Battlefield Hardline And Dragon Age Delays
Battlefield Hardline And Dragon Age Delays
Get ready to shuffle those calendars and re-arrange your holiday period games purchases as EA today announced Battlefield Hardline and Dragon Age delays.
We’ll give you the bad news first – Battlefield Hardline has been delayed into Quarter 1, 2015. EA cites the reason behind the delay would “ensure Hardline is the best, most innovative Battlefield experience.” Over at the official Battlefield Blog, DICE VP Karl Magnus Troedsson attempted to explain further details and reasoning behind the delay.
“Back at E3, we launched a beta for Hardline — we wanted to not only show you the game, but to let you play it for yourselves. Millions of you jumped in and had a great time. As a result, the Visceral Games team learned a lot from players about what they wanted in the game.
“We’ve been pouring over the data and feedback, and have already been putting a lot of it right into the game and sharing it directly with you. This feedback also spurred us to start thinking about other possibilities and ways we could push Hardline innovation further and make the game even better. The more we thought about these ideas, the more we knew we had to get them into the game you will all be playing.
“However, there was only one problem. We would need more time. Time that we didn’t have if we decided to move forward with launching in just a couple of months. We decided that the right thing to do was to take more time to ensure Hardline is the best, most innovative Battlefield experience we can give to you, our fans.”
The additional development time will works towards a variety of improvements in Battlefield Hardline, specifically adding innovative new features into the multiplayer mode, ensuring that the single player campaign is sufficiently deep and interesting and working towards stability, presumably to avoid the issues that plagued the launch of Battlefield 4 last year.
Now for the slightly better bad news; Dragon Age: Inquisition has also been delayed by EA, although it’s not as bad as the Hardline delay. Instead of launching in early October, Inquisition will now launch on November 18 in North America, November 21 in Europe. That’s the same day as rival company Ubisoft launch Far Cry 4.
Over on the official Dragon Age website the games’ executive producer Mark Darrah explained why the game had been delayed by a little more than a month.
“Since we began working on Dragon Age: Inquisition almost four years ago, our goal was to create the best Dragon Age experience ever. It was that goal that motivated many of our decisions: moving to Frostbite, bringing race choice and customization back, improving tactical camera, building a team of characters whose relationships evolve based on your actions, and most importantly, crafting an epic, nation-spanning story that both draws upon past games and takes you to many new places in the realm of Thedas.”
“This last bit of time is about polishing the experience we want you to see. Ensuring that our open spaces are as engaging as possible. Strengthening the emotional impact of the Hero’s choices. And ensuring the experience you get is the best it can be in the platform you choose to play on.”
The extra month looks to be worth it, as long as further delays are avoided, for the greater good of the game. Delays are unfortunately becoming more commonplace for games now, but I’m sure gamers all over will agree that so long as the delay directly improves the game, it’s a necessary evil.