When it comes to Electronic Arts and developer, the company is infamous for very tight deadlines. From Command and Conquer: Red Alert 2 to Dragon Age 2, a number of major titles have had developers come forward and state that it was forcibly released early. Often buggy and lacking the polish of a finished title, it seems that Battlefield 4 has joined that list.

Reported on by pixelenemy.com, one of Reddit’s moderators supposedly spoke to a QA employee and responded to questions surrounding the quality of DICE’s latest title. The statements only continued the impression of EA’s poor treatment of its developers, forcing rushed deadlines to try and gain a greater profit. In this case it was in an effort to beat Call of Duty: Ghosts in releases, and have their product up a week ahead of their chief competitor. While the game was indeed tested, it did not prove to be an easy task given the deadline.

“First we have a company culture that always wants more and more in the game until the very end of the project which puts an enormous strain on QA to test everything.

Then you have EA that wants us to release 2 weeks before CoD to avoid competition.”

He specifically cited how much time QA testing takes per item and the amount of work which went into each element of the title and how any change could force them to return and repeat their work. The example he used for their work was asking readers to “imagine we are 300 people at DICE, imagine we test the game for 1000 hours per person. That’s 300,000hrs of testing. Then imagine we release the game and 5million people buy it and play for one hour. That’s 5million hours tested in the first hour the game is release on so many different set-ups we couldn’t get close to!”

While the tester wanted to make it clear how much work their task truly entailed, he did not want to incur the wrath of the “internet hate machine” and cited how misquotes and misunderstandings could do more damage than good. Hence why “saying nothing and just fixing seems to be the safest way”. He finished stating that they were trying their best under difficult circumstances and that his opinion was not any official QA statement.

If this is genuine it does show the difficulties which come with ensuring the quality behind an IP as big as Battlefield, and how monumental a task their job can be. Especially when tight deadlines are placed upon the game thanks to competition.

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