With massive upcoming titles such as Call of Duty: Ghosts and Battlefield 4 set to make their marks later this year, expectations are huge as to how these games, with their improvised in-game engines, will work out on the next generation. However, it seems like those plans were almost dealt a huge blow in the form of a delay for Battlefield 4.
Speaking to GamesIndustry International, Executive Producer Patrick Bach spoke about the difficulties involved in developing a title for a new hardware alongside the ones for the current generation platforms, and that the team considered delaying the game as a result:
"...we knew we'd set ourselves a tough challenge, but people on the outside seem to think that because there are going to be launch titles, it's easy. What are we spending all our time doing? They don't understand how hard it is! Talking about Watch_Dogs [delay], I don't blame them, there are times when we've considered doing the same thing - luckily we've overcome those hurdles and thought about what the game actually is on the next gen."
Thankfully, with the proper amount of dedication, the Bach and the rest of the team managed to stay on track: “Well we've been very aggressive with Battlefield 4 in that we want to be out at launch with the next gen consoles. I think people might not grasp how hard that is, to develop a game at the same time as the hardware.”
“We've been struggling quite a lot to keep up with the changes we've seen - both sides need to adapt and you end up being late. Everything is very complicated. Battlefield itself is a really complicated game, so it doesn't make our lives any easier.”
“We've had an excellent team working that out at the same time as the game itself, which is a big struggle. We can see that a lot of the next gen games coming are, arguably, lesser when it comes to the scope of features because of this problem,” he added.
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.
