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EA will delay Star Wars: Battlefront if it’s not ready in November

Star Wars Battlefront co-op missions E3 2015

From a business perspective, I imagine EA are pretty set on making sure Star Wars: Battlefront releases on the November 20th date they’ve set. Star Wars: The Force Awakens releases in cinemas just weeks later, and Star Wars fever will be ripe. But EA has said that Battlefront will release when it’s ready, and if that requires a delay then that’s what will happen. 

Talking to MCV at E3, EA’s chief operating officer Peter Moore said: “We’d have no compunction, no hesitation that if something went wrong with Battlefront, if it wasn’t right, we would just push it.”

As of now though, Moore is convinced they’ll hit target. “But that’s not going to happen. The game is playable with 40-players already, and it is rock solid, so it ain’t going to happen.”

After this week’s debacle with the PC version of Batman: Arkham Knight, many publishers are likely to be considering what’s best for their reputation when it comes to throwing out games that clearly need more work. But EA doesn’t have a clean past in this area: Battlefield 4 was infamously buggy for months and months after release. And despite being delayed by several months, Battlefield: Hardline suffered launch issues too.

Regarding that delay, Moore said: “Well you can’t ship it if it doesn’t work or the quality isn’t right. You just bite the bullet. Trust me, shipping Hardline in March was not the easiest thing to do from a business perspective, but it was the right thing to do from a player perspective.”

For Battlefront, hopefully EA will get it right first time or learn from both their own and other publishers’ mistakes and keep the game off the shelves until it’s in perfect condition.