14 DAY TRIAL // An anonymous Quality Assurance game tester from Battlefield 4 developer DICE has confirmed that the various glitches spotted in the game were largely due to Electronic Arts' desire to launch the game with as many features as possible and before Call of Duty: Ghosts.
Battlefield 4 came out last month and delivered a pretty good first-person shooter experience with great mechanics, gorgeous visuals, and plenty of improvements over its predecessor.
Unfortunately, as opposed to Battlefield 3, the new title had quite a few problems, including glitches, crashes, and other such issues that affected both the single-player campaign and the much more popular multiplayer.
According to a DICE employee in charge of game testing and quality assurance, most of these issues stemmed from the desire of publisher Electronic Arts to launch Battlefield 4 ahead of Call of Duty: Ghosts, its archrival.
This emphasis meant that there wasn't enough time to test all of the different mechanics and, once some were tested, they would always be altered due to the focus on putting in more features.
"First you have a company culture that always wants more and more in the game until the very end of the project which put an enormous strain QA to test everything. Then you have EA that wants us to release 2 weeks before COD to avoid competition," the anonymous employee told a moderator of the Battlefield Reddit group, via IncGamers.
"We want to talk to people about this but the Internet hate machine is such a tender thing and saying nothing and just fixing seems the safest way to not stir up an even worse [controversy]."
Keeping a balance between testing out various features and items and making changes to them after they were validated is a hard thing, according to the employee.
"We do test everything, we really do. Let’s say we test the SPAS-12 in June before we release. Then a sound guy makes a change in July which breaks it. Do you test everything again? Do you forbid anyone to work on the SPAS-12 after we’ve tested it? It’s a hard question and something that we in DICE QA struggle with a lot."
As of yet, however, neither DICE nor EA has acknowledged these claims, although they've both pledged to launch updates to solve Battlefield 4 glitches as soon as possible.