Battlefield 4 Problems a result of rushing to compete with Call of Duty

DICE has been pretty quiet about Battlefield 4 problems since the October 29th release.  But make no mistake about it, the game is having a list of issues, especially on PC, where it’s most rabid fanbase calls home.  A moderator on the Battlefield 4 Reddit thread claims to have had a confidential conversation with DICE QA, and gives a number of reasons why the game is experiencing problems.

Then you have EA that wants us to release 2 weeks before CoD to avoid competition

“First we have a company culture that always want more and more in the game until the very end of the project which puts an enormous strain on QA to test everything.  Then you have EA that wants us to release 2 weeks before CoD to avoid competition.  The biggest thing though is the time it takes to test.  Imagine the number of combination of vehicles/weapons/gadgets and accessories.  We do test EVERYTHING we really do.  But let’s say we test the Spas-12 with silencer in June before we release.  Then a sound guy makes a change in July which breaks it.  Do you test everything again?  Do you forbid anyone to do work on the Spas-12 after we’ve tested it?

It’s a very hard question to answer and something we in DICE QA struggle with a lot.  Alos when it comes to testing there are just so many test cases and some are really hard to solve while others are not thought of completely.  Imagine we are 300 people at DICE, imagine we test the game 1000 hours per person.  That’s 300,000 hours of testing.

Then imagine we release the game and 5 million people buy it and play for one hour.  That’s 5 million hours tested in the first hour the game is released and on so many different set-ups we couldn’t get close to!

We want to talk to people about this but the internet hate machine is such a tender thing and saying nothing and just fixing seems to be the safest way to not stir up an even worse shitstorm.  People always misquote, misunderstand and a comment like the one I’m making to you could potentially do more damage than good.”

DICE hasn’t come out and issued an official word on when players can expect patches to fix the game breaking bugs in Battlefield 4, but from the sounds of these comments, they are on the case.