DICE’s upcoming FPS title Battlefield 4 may be one of the biggest games of the year as far as the industry is concerned, but the game itself is still in its beta-testing phase for multiplayer. The beta has received a number of reviews and feedback from associated fans who have started getting their hands on the game, but not all of it has been positive. However, it seems like DICE isn't too concerned with the not-so-positive feedback.
Speaking with Games Industry International, Executive Producer Patrick Bach said that the team has received good feedback for the beta, and that fans who see negative reviews online shouldn’t confuse it for the truth.
“In the first hour of the beta we got more playtesting than we'd have previously during the entire project," said Bach. "The feedback you get is huge. We're trying to compare our list of feedback and bugs with the list we're getting from the community. While we know that what people are playing isn't the latest game, it's one or two months old, we're comparing notes on what is already fixed.”
As expected, the test mode for the game is meant to find out all the nooks related (like load-testing) to it before final release with the back end mostly taken into consideration. Bach clarified that this is an important stage “so that you don't end up in a Rockstar situation where the game doesn't actually work on day one. We've been in that situation previously for the same reasons, where you're expecting one scenario and then it turns out to be completely different - it's really, really hard to cater for that.”
It was also confirmed that the game is really getting good feedback and that the team has “got more or less everything that people have found now, people are finding less and less and just playing for fun. So for us it's extremely helpful, even though it hurts because you know people aren't playing the actual game and you hope they don't think that they are.”
Additionally, on the topic of people believing whatever is written online related to the beta, Bach revealed that his biggest concern here “is when you see online feedback as truth, because we actually build into the game a lot of telemetry, ways for us to measure different things happening either... almost on a player level but also on a match level and see who won, what happened, how many kills did he get with his gun etc etc, making it possible for us to actually compare feedback from the internet with facts.”
He added that it’s quite scary “to see how objectively wrong people can be. Because they want to win, personally, therefore they claim the thing that prevents them from winning is a design flaw or a bug or something.”
Negative feedback seen on the Battlelog Beta forums include everything from performance issues over stuttering, controls, nerfed weapons, and more. As tends to happen, the louder complaints tend to drown out praise. It was stated there that the team needed to apply fixes for certain performance issues that makes the game, otherwise “awesome,” unplayable. Moreover, there were stuttering issues inside the game and also lack of AAs.
One person wrote: “Running on a system that runs BF3 in ultra on 1920x1080 @ 60fps. But even after beta driver updates from AMD I'm getting sluggish gameplay, extreme framedrops and general low performance with everything on medium and blur/AA/post fx OFF. Not really want to spend another 600 bucks to get this game to run top notch.”
To this the team later responded: “As you might have noticed, there are not a lot of developers from DICE taking part in the discussions here on the forum right now but you can be assured that we do get all you feedback. The reason why we are not very visible on the forum is that we are working hard on fixing bugs that you find and finishing the game to be able to have an awesome launch later this month.”
Battlefield 4 is currently scheduled to release for PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and PC on Oct. 29 in North America and Nov. 1 in Europe, with versions for PS4 and Xbox One arriving in Q4 2013.
