Games Thirst – Amazing Life
“I think people might not grasp how hard that is, to develop a game at the same time as the hardware,” says the game’s executive producer Patrick Bach.
DICE heavily considered delaying the release of Battlefield 4 on PS4 and Xbox One because the studio “struggled to keep up” with the constant changes being made to next-gen hardware in the ramp up to release.
That’s what Bach told GI.biz in a recent interview, adding that, thankfully, they were able to sort through the problems.
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.
Examining Bach’s comments a bit closer, however, give hints that the developer may not have been able to completely realize their next-gen Battlefield 4 goals, but my confidence in DICE is sound enough to believe that they were able to pull off a more-than-decent effort.
Day of Reckoning will be on November 15th and 29th, when PS4 gamers the world over will get their hands on the game, followed by Xbox One gamers on November 22nd.
