With all the Battlefield 4 patches released to date, things have turned around following a launch that was plagued with issue after issue.
Rock Paper Shotgun had a chance to talk with EA Chief Creative Officer Rich Hilleman during the D.I.C.E. Awards red carpet and asked if EA’s changing their launch approach after what happened with both Battlefield 4 and SimCity. Hilleman replied, “I’m not sure I accept your premise. Battlefield 4 has been an exceedingly successful product on both consoles and PC. From a sales perspective, from a gameplay perspective.”
Pressing further, RPS added that Battlefield 4 is fundamentally a good game, but EA couldn’t write off all the glitches and server issues. Hilleman this time replied:
I think there was a lot of noise about the game, but some of that is a function of your surface area. 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.
Delving further into the issues of Battlefield 4, Hilleman said his impression was that Battlefield 4 had over 10,000 beta testers before it shipped. He then added how some of the problems with Battlefield 4 were for systems that hadn’t been released yet (PS4, Xbox One), and “beta testing on an unreleased system is difficult.”
Do you think Battlefield 4 is a “bad product” and do you wish you never bought it?
[Via]
