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A producer from EA studio DICE has chosen to address fans directly online who have questioned the studio’s strategy for the recently detailed Star Wars Battlefront.
The game was officially unveiledat the Star Wars Celebration event in the US, but shortly after found itself coming in for criticism online for what was perceived to be a lack of features compared to previous releases in the series.
As Polygon reports, some were unhappy over what was described as the limited selection of maps and character loadouts, the lack of space battles or campaign, the DLC strategy and the lack of confirmed pilotable vehicles, among other things.
In a Reddit thread accusing EA of plotting to withhold content from the main game in order to later release it as premium DLC, a DICE producer waded in to defend the studio.
Please don’t make me break what I can and cannot say, but if you think there’s anything we’re not including in the game to save it for DLC, I can tell you you’re 100 per cent wrong,” the producer stated.
In this project, I’ve never heard anyone say ‘let’s not do this for launch so we can do it as DLC instead’. Ever.”
The same producer has gone on to defend the game against several more accusations, too.
I wish you could get inside the belly of the beast and see the game development process first hand. Finishing a game on time is really, really tough, and we want to get the game out for November 17th,” they added. [Confirmed DLC] Battle of Jakku is a bit later, so the people working on that can work a little bit separately and on a different time schedule, and that means it doesn’t impact finishing the main game.
The situation was never that we had the Jakku maps in the main game, and then stripped them to put them in a DLC. It was that the idea to do the Jakku maps came quite late in the process and we didn’t have capacity to add them for launch, so we found a way to get them out to people as soon as possible after launch.
By far the majority of ideas and main decision making is not made by higher-ups, but by the team. And yes, what you see in DLC is sometimes the result of things that you started thinking during the latter part of development. We have a word in development for constantly adding new features: it’s called feature creep and it’s absolutely paramount to avoid that in the latter stages if you want to build a good game. It’s hard though!
Of course, if you want to think we’re evil, you’ll always think up evil motives and method. But in all essence, this is the output of hundreds of passionate people and games, just like people here, who want to deliver great gaming experiences.”
