One of the key problems with Battlefield 3 was its painfully slow patching process: players had to wait months for what were sometimes critical fixes. The source of the issue was the console certification process, which in turn dragged down the PC process.
Thankfully, that won't be the case with Battlefield 4, according to DICE executive producer Patrick Bach, who says in an interview with CVG that since then they've moved a lot if not all elements server-side, allowing them to work around console processes and patch the game directly, and even daily. Server-side patches were a handy thing with Battlefield 3, but were rare and small, as at the time, the structure didn't support what it does now.
"It's easier for us now to support the game; it's easier for us to change things, more or less in real-time, instead of you having to download a big chunk of data to update the game," he explains. "So you don't have to wait for all of the fixes, going through certification [and all this]. There's a lot of blockers [where] even if you have a fix, we can't get it out to you, because [we] have a lot of steps [we] need to go through."
"We're moving that back a bit so we on our servers directly can change bits and pieces of the game, [including] weapons and guns and gadgets. We spent a lot of time fixing all this stuff under the hood; people day one might not see, but as we're moving along in the post-launch campaign, we will be able to do a lot of cool things."
"There's a lot of good things about this new policy. We are now allowed to updates more or less daily, [meaning] if you find a problem, we fix it tomorrow. Sometimes we might not be able to fix it tomorrow cause it could be more complicated than that, but in some cases we can; if it's a small problem we can. Previously it took like, a month, or two."
Thankfully, that won't be the case with Battlefield 4, according to DICE executive producer Patrick Bach, who says in an interview with CVG that since then they've moved a lot if not all elements server-side, allowing them to work around console processes and patch the game directly, and even daily. Server-side patches were a handy thing with Battlefield 3, but were rare and small, as at the time, the structure didn't support what it does now.
"It's easier for us now to support the game; it's easier for us to change things, more or less in real-time, instead of you having to download a big chunk of data to update the game," he explains. "So you don't have to wait for all of the fixes, going through certification [and all this]. There's a lot of blockers [where] even if you have a fix, we can't get it out to you, because [we] have a lot of steps [we] need to go through."
"We're moving that back a bit so we on our servers directly can change bits and pieces of the game, [including] weapons and guns and gadgets. We spent a lot of time fixing all this stuff under the hood; people day one might not see, but as we're moving along in the post-launch campaign, we will be able to do a lot of cool things."
"There's a lot of good things about this new policy. We are now allowed to updates more or less daily, [meaning] if you find a problem, we fix it tomorrow. Sometimes we might not be able to fix it tomorrow cause it could be more complicated than that, but in some cases we can; if it's a small problem we can. Previously it took like, a month, or two."
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