With the news that Watch Dogs, The Crew, and Drive Club have been postponed, some have wondered whether other launch titles might follow suit. According to Patrick Bach, DICE was thinking about delaying Battlefield 4 for next-gen consoles, but they have been able to work out some kinks to get the game ready for launch.
I think people might not grasp how hard that is, to develop a game at the same time as the hardware
According to Bach, “Well we’ve been very aggressive with Battlefield 4 in that we want to be out at launch with the next gen consoles. I think people might not grasp how hard that is, to develop a game at the same time as the hardware. We’ve been struggling quite a lot to keep up with the changes we’ve seen – both sides need to adapt and you end up being late. Everything is very complicated. Battlefield itself is a really complicated game, so it doesn’t make our lives any easier.
So we knew we’d set ourselves a tough challenge, but people on the outside seem to think that because there are going to be launch titles, it’s easy. What are we spending all our time doing? They don’t understand how hard it is! Talking about Watch Dogs, I don’t blame them, there are times when we’ve considered doing the same thing – luckily we’ve 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 is a big struggle. We can see that a lot of the next gen games coming are, arguably, lesser when it comes to the scope of features because of this problem.”
Bach also indicated that, because of the troubles of launching a game for the next-generation, they will not currently be using Microsoft’s Cloud Servers for the Xbox One. According to Bach, “The reasons for that are multiple. We started this project before these plans were locked down, so we didn’t dare fiddle too much with it. Also, we’re not Xbox One exclusive, so we needed a solution that would work on all platforms. We’re on five platforms, so we need something that’s Battlefield, not Xbox One.”
