Poor Visceral. They’ve inherited the Battlefield series at a time when its reputation has never been iffier. Battlefield 4’s launch was scuppered by server crashes, netcode problems, and low walls which occasionally killed vaulting players at random.
Now, with the world and their paymasters at EA watching, they’ve got to get Hardline off the pad without any of its engines exploding. But they’re a confident bunch.
Battlefield Hardline players should expect “great stability” at launch, Visceral lead multiplayer designer Thad Sasser told PlayStation Lifestyle.
“A lot of our engineers are participating in the CTE (Community Test Environment), actively helping with the changes going on there,” said Sasser.
Sasser suggested that the work DICE have done over the last several months to restabilise Battlefield 4 will help keep Hardline upright too.
“One of the great things about working on this franchise with DICE is that we’re able to take some of these improvements and roll them into the Hardline game,” he said. “So expect to see great stability at launch, and anything we can do to improve the player experience, we’re going to take that very seriously and try to get that into the game.”
Last week, EA CEO Andrew Wilson claimed that Battlefield 4’s launch was a disaster because it was ambitious. But he also said that the publisher’s management style was changing to avoid similar screw-ups.
“You can lengthen development cycles,” Wilson told Eurogamer. “You can change the development process whereby you have more stable build requirements throughout the entire set of development. You can start betas earlier so you get it out in the wild earlier with more people banging away at it.”
Battlefield Hardline’s beta was uncaged at E3, months ahead of its October 21 release date. Do you think that’ll help its chances?