14 DAY TRIAL // Battlefield 4 came out precisely one year ago, and its disastrous release caused an uproar within the military first-person shooter's community.
The game was plagued by so many issues that some players even went as far as to take legal action against Electronic Arts, Battlefield 4's publisher. In spite of this, however, the game has been a huge commercial success, and has been lauded by critics for its merits.
Developer DICE worked very hard to improve the experience across the board, from enhancing the netcode and working on stability to various balance fixes meant to streamline the multiplayer experience.
Battlefield 4's issues are in the past now
EA lost a lot of credibility with players due to the shooter's rocky launch, and developer DICE now has to make sure that the launch fiasco won't be repeated. The series is insanely popular and its commercial appeal was not impacted due to its inertia, but the company lost player trust.
"Oh, yeah. I'd say we passed that point a little while ago, but this [fall patch] was where we added a lot of improvements and changes as well as fixing issues. A lot of what's in this patch is actually gameplay balance changes and tweaks to systems that we wanted to do."
"But we felt that we had to do it in a collected way, and that's why this patch is so big and so feature-laden," DICE co-founder David Sirland opined when asked by Gamespot whether the company managed to overcome the initial issues.
The September patch saw a surge in player interest
The latest patch was a collection of everything that the developer accomplished on the Community Testing Environment, introducing a ton of updates, fixes and features.
"We've seen a bump in players, we've seen a bump in played hours, we've seen a bump in daily active and weekly active users as well. Actually, almost equivalent to the Dragon's Teeth release in terms of increase in numbers. So it's really good to see that and we hope it continues as well," Sirland stated.
This is really good news for everyone involved, and early adopters of the game can really say that they got their money's worth now, even if it took a year to get here.
This could start a more serious transition to the games as a service mantra that Electronic Arts and other publishers have been throwing around lately.
As games get bigger and bigger and their development more and more complex, it's going to be increasingly difficult to complete production efforts within a year or two, which could mean that big franchises will see smaller launches of core content at first, that will be improved and expanded over time, just like in the case of Battlefield 4.
