Battlefield 4 did not have a smooth, uneventful launch. EA and DICE have acknowledged this. The interesting thing is that despite the problems, most BF4 players stuck with the game, or came back to it as things were fixed.
Six months after release, the idea of opening up development to the players — the Community Test Environment — came up, and has produced good results to improve the game. Most of the tragic, game killing problems were resolved by that time, but many frustrating issues remained.
A year later — when EA fully addressed the problems with the game’s release — the big Fall Patch made significant changes in the game play. We got that shortly after got the last DLC (Final Stand). This finally brought the game performance up to acceptable for most players.
State Of The Game
Now (March 2015), we are a year and a half past release, and received another new patch. More improvements have been made. But is the game perfect and finished yet?
Not quite.
In fact, the forums remain filled with negative comments about the state of the game. Youtubers also offer criticism about the game. It is quite common to see comments during game play about how broken the game still is.
All those people criticizing the game are still playing it, despite its flaws. So either they are masochists, or the game has something going for it which outweighs all its problems. Maybe the advice of Battlefield Friends here fits — the game isn’t perfect, but we play with our friends and enjoy it, and have confidence that the developers will make it perfect in time.
We are demanding gamers, those who play Battlefield. We don’t want a merely good functional game. We expect a spectacular game, with innovative game play and all of the benefits of new technology that can fit into it. We also want our game to work perfectly, even when it has new, untested, performance-demanding features. DICE for its part wants the same thing. They are unwilling to make a game which is just new content for the same basic engine and system.
Games requiring patches after release, and often many of them, is nothing new or unusual. Are the number of patches and the problems with Battlefield 4 unusual?
A Perspective On Patches
Battlefield 1942 came out in September 2002. Patches came out in November and December of that year, fixing numerous bugs and issues. Further patches came out in 2003, and early 2004. Much of those were feature enhancements. A bit over two years between initial release and the final patch. These went along with the two expansion packs released in 2003.
In March 2004, Battlefield Vietnam came out. It used the same engine as BF 1942, with improvements. Patches came out over the release year, fixing bugs but also adding considerable new features to the game.
Battlefield 2 arrived in June 2005. It brought Battlefield into the modern era (though mods for earlier games offered that too). This is the start of the series of modern warfare games which includes Battlefield 3 and 4. It is held up as the standard that all Battlefield games need to meet, It received 10 patches between release and November 2006, a period over a year.
But BF2 players got a big surprise in September 2009, when another huge patch came out for the game. it fixed a lot of bugs, but also added much new content to the game, including the previously released map packs (from 2006) now for free. It was a very good upgrade, but it came out over four years after the game itself.
Battlefield Bad Company 2 came along in March 2010. The game got its last patch September 2011, about a year and a half later.
Battlefield 3 was the long awaited sequel to BF 2, and was a fall release in October 2011. It also received patches, with the last DLC (End Game) in March 2013 Again, about a year and a half from release to the final version.
For all the above, the final version is generally considered an excellent game. There remain issues, but nothing which most players consider to be game breaking.
Battlefield 4 is now at about the same point in its lifespan. The Winter Patch (March 2015) has resulted in a game which behaves fairly well for most players. There are problems remaining, and another patch can fix those, but people still play it. A lot of people, and most don’t seem to be crying constantly about how bad the game is, or say that they will never play it again. Despite this, many players think that the Battlefield franchise has had its reputation ruined by Battlefield 4, and it could be the worst Battlefield game ever.
So What’s Different About Battlefield 4?
It was one of the most highly anticipated games of 2013, and was a launch day game for the new XBOX One and PS4 consoles. DICE and EA promoted the improvements in the game, and preorder sales boomed. The open beta before release was popular, and though there were some problems with it, most players were quick to say “It’s just the beta, the final game will be fine.”
Except as we all know, it wasn’t fine. It is by far not the only game to have terrible, game breaking, system crashing bugs which plagued the early days of the game release. But it was a very high profile game, whose fans were understandably upset to find themselves unable to play, or to get into a game only for it to fail just when things were going good.
Worse, DICE couldn’t fix the game fast enough. One thing is strongly blamed for this: the game was rushed to release to get it out on its scheduled date, launch day. Rather than spend a bit more time in closed testing to make sure everything worked as intended, DICE had to try to repair the game as players continued to attempt to play and enjoy themselves. It may surprise you to realize that a lot of players stuck through the first months of the game’s release, trying to play, hoping that each new fix would finally give them a stable game.
Why stick with this game? We still had (and have, it isn’t dead yet) Battlefield 3, and there are many other FPS games out there.
Great Alpha Expectations
http://www.battlefield.com/battlefield-4/videos/bf4-announce-trailer-with-rihanna
Before BF4 was released, many people got to play Alpha versions of the game. There were both convention and invitational game play sessions, and an invite-only online alpha. I was one who got to play the alpha. The videos of E3 game play and the live streaming showed a clearly working, dazzling version of the game.
http://www.destructoid.com/17-minutes-of-the-new-battlefield-4-will-blow-you-away-249762.phtml
The Alpha, though, was kind of like a hothouse flower. It wasn’t the full game with all features available. We had one map, limited ranks and weapons, and it was played in short sessions which allowed the servers to reset between rounds. The online alpha used a “white box” build of the game which was stripped down to save download time. It had issues likely related to that with map geometry (glitches), but even so, the game play was both attractive and fun despite the limitations on visual quality. We knew that there were things which we wouldn’t be able to try out, and we played a “work in progress” game which had server and game updates during the test period.
EA promoted the game intensely, supporting live streaming from play events, and active support for Youtubers to record and release videos of the live Alpha game play. Now, much of that game play came from events where every PC and the servers were provided by EA and operated on a LAN — an ideal gaming environment but not what we get with Internet gaming.
Doesn’t the video look good? The new game features also seemed solid, with improvements to the class and weapon systems, as well as some amazing graphics and physics enhancements. Plus the hyped Levolution, which despite having a marketing-based name truly added some nice elements to the game play.
Beta Blocking
A fairly short time before the retail release — October 1 through 15, 2013 — a large number of players got their chance to actually play the Beta version of the game. It used the same Siege Of Shanghai map shown in the alpha, and had many of the same limitations on weapons and tools as the Alpha. It looked very much like the videos of the Alpha we’d been shown. It had some performance issues, something which wasn’t unexpected since optimizing performance is something done nearer the end of game development than the beginning, but for the most part it played well. It did have some issues with crashing, but again, it wasn’t so frequent to make people immediately reject the game as unfinished.
Those of us who played it provided much feedback to the developers. The retail release incorporated some changes from the beta, and there was a feeling of confidence among most Battlefield fans. DICE and EA would have time to make everything perfect. We wouldn’t be surprised if there were problems at release, but no one expected them to be hard to resolve.
Another advance was streamlining the patch process. Battlefield 3 had to suffer with some well known bugs which may have been easy to fix, but had to wait until a patch could be authorized for release on both consoles and the PC. It was easy to believe that fixes for some of the most egregious problems would be delivered quickly.
The Demand of Perfection
The Battlefield series are demanding games, in terms of system performance and the depth of features in the game. We have had a certain degree of tolerance for the issues DICE has had in previous games, because we believed they would work everything out and make a game which would deliver all the amazing elements of game play to satisfy us, a very demanding group of players.
Some people called Battlefield 4 “version 3.5” before release. Released just two years after BF3, it was hard to believe that DICE could create a truly new engine and redesign the game to be something that players could call a worthy upgrade, not just more of the same with new maps. Other game franchises have done that, some with success.
Battlefield has features which most other FPS games don’t attempt:
- 64 players in the same game.
- Projectile ballistics, tracking bullets as individual objects.
- Destructible environment.
- Player operated vehicles.
- Multiplayer with networked physics interactions.
- A hardware-pushing visual engine with lots of realistic imagery and actions.
In Battlefield 4, some new things were added to this mix. The large scale destruction of Levolution events transforms the map during a match, and all players and objects are affected by force of the changes in the same way — that is, a networked change to the environment which takes into account the current (damaged) map state and can incorporate random forces.
The networking of the waves in the water, the forces of the wind and rain, and even the impact of explosions on the map.
Foliage physics, where the grass, bushes, and trees move in response to forces generated by player action, whether the impact of player movement, vehicles, weapons, or explosions.
Greatly increased particle effects — dust and debris in the atmosphere, fire, flames, heat, and smoke — which can persist throughout a match, rather than just being very short events.
On top of this, the whole player kit (class) and experience system was reworked, the new customization system allowed for extremely flexible configurations for weapon attachments, gadgets, and vehicle upgrades, as well as custom appearance and personal emblems.
New game modes were added, and the interface was considerable revamped to incorporate new features.
Combat on and in the water was greatly expanded, with the armed watercraft being very effective vehicles.
The Commander returned in Battlefield 4. Many Battlefield 2 fans were unhappy when BF3 didn’t have this. We didn’t get a good chance to see this in the beta, but the idea of restoring a key feature to enhance team play was very exciting.
All in all, there are a huge number of changes between BF3 and BF4. The engine produces an audio and visual experience which is significantly better than its predecessor. More impressive is that, after many patches, it does so with about the same performance (frame rates) on the PC.
The terrible issues with the release also make it clear that BF4 isn’t just a quick retouching of BF3. DICE tried to add many new things, and an amazing number of them worked pretty well even at the start. Had they been able to fix the game to a playable state more quickly, I think that most players would as happy about BF4 as they were about BF3.
Patching Progress
EA seemed to take the view that, despite the problems with the game, DICE should have no trouble completing all the needed fixes as quick patches pushed out after release. Having stuck to the schedule, they may have felt they had no other choice. It wasn’t like they could say “Hey, we released it early. Let us shut everything down and try again in six months.”
By December 2013, most of the bad crashing issues were fixed. EA began serious damage control, first suspending the DLC release schedule to focus on core game fixes, and second by offering gamers in game promotions and rewards — much in the form of free Battlepacks, but still, it was much better than nothing and the game was improving.
The CTE program began in spring of 2014, and soon brought about significant improvements with new patches. The new DLC also appeased players, offering new challenges and some pretty nice looking maps. The artistic side of the game isn’t essential for good game play, but it does make it more attractive and enjoyable, and DICE delivered this wonderfully.
Welcome To The Grand Illusion
Netcode. Lag. Tick Rate. Ping. Latency. All these things are related, but most players don’t know exactly what they mean. Nor do we truly need to, in order to enjoy the game. But it can help to understand some of the technical issues involved in playing a multiplayer game on the Internet.
Ping is one of the simplest, and one which you have some limited control over, by choosing lower ping servers in Battlefield. It is the time it takes information to go from the server to the player’s system and back, or vice versa. It imposes a delay which cannot be remedied by any means, on all actions taken in any multiplayer game. A ping of 50ms, generally considered a good low value, means that what you see in the game is based on information (actions and server results) from at least 50ms ago. That is less than a typical human’s reaction time, but it is 3 frames of 60 fps video. Higher pings put you even further out of sync with other players.
Modern multiplayer games use techniques commonly called lag compensation to give the illusion that actions happen in real time, despite these delays. The frustration of shooting at someone who is no longer where they were when you get around to seeing them (due to ping and all other internet signal delays, called Latency) and thus missing, is eliminated. Instead, the server interprets the actions of all players, and resolves hits based on what each player saw in their “reality.” Sometimes, especially for players with relatively high ping, in order to be fair the server has to rule that their shot missed, or worse (from a player’s perspective), that they were already dead before they opened fire.
When things like that happen, our illusion of being in a game with everyone in real time is broken. The more things going on in a game, the more likely that such events will happen, especially (again) for players with relatively high ping. The Internet isn’t a true real time communications system, and delays can happen at any time, so even if your average ping is quite low, there can be hiccups in the flow of time in the game.
Both the server and the player’s system also take time to process game events, and that imposes another area of delays. But that can be improved by more efficient coding for the game. CTE addressed another issue, the Tick Rate. Battlefield runs — for both the current and previous games — with a 30 Hz (30 updates per second) Tick Rate. But it also has a slower 10 Hz rate for events which don’t need as frequent input in order for the server and game to provide a smooth response which feels like real time. Increasing the Tick Rate also increases the amount of data sent over the Internet by the game, and that can result in overloading low bandwidth connections, and also can require additional processing power for both the server and player systems.
Weapons fire in Battlefield is very fast — just like it is in real life. The time to kill with many weapons is within the 10 Hz time frame (under 100ms), especially at close range. The CTE tested changing many things to the faster 30 Hz rate, and the result was a greatly improved sense of real time response for close combat actions.
The Summer Patch of 2014 brought this improvement and many others to all Battlefield 4 players, and restored the confidence of many in the game. Gamers who had stopped playing returned to try out the improvements, and the new Dragon’s Teeth DLC.
Making A Big Difference
The Fall Patch made great improvements, practically a new game. The Final Stand DLC came out, and was one of the most impressive sets of maps so far for the Battlefield series. The recent Winter Patch did more improvements, including a lot of “netcode” fixes and enhancements There are still things to fix, but the game itself works fairly well.
Ours Is Not A Perfect World
The CTE program is still going strong, and is looking at every game bug, and every issue where players believe the game needs work or improvement. Despite all the fixes in each patch, the game still has times when it doesn’t work the way it should. It fails to deliver the illusion that we are in a real time battle with other players.
If we want to play Battlefield, that is the situation we must live with. There are still lots of people playing Battlefield 4, despite the many complaints. It is, for now, the only Battlefield we have. Perhaps Battlefield Hardline will draw new life into our game playing, but I expect that fans of the modern warfare genre are still going to keep playing Battlefield 4, at least until the next one comes out.
People who don’t play enough different online multiplayer games might think that these problems are unique to Battlefield, and that no company should release games full of flaws and bugs. A bit of experience with the other FPS games out there will find them with their own problems. And nothing can truly eliminate the problem of playing with a high ping, other than having servers with a better ping available to you.
So what do we do now? We keep playing, enjoy the game for how good it can be when things work well — which is very good — and let DICE and the CTE program keep making the game better. There are many cool things in development, but the progress on fixing the problems is even more exciting than new maps or game modes.
