It's easy for a leman to just go for the anti-corporatist sentiment and say both are bad/evil/greedy/monopolizing and all indy game devs/publishers/companies are saints compared to them. You'd be preaching to the choir if you told me that. For years we've had watered down games alone from EA or those that greatly destroyed whatever expectations we had (SimCity) for a very influential series/intellectual property. Battlefield is no exception, starting from it's humble roots of Battlefield 1942, the game was iconic. It had a very memorable multiplayer experience as infantry, aircraft, and land vehicles were merged into an outstanding title that also was moddable and lead to the start of the series. The community themselves were able to create Desert Combat which was a modern twist using the same engine and some aspects of BF1942 but gave new life to a strong FPS game. Then came Battlefield 2, 2142, even the divergent Bad Company sub-series, 1943, Heroes, Free To Play, 3, and now 4.
The Battlefield series is ripe with history, but the core gameplay mechanics has always maintained of a FPS shooter that was unlike you'd see back in the old days of Quake where it took a time period, weaponry, and abilities of the players to be placed in a more relatable timezone. The same can be said of the Call of Duty series, but I'm going off topic, this isn't about the BF or COD series and their origins, but why I think despite what I do think of EA, it was sadly the lesser or 2 evil choices in regards to the release of Battlefield 4.
There could have been a huge list of reasons as to why EA chose to order DICE to forego QA testing. But I'll just list any off the top of my head that may or may not have been reasonable choices, while seemingly not that many though.
- Obviously, release dates is a key factor. They knew COD: Ghosts was coming out well before Thanksgiving, so they had to get something in earlier.
- Timing in regards to the next gen consoles of the PS4/Xbox One. That can go through a huge number of issues as well. BF4 is a constant work in progress but they can work with Microsoft, Sony, and AMD to get things ironed out as fast as possible to make the games run nice and fast by launch. AMD is important to note since they actually provide the key hardware in the APU inside both Xbox One and PS4, as well as the upcoming Mantle API AMD will use in their first related release of Battlefield 4 for the PC.
- EA and Activision have a rivalry going on as to which AAA title is better one would assume. But truth be told, not really. COD has always been a top seller due to it's accessibility not just by platforms, but it's rather ease of gameplay. Constant back and forth wars between the platforms of "dirty console peasants" and the glories "pc gaming master race" have yet to abate with the rise of the XB1(yes I'm gonna acronym this that)/PS4 as well as Battlefield Series (more specifically BF3, and BC2 to a lesser extent) to the current generation of the COD series.
- The beta for BF4 despite initial teething issues in it's barely 2 week lifespan did iron out key issues like client crashes, FPS drops/stuttering, and seemingly overall stability. Though other issues like netcode which still exists is something that existed in beta and is quite prevalent today. Many customers are very upset over the current netcode and hope that DICE will work that out to a level where it's more in tune to what Battlefield 3 had.
- A minor money grab in regards to the older console generation. If you haven't noticed, BF4 is obviously playable but slightly scaled back like BF3 was to both 360/PS3 in offering a much smaller cap of max players in multiplayer, smaller maps, obvious simpler graphics, but still maintains the same overall gameplay. So what EA decided to do was offer up a one time $10 payment "upgrade" to let a 360/PS3 account have dual access to the subsequent next gen console. Even if $10 may not seem like enough, you can tell this move reeked and was clearly a money grab. Let's be honest, EA is not exactly that kind-hearted and philanthropic here.
Whatever their intentions for this reason may be, whether it was for money, just trying to beat Activision out, or whatever else. It's sad that the consumer has to pay in so many ways, and DICE probably got screwed in the pooch as much as we did, if not far worse. Now that BF4 is released, however big their dev team is, is now shrunken down and I would consider quite a few members are moved to other games/intellectual properties under EA's banner. A fraction of DICE's core team with the BF series will stick around as they iron out patches, and work on the future DLC's for the series. It must hurt to be them right now as they knew the BF4 beta yield a similar but different product, and they had no choice but to follow orders from EA in charging the consumers $60 to do yet another beta test for them, now their marginalized staff has to work potentially unpaid overtime to fix the kinks and other game-breaking issues just so EA can pat themselves on the back and their FPS AAA title went gold, sold big numbers, will have compatibility with XB1/PS4 (well, we'll see ), and so on..
This mandatory corporate policy of the rich get richer, and the greedy get greedier is abhorrent, but such is the way of business these days (especially for the big dogs, IE: 99.9999% of Fortune 500 Companies and the like), and it can be quite appalling to watch. We as normal people can only comment and foment about it, but really can't do much else. Sure we can "vote with our wallet", but truth be told, unless it was a massive scale grassroots campaign to really tell off Corporation A or B and the see massive losses due to their own recklessly bad decision making go down the gutter. Not much else we can do.
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