In an interview with Battlefield YouTube personality JackFrags, DICE executive producer on Battlefield 4, Patrick Bach, is confronted with some pretty tough questions that stem from the passionate Battlefield community, ranging from topics like the game’s net code, server options, patching process and much more.
However, Bach handled all questions rather well and had some very interesting things to say about each subject.
Speaking on the topic of net code, Battlefield 3 was by no means perfect. Dedicated servers served the game very well, but that’s not to say that it was without its minor issues. Bach explained how the studio will be making improvements to Battlefield 4’s net code, despite it being an extremely difficult task.
“You can never have a game like Battlefield, with the complexity of the amount of players, vehicles, bullet trajectory, destruction, etc., and have a perfect net code that is one hundred percent perfect,” he said. “There’s too many things going on. So in our world, we’re improving it and trying to make it as good as possible. But there’s a reason why there aren’t any other games on the market that does what we’re doing, because it’s really, really hard to do that.”
Of course, the beauty of dedicated servers, other than network stability, is that they can be rented and customized to the content of any player’s heart. But at the same time, giving players complete control of a server can lead to some very confusing circumstances for new comers just looking for that core Battlefield experience, but are instead served 1000-ticket games, among many other wonky settings that the community tends to sometimes favor.
Bach mentioned that while giving players a greater amount of settings to customize, DICE is also going to make sure players looking for a more standard Battlefield experience will easily find what they are looking for. He confirmed that you will “absolutely” be able to toggle Commander Mode on or off, “like many other things,” but that there will also be a “Classic” server search filter that will only display servers including settings that are “DICE-approved.”
“We want official servers that, even if you have your own server, you can set it as an official server,” he said. “So all the settings are DICE-approved, more-or-less.”
Waiting for patches in Battlefield 3 was often agonizingly long, especially when issues like the M320 Dart glitch plagued the Battlefield for a number of week before it was addressed. Of course, much of the issue lied within the hands of Microsoft and Sony, who often required patches to go through a more tedious certification process. Luckily, moving into this next-generation of gaming, Bach mentioned that not only have first-party figures altered some of their policies, but DICE is also looking into ways to be able to update the game more frequently on their end.
“There are two things that will be very different for Battlefield 4,” explained Bach. “One is of course the policy changes from first-party, where it’s easier for us to hand out a patch to the players more-or-less immediately. In some cases, it will take time because it still needs to go through certification and getting approvals,” which Bach said helps “prevent you from breaking the game. So, of course it won’t always be over night, but in some cases it will.”
“And the other thing that we’re doing is we’re actually moving some of the information on the game to the server-side, which means that we have control of the servers, which means that we can update the servers on more-or-less a daily or weekly cadence if we want to.”
You can catch the full interview with Patrick Bach on JackFrag’s YouTube channel right here.
Battlefield is headed to the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC this October 29 – November 15 on the PlayStation 4 and November 22 on the Xbox One.