EA admits it has to do a ‘better job’ of bug-testing, but believes players ‘should be patient’

EA has admitted that it has to do a “better job” in releasing games “as bug free as possible”, but also believes that players should “be patient and allow us to update games when they come out”.

Responding to criticism over the major stability issues faced by Battlefield 4 players, EA Studios EVP Patrick Soderlund told The Guardian: “Listen, we have to do a better job of getting games into the market that are as bug-free as possible. What I would say is, games are becoming more and more complex – even though we’ll run a beta and we’ll do massive amounts of testing, there are certain things, especially in an online-focused environment, that you won’t catch.

“I wish I could [say] that we will, but I don’t think we’ll ever catch everything. I think we’ve got better at it, but I certainly think we’re not where we need to be in terms of getting games to market that offer a friction-free experience.”

Soderlund’s solution, however, appears to be releasing post-launch updates quicker, rather than ensuring that the game is up to the standard it should be prior to release.

“What we need to do, and what we are doing is, when we launch a game, we have to work very quickly to work course-correct to fix issues and then to get fixes into the hands of the consumers. I have to say that gamers have been good with us – they realise that we work hard, I think we’ve had eight or nine server updates since the launch of the PC side.

“We try and do an update every second day to improve the game experience, and there are patches in the works for the PS3 and Xbox 360. I bet we’ll have to do the same thing on the next-gen machines. But our commitment to making the best gameplay experience on a continual basis is there. We devote a lot of time and effort toward making the game better as we go. But I think we need to do a better job as a company in making sure that what comes to market is in as good a shape as it possibly can be.”

Soderlund also suggests that the problems DICE has faced with Battlefield 4 are due to the number of players playing the game.

“The number one reason for things going wrong is scale. We do a lot of testing and load balancing, we do everything we can, but my personal experience tells me there’s no such thing, at this point at least, that can emulate real physical load. It’s so hard to simulate that because there are so many different user cases that you can’t simulate in a test environment.

“So should players be patient and allow us to update games when they come out? Yes. Should players expect base functionality for something they’ve purchased? Absolutely. I think if there are two people screaming at you out of a thousand, you can ask for patience, but if there are 500 out of 1,000, you’ve got to change something, right? You’ve got a problem.”

Battlefield 4 has been criticised by many fans following its launch for its stability problems, which has largely affected the PC, Xbox One and PS4 versions of the game.

Many PS4 players reported problems when attempting to join 64-player matches during the week of the game’s launch, and the Xbox One version is currently awaiting an update to fix frequent software crashes.

Source: theguardian.com