S&S; News: Battlefield 4: Making It Look the Same on All Formats is “coward’s Way Out,” Says DICE

Battlefield 4 is already being closely analyzed across current and next-gen formats by fans. It’s a practice executive producer Patrick Bach feels will never go away, but he’s not prepared to settle for format equality just to appease those who feel left out. That’s the “coward’s way out,” he says.
In an interview with OXM, Bach commented on the nature of comparison videos and debate over which versions look best. “It gives me a flashback to Battlefield 3,” he began. “We had that problem even back before the next gen consoles, where we made a game that looked amazing on the PC – the better the PC, the better that game looked – and then you had a game that looked amazing on PS3 and Xbox 360, but it didn’t look as good as on PC, and people kept nagging us about that.
“It was like, you should compare it to other games on the same platform. And people said, ‘OK but still – why doesn’t it look as good as on PC? You don’t care about the consoles.’ Well, we’re pushing your hardware as hard as we can, and I’m quite certain that we’ll get that this summer as well – because we are pushing the PC, we’re pushing the Xbox One and we’re pushing the PS4, and also making sure that the Xbox 360 and PS3 software looks amazing, way better than it did for Battlefield 3.
“People will still bring it up. We’ll still get the comparison videos, where somebody will judge us based on that, rather than comparing us to other games on the platforms. You could take the coward’s way out, and just set the bar at Xbox 360 and PS3, and make it so that all games look the same on all platforms, but that’s not who we are. We want to do our best with the hardware.”