Speaking to Swedish site FZ, an unnamed DICE employee took the time to describe the technical difficulties that have prevented Battlefield 4 from being the game DICE and gamers hoped for.
First, he began by detailing that DICE pushed to make Battlefield 4 as much of a technological leap over its astounding predecessor as possible, but underestimated how much work would be required to make it run properly on different hardware configurations.
When a code that’s not “thread-safe” executes on multiple sources, it’s a coincidence if it works or if it crashes. All the codes become “timing dependent and different hardware combined with different background processes and OS’s, have different timing.
So why is it inherently more unstable on some machines than others? He explained:
Unfortunately, if you have a certain CPU and you run a certain OS and at the same time you run a certain background process, you could get “bad timing” more often than other people, Timing that will cause the game to crash or other bugs
He would admit that not enough time was spent testing the game internally or within the end-user beta which began in early October, just weeks before launch. There simply wasn’t enough time to react to the flood of reports.
In essence, DICE’s ambition to deliver as good of an FPS experience as possible coupled by the fact that EA pushes deadlines has jeopardized the foundation of the game. DICE promises to work on stabilizing the game before moving onto its next project, but with EA behind its funding that just might not happen.
