There is no doubt in people’s mind about the kind of impact Battlefield 4 is going to have in the game industry when it gets released. We are talking about a series that has produced both critically and commercially acclaimed games ever since Battlefield 1942 was released way back in 2002. The developer of the long-standing series EA Digital Illusions CE or DICE as it is widely known throughout the games industry, has been continuously churning quality content with great focus and care on aspects like large-scale maps, teamwork and vehicular warfare. As a testimony to this fact, the entire Battlefield series has sold more than 50 million copies worldwide with a total of 11 games released along with 12 expansion packs.
So it came as a surprise when the executive producer for Battlefield 4, Mr. Patrick Bach told industry reporters that DICE considered delaying the release of their game on the next-gen consoles Xbox One and PS4. Speaking with GamesIndustry International, Patrick said that often people fail to understand it can be very difficult to develop the same game alongside newer hardware. He went on to say that they had been very aggressive in developing Battlefield 4 so that the game is launched alongside the launch of the next-gen consoles. Since this is a very unique situation where the game is getting developed on one side while the hardware it’s supposed to be played on is getting ready to be released on the other side.
Bach also said that as there were a lot of changes that needed to be understood and worked around with, as both the hardware and software side of things needed to get adapted with each other. With so much technological challenges they’d been facing, along with the fact that Battlefield 4 itself is a very complicated piece of game software, the teams over at DICE didn’t have their lives any easier.
The news comes as a reminder of the piece of news that Ubisoft laid on the gaming world that two of its widely anticipated upcoming titles had been delayed. The delayed products are the Hacker-themed Watch Dogs and the open-world racing game The Crew; they have been reportedly delayed until the next financial year, April to be precise. As soon as this news broke out Ubisoft’s shares plummeted down by 26% shocking the shareholders.
Mr. Patrick said he completely understood the reasons behind Ubisoft choosing to delay its products as he is aware of the technological mountain that they have had to climb in order to make Battlefield 4 ready for launch alongside the next-generation consoles. He went on to add that “Luckily we’ve been able to overcome those hurdles and thought about what the game actually is on the next-gen. We’ve had an excellent team working that out at the same time as the game itself which was a big struggle.”
Speaking to Videogamer in August this year, Bach revealed that DICE needs to make some compromises in certain places when it comes to the Xbox One and PS4 versions of the game. He explained that Battlefield 4 would not be using Microsoft’s cloud-powered service at launch since the project was started before the Xbox cloud service had been announced. Plus concentrating on five different platforms was too much of a headache to focus only on Xbox One.
Let’s hope all the hard work put in by the good souls at DICE comes through and we get to have a great shooter in our hands. Battlefield 4 is slated to launch for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC on the 29th of October and for the Xbox One and PS4 versions sometime in November.