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Battlefield 4 hasn't had the greatest year. Its launch was riddled with problems that EA itself deemed "unacceptable", and while over the course of 12 months many of those have been addressed - and, indeed, while it has seemingly come the norm for triple-A games to ship with serious issues - faith in the Battlefield brand has been dented. Visceral's Battlefield Hardline, a spin-off that takes the gunplay of the series and places it in a gritty world of cops and criminals, needs to restore some of that faith, something it made move towards when EA released a multiplayer beta earlier this year that was arguably more stable than its mainline companion. So what has the studio learnt from the problems faced by Battlefield 4?
"When you ask what did I learn, or what did we learn, all game developers know it's important to launch a stable game, a bug free game, because that equates to fun," Visceral's general manager Steve Papoutsis told Eurogamer at a recent press event. "It's unfortunate that Battlefield 4 had a rocky launch, and a lot of effort's gone into rectifying that. We at our studio pride ourselves in doing our best - as do many, or all developers - to release bug-free software that works. But these games are complex, and when you're working on five platforms simultaneously it is a challenge. What's resonated with us is we need to keep an eye on it.
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