Games Thirst – Amazing Life
There’s no game of the year award going to DICE’s Battlefield 4, not by a long shot. Maybe most bug-ridden and broken game of the year. That, the shooter stands the best chance among the crowd of winning. But why is the game so buggy? Well, I think there are many factors to consider. First, DICE didn’t have enough time to properly bake the game — EA wanted to that Call of Duty money, and secondly, well, we’ll let a DICE employee talk about that.
The employee chose to remain anonymous for obvious reasons while sharing what he thinks went wrong on a Swedish games site, but here’s what he had to say, courtesy PCGMedia:
When a code that’s not “thread-safe” executes on multiple sources, it’s a coincidence if it works or if it crashes. All the codes become “timing dependent” and different hardware combined with different background processes and OS’s, have different timing.
We are working hard on solving all the remaining problems within the game, and apparently many of the problems have been fixed in the last patch. But since the game is so timing-dependent, it’s hard to say how many problems we have left to fix.
Unfortunately, if you have a certain CPU and you run a certain OS and at the same time you run a certain background process, you could get “bad timing” more often than other people, Timing that will cause the game to crash or other bugs.
My thing is DICE simply needed more time to make sure that everything in their game worked how it’s supposed to. But they didn’t and now EA’s in a whole lot of trouble. Hopefully this’ll be a lesson for the industry.
