Thread: Things you'd like to see fixed in BF4

And if we were talking about things that had never been done before, or had never been done by said developer, you might possibly have a point. Yet we are talking about things that existed in previous versions of this game that was developed by the same company. I am willing to bet any amount of money you choose that at some point during the development of BF3 some decision maker flat out asked how many sales, and thus how much revenue, EA was likely to lose if they cut out VoIP, and when that number was mentioned, and was determined insignificant in the grand scheme of things, the decision was made.

Regardless that is not even the point I am making. The problem, in my opinion, is not that EA made the decision based on dollars and time lines as opposed to fan desire. The problem IS that this decision, and many more like it, had little to no impact on fan desire. One would think that if BF3 was released with no in game VoIP, no commander, maps the size of cracker jack boxes, and linear play style that sales would reduce by a large enough percentage that they would be forced to include them, but the fact of the matter is they still had record sales even after cutting all of those corners, so why bother making the game great when good will get you all the sales you want/need?

I actually have a feeling what happen was this. The engine used for BF2 was an engine they bought from another company, thats why they had voip in the 2nd version of the engine, it wasn't DICEs on creation.

Then they decided to make their own engine. Frostbite 1.0 didn't need it because it was console only and it seems they have their own API you can hook into for voice in your games. Frostbite 1.5 didn't need it for the first game since it was console only. I'm told BF: BC2 had it but it wasn't very good and they probably new that. Frostbite 2.0 was made and BF3 was their first game. Their mistake was probably someone going, "Why would we try to fix VoIP in Frostbite 2 when we just bought this Battlelog software from ESN? They say they have VoIP in it which we can just use." or someone said "Why add VoIP to Frostbite 2 (if they started from scratch for the 2nd version of the engine which developers do sometimes) when Battlelog will have it?"

Sadly no one ever thought to see how exactly Battlelog VoIP would work and realize it would suck.

Originally Posted by SourceSkills

I think my point is it is a given that the situation we describe would happen and I really see no need in pointing out. That is all i am really saying. People like to get caught up in the business side of things sometimes blaming it for what we don't get out of a game and sometimes it is true but most of the time it has nothing to do with money. Most of the time it has to do with the developers inability to deliver said functionality in a game on time. It doesn't reflect on their talent or capabilities it just takes a long time no matter how talented you are to make something happen the right way and that can be a problem when you have a release date to keep and commitments to fill. That's why I think this said situation we have discussed with planning out the cost/benefit is simply not as important as we might think it is.

Eh look at killing floor, game is super old. But good guy devs release new content seasonally for free (there are some skin dlcs but playable content is free). A game developers ideology goes a long way, especially in comparison to EAs ideology which unfortunately other game developers are starting to mimic.

Furthermore the quality of the product released says a lot too. EA treats it's customers as beta testers but mostly ignores feedback. Releasing a bug less game is hard sure, but releasing a game that's still arguably in beta (their betas are most devs alphas and their releases products are most devs betas) and calling it release quality is another thing entirely.

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Not sure if this has been mentioned or not, but, there is talk about not being able to be revived after getting kill be a knife.