Ask DICE: Gameplay Balance And Level Design

[Shawn Zipay]

Yes, surprise! Dice is not changing the current game. Buy our new games that will fix this issue!

[CptainCrunch]

Aw... I wanted CptainCrunch to go into the blog and see the answer for himself... It was supposed to be a surprise! Oh well. Surprise and congratulations!

LOL K, I did see it first. I saw your post and went right to the previous page.

Thank you for the support and Zips is right.

I know my question was long, but I wanted to make it clear what I was asking. No doubts. I was also hoping a little more background to it than just "yeah, were checking it out."

So I guess we are stuck with that "feature".

[K-16]

Yes, surprise! Dice is not changing the current game. Buy our new games that will fix this issue!

Thank you for the support and Zips is right... So I guess we are stuck with that "feature".

*High five.* Battlefield 4 and SimCity should forcibly be showcased alongside EA Sports titles at the next Santa Monica pre-E3 presentation. I'm excited to see how EA will bash themselves in May 2014/2015. It'll be a field day!

[CptainCrunch]

*High five.* Battlefield 4 and SimCity should forcibly be showcased alongside EA Sports titles at the next Santa Monica pre-E3 presentation. I'm excited to see how EA will bash themselves in May 2014/2015. It'll be a field day!

Yeah, I dont know if this is EAs aproach to their games this year or if this has been going. Its just like DICEs "We nailed it" in BF3 then when BF4 was coming out, "We know BF3 had some issues and some things could be better...so here is BF4!"

It's really a shame they are taking the same route. Perhaps EA and Activision has been around a bit too long and grown too big and lazy.

[K-16]

Switch lazy with stupidly competitive and I would agree with you. The size of those companies is primarily because they're public companies controlled by shareholders (well, Activision is a bit of an exception, but it was a large company even before the self-acquisition happened). From what I've been seeing so far (and only as a personal opinion), game development companies going public seems rather toxic to the industry.

Spoiler: 

It increases competition through shareholder demand as they judge by the quantity of products shipped and not their quality within a hard-set period of time. Delays aren't tolerable to shareholders, unless they see an opportunity to sell high and buy low later (Ubisoft and Watch Dogs), but for the most part will punish the companies for delaying anything. So in a sense, the shareholders are creating the overly competitive nature of Battlefield vs. Call of Duty, which is why EA ironically had to work way harder to cram the game into a schedule that was too tight.

Which leads to my next point. Activision had two years to recreate the same crap under the same engine with slight upgrades. They also have multiple development studios in rotation (and now 3 years as another "assistant" studio has turned into a full-fledged one). EA, while having more than two years to produce Battlefield 4, had DICE split up their own studio to multi-task between BF3 (DLC/patches) and BF4. And their Frostbite games seem dramatically different with each iteration. The technology is so much more difficult to manage and maintain. Then there's the shareholders who harp on the studio to release in time to compete against Call of Duty, and you have your recipe for disaster, even if DICE ironically ended up being less lazy than (well-funded) private companies as a result of this. Then there's the "in with the new, and out with the old" attitude for many games sold by public companies. Why no modding? To charge DLC AND control the life expectancy of the product.

Why abandon the current game and fix problems in a future product? Gives shareholders something to look forward to, as the new product would surely outperform the old, and gives awesome future projections. Again, control the life expectancy of the product, because shareholders want more products, not drag out the life of a current product. If VALVe were a public company, shareholders would furiously burn down their offices, because it goes against so many traditional business practices (in many ways, I consider VALVe as NOT a gaming company, but a properly built incubator firm because of their cabal system and flat management style). As I said, my opinion is that the stock market is completely incompatible and toxic to the dynamics of the gaming and technology industry. It's traditional limitations of companies owned by those who have no experience in the field, and using generic metrics to gauge the performance of a company creates barriers of developing with innovation, time, and minimal external judgement (backseat driving). It's a bit sickening to hear indie as the new cool buzzword now since the problem and solution was always there, but that's the state of the industry we're in now. Battlefield 4 and Call of Duty: Ghosts merely proves it.

To be honest, a lot of these problems are similar to struggling Kickstarted projects, where the funding goes in, but the product comes out as a turd. Only this time, we were the "investors" who feel entitled to backseat drive the development and complain about timeliness. The devs may be hardworking, but it doesn't matter when the scope didn't match the time needed for it to be good.

Maybe "stupidly competitive" could be replaced with "naive."


Side note: I watched a investor's advice show on television earlier this month. There was an interview between a financial analyst and the host. A phone call from a viewer asks both the analyst and the host what they thought of Microsoft. The financial analyst paused and struggled to remember what the latest product Microsoft released was.

"Sorry, what was it?... X... Uh... X, something..."

The host quickly replies, "Xbox 360."

"Ah yes, Xbox 360, thank you."

I know this isn't an EA/Activision example, but **** me, these are the people who own part of the gaming industry. Sure, they may not have voting rights (preferred shares), but EA and Activision better continue to pump out games (regardless if the previous needed continued support) if they want to maintain dividends and not piss off those clueless folks. Delicious dividends...

[CptainCrunch]

Since I posted the Demize thing here, today in Twitter and Battlelog Demize being fired/quitting/raging has blown up

His last tweets were in March and were vague about firing staff. According to Reddit posts from DICE employees Demize just got tired of the community and went into hiding because they are big meanies, but still works at DICE.

Others are saying they are just saying that and Demize is gone, but probably due to some NDA, cant say so.

Anyway, still don't know the truth of it and last tweets makes you think he was fired, but there is no context to them either.

If you google search Alan Kertz the second suggestion that pops up is "fired".