DICE Had Considered Delaying Battlefield 4

After three installments in the Battlefield franchise you’d think that it would be easy for developer EA Digital Illusions CE (DICE) to launch a fourth one next month alongside the launches of the Xbox One and PlayStation 4. But it isn’t as simple as people think it is since there’s new development difficulties to overcome. According to executive producer Patrick Bach, these difficulties have been caused by obvious hardware changes for Battlefield 4.

In an interview with GamesIndustry International, Bach said that people “might not grasp” that difficulty:

We’ve been very aggressive with Battlefield 4 in that we want to be out at launch with the next-gen consoles. I think people might not grasp how hard that is, to develop a game at the same time as the hardware. We’ve been struggling quite a lot to keep up with the changes we’ve seen–both sides need to adapt and you end up being late. Everything is very complicated. Battlefield itself is a really complicated game, so it doesn’t make our lives any easier.

During the week, Ubisoft released a major announcement that Watch Dogs, a launch title for the Xbox One and PS4, will be delayed until Spring 2014. Bach also revealed that he sympathizes with that studio and understands what they’re going through because at times DICE considered delaying Battlefield 4:

So we knew we’d set ourselves a tough challenge, but people on the outside seem to think that because there are going to be launch titles, it’s easy. What are we spending all our time doing? They don’t understand how hard it is! Talking about Watch Dogs, I don’t blame them, there are times when we’ve considered doing the same thing.

In 10 days, Battlefield 4 launches on the PS3 and Xbox 360. The next-gen version will follow at launch in November.