EA had some of its roughest starts to date last year. First came SimCity – a game that was destined to be the rebirth of the SimCity franchise that instead became one of the most disappointing games in recent memory. Fast-forward to late last year, and Battlefield 4 had another rocky launch. While EA has tried to make good on fixing the problems plaguing Battlefield 4 by opting to not release downloadable content until everything is fixed, this brings up an interesting question: can we expect more big multiplayer-focused EA releases to have this sort of rocky launch?
In an interview on Rock Paper Shotgun, EA’s chief creative officer Rich Hileman discusses the issues related to releasing multiplayer games. Here is an excerpt from the interview:
Rock Paper Shotgun: “SimCity and BF4 both had terrible launches. SimCity didn’t work for more than a month, and BF4 still has issues. Surely you’re overhauling how you approach launches internally from now on?”
Hilleman: “I’m not sure I accept your premise. Battlefield 4 has been an exceedingly successful product on both consoles and PC. From a sales perspective, from a gameplay perspective.”
Rock Paper Shotgun: “Sure, BF4 is fundamentally a good game, but you can’t just write off months of glitches and server issues. Some people straight up could not play for the first couple weeks.”
Hilleman: “I think there was a lot of noise about the game, but some of that is a function of your surface area. The more customers you have, the more noise becomes available. We did things wrong. We know that. We’re gonna fix those things. We’re gonna try to be smart about what customers want in the future. But I’m not willing to accept – and I don’t think most of my customers are willing to say – ‘it’s a bad product, I wish I didn’t buy it.’ That’s not the conversation we’re having now. I think what we’re hearing is, ‘You made a game we really liked. We would’ve liked it a little better if it didn’t have these problems.’ Many of those problems we can fix, and we have and will.”
With Titanfall just around the corner, EA’s failure to ‘own up’ to the mistakes made is alarming news. Sure, Battlefield 4 (and SimCity for that matter) may be working somewhat properly at the moment, but those games were released months ago, and the worst part about it? It took months to fix said games! Judging by this pattern of failure over the last year, it’s enough to make one wonder if Titanfall will be worthy of a day-one purchase later this month, or if it would be wise to hold off on purchasing it for a few months until all of the bugs are worked out. Without any indication that EA is learning from their mistakes over the last year, it isn’t out of the question for Titanfall fans to be a little wary about how stable the game is going to be day-one.