that.

A submission process takes about a month. The console companies are anal about their requirements, because mostly they don’t want their customers to have a bad experience on their console. And of course the console manufacturers charge for each submission process (so the more failures they have, the more money they make). The same submission process has to be followed for all patches on consoles (hence the delay for patches on consoles compared to PC).

It is inconceivable that rigorous testing by EA, DICE, Sony and MS did not show ANY of the bugs that BF4 had on launch day (even after the day 1 patch). They passed submission anyway – the reason why? Games like BF4 sell millions, and they actually help sell consoles. So platform holders make an exception. The same benefit does not apply to most other games. If Sony and MS would have done their job and failed the submission of BF4, DICE would have been forced to fix the issues before launch.  It would have cost EA money, but it would have guaranteed a good customer experience on release.

And this is really all it comes down to. Customer satisfaction. In the case of Battlefield 4, DICE, MS, Sony and EA gave a big fucking finger to the customer. All those entities knew that the product was broken. They knew the game would freeze consoles, forcing a hard reboot (I had 50+ in the last 4 weeks), potentially damaging the console. They knew about massive graphic issues on PCs, potentially causing hardware issues. And they did not give a fuck.

A statement was released yesterday by DICE, saying they would focus on fixing the game rather than working on new content for now. They said customers are their number one priority. Well, I am sorry, but it’s a bit hard for me to believe. If we, the customers, would have been the number one priority, the game would not be on the shelves right now. The game would not have 3 patches already and still have massive issues (in fact some issues got worse/re-introduced with the latest content patch). If they can halt production of patches and new content now, they should have halted the release a month ago.

Battlefield 4 can be am amazing experience. Like with any of the previous games I think the map design is almost flawless. Their class and weapon upgrade and balance system is fantastic, the co-operation players can pull off in the different game modes is, in my opinion, second to none. Their new Levolution stuff is magic and a definite step up from destruction 2.0 in Bad Company 2 and BF3. When Battlefield 4 shines, it truly shines like a bright star in the dark night. The talented people at DICE have the right ideas, the right tools and the right mindset when it comes to creating a top notch multiplayer game.

But their acceptance of issues and their willingness to ship a title that was so obviously broken on all platforms borders on incompetency and certainly shows a complete disregard of the customer. In my opinion even the lowest ranking developer should have stepped up and said “Hang on a minute – we can’t ship shit like this!” My guess is there were 100+ people working on the game. Surely there must have been someone there realizing what a turd of a product was about to be put on discs and shipped to retail.

Giving people 5 days of double experience points is not enough to brush over that. Particularly not if you are actually delaying content now after people purchased the Premium pack, paying 40 GBP upfront, money in the bank for EA/DICE, for that delayed content. Clearly someone at the top of the ranks needs to make some hard decisions going forward. I would not be surprised if the franchise already has suffered and sales numbers will be down. Another launch like this might well put an end to one of the best multiplayer shooters available.

In hindsight, probably the best Battlefield game coming out of DICE in the last 10 years was Bad Company 2. And it actually had a decent single player component to boot.

NOTE: I have only covered the multiplayer experience here, since the single player simply is not even worth playing or talking about.