The ever problematic Battlefield 4...
Since the game's fall launch, Electronic Arts' Call of Duty rival has gone through a littany of issues - installation, crashes and bugs on all versions, unavailability of DLC map packs, and perhaps the icing on the cake, the outright rejection of EA to the various complaints players had, only for the company to later eat its words in a great big slice of humble pie, finally admitting their fault.
And of course, let's not forget the scandal that resulted from the lawsuit EA was hit with that accused the publisher of misleading investors over the game's quality. The same game that had such a problem with DLC, that EA halted work on all future projects and had to bring all of its developers together to fix the broken mess of a shooter.
While the lawsuit has since mysteriously vanished, and a bigger company has replaced EA as the most hated company in the country, Battlefield 4's tarnished legacy remains, and Oddworld creator Lorne Lanning wants to make sure it stays within everyone's mind.
Lorne Lanning spoke exclusively with VG247 recently about his upcoming game, Oddword: New 'n' Tasty, and didn't mince words about the infamous publisher. Funny how the timing works out, as VG247 published the story the same day that BF4 developer DICE announced they were delaying the PC release for game's Naval Strike DLC.
EA came up when Lanning talked about New 'n' Tasty's goal to turn his studio, Oddworld Inhabitants, into a viable and independent company. With all the previous games in the Oddworld series published by larger companies (EA published the most recent game in the series, Stranger's Wrath), Lanning was more than familiar with the companies', shall we say, emphasis on the financial, something the Oddworld creator wasn't quite in agreement with.
"I'd rather not make games than go fucking be a slave for public companies who care more about their shareholders than they do about their customers," he said. "Fuck that business. I don't want to play with that business, because it was a losing business...I just don't want to go back and play the old [publisher] game. I'd rather not make games than go fucking be a slave for public companies who care more about their shareholders than they do about their customers."
"Why did Battlefield 4 ship?" asked Lanning. A fair game to target. Even if you ignore the lawsuit, the problems downloading DLC, the company's selling off of a massive amount of stock before the game's release, and the creation of the first external bug tracker for players to list the problems they encountered, there's still about two dozen or so patches and upgrades that have hit the game on all platforms to fix the multiple bugs, glitches, and errors that just seem to keep popping up.
"You know that team was crying. You know that team knew that game wasn't ready to go. You know that team fucking spent a lot of sleepless nights building that shit out to look as good and play as good, when it was able to be experienced, being played as they were intending it to be played. Someone made a decision that the shareholders are more important than the customer. And we see a lot of that. How do you blow that? How do you take that fucking jewel and ship it with dirt all over it?"
Only EA and DICE can answer that, but response to the public will never be the admittance that Lanning and others are looking for, merely a half-assed attempt at an apology and a promise to do better.
