EA chief creative officer Richard Hilleman has said that while Battlefield 4 has been “an exceedingly successful product on both consoles and PC,” DICE has acknowledged some “obvious and glaring issues” and are continuing to work on said issues.
Speaking with RPS during the D.I.C.E. Summit in Las Vegas, Hilleman attributed many of the game’s issues with “noise,” stating that the more customers one has playing a tile, the “more noice becomes available.”
“I think there was a lot of noise about the game, but some of that is a function of your surface area,” he said. “The more customers you have, the more noise becomes available. We did things wrong. We know that. We’re gonna fix those things. We’re gonna try to be smart about what customers want in the future.
“But I’m not willing to accept – and I don’t think most of my customers are willing to say – “it’s a bad product, I wish I didn’t buy it.” That’s not the conversation we’re having now. I think what we’re hearing is, “You made a game we really liked. We would’ve liked it a little better if it didn’t have these problems.” Many of those problems we can fix, and we have and will.”
Hilleman went on to say that BF4 had over 10,000 beta testers involved in the title before it shipped and some of the problems with the gamer were related unreleased systems such as PS4 and Xbox One.
“Beta testing on an unreleased system is difficult,” he said. “What I would say is, there were dynamics that were different this time. There were organizational differences. Some of those have been fixed already. Many of those conditions will not be the same next time. Some of those fixes aren’t going to solve the problem next time, though.
“The obvious and glaring issues – the ones we heard most about from our customers, the ones that matter most to them – we’ve really gotten on top of those and they’re fixed.
“What is most important is to know how to not have the problem next time, and that’s kinda what I’m proudest about.”
