It seems like EA DICE is taking notice from the problems Rockstar is facing with GTA Online, and wants to bypass those issues as much as possible. For Battlefield 4, DICE is hoping to offer an unhindered online experience, compared to the previous titles in the series.
Recently, speaking with OXM, Executive Producer Patrick Bach stated that DICE will make the Battlefield 4 online experience as smooth as possible.
"Well, we've had the beta," Bach stated, when asked whether fans could expect better online performance compared to Battlefield 3. "We've had an alpha. But we're back to the ambition or 'over-scoping' problem again.”
"We have been changing a lot of things under the hood in the game, which are quite hard to see at a glance - when you're playing the game you'll feel the benefits, but you might not understand what we've gone through to get there. Sometimes you have to more or less pull out the whole engine to get +10 horsepower. You can't just keep 'boosting' your game to get there."
Bach added that while all these changes are made for the sake of a new game, there is always the problem of associated bugs. “If we'd wanted to play it safe, we wouldn't have created a new version of Frostbite - we would have stayed on the right side of the fence. We are trying to push things as far as possible. That doesn't mean you will have loads and loads of bugs, of course."
Although Battlefield 4's multiplayer beta has churned up a number of bugs, Bach revealed that a majority of them were already expected. "I think in general our beta was kind of at the point we thought it would be at, from a bugs perspective. When you release a beta, the build is quite old, because you have to go through all these steps.”
"We had our list of known bugs, and the list the beta testers sent back, and they were quite well-matched. The funny thing is, the first hour the game goes live with a beta like this, we have more testing that hour than we've had in the entire project. It gives us a big chunk of information that we need to then cater for. I would hope it would be a smoother experience than we've had before with any previous Battlefield game," he concluded.
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.