The release of a 17-minute gameplay trailer for Battlefield 4 has everyone abuzzing about the upcoming game. Let me get right to the point: while the trailer is impressive on its own merits, a more historical view has me feeling a little more negatively about the whole thing.
What I'm referring to largely, of course, is Battlefield 3 and its own (impressive) pre-release marketing campaign. If you think back to those trailers, they likewise got a lot of mileage from the obvious TECHNICAL improvements made possible byt the new engine, Frostbite 2. I don't want to quash these or gloss over them, because the Frostbite 2 engine for the record is a beast. In fact, it took no more than the player's avatar running down a backstreet to make it obvious that "first-person" was being elevated in Battlefield 3.
But in the end BF3 ended up being a mess that missed greatness, and despite the advancements the technical aspects suffered too. The key to BF3's disappointment lies in the near-perfection of balance that was Bad Company 2 prior to BF3's release. When everyone saw the technical improvements, we immediately projected previous games' polish onto a future and untested product. Even during the beta, we overlooked glaring flaws.
Worst of all was the complete silence from DICE and EA, punctuated only occasionally by nonsensical statements that glossed over the truth. For months after release, the game was a complete broken pile of excrement, and the developers and publishers did nothing except push their garbage.
If you think back to BF3's release, about a week or less before, Patrick Bach came out in the press with a very unusual statement. At the time I took it as a perfectionist, an auteur, vainly fishing for compliments and veiling it as modesty on the eve of his opus' release. He said that as he looked at BF3, all he could see were the flaws and imperfections, that as a game designer he saw what he planned to improve the next time around.
I'm guessing most of the things he was referring to will be in Battlefield 4. I'm guessing they were quality-control issues he wanted to take time to fix but was forced to or willingly ignored to release the game and feed EA's corporate fantasy of competing with Activision.
It doesn't really matter whether Bach was a puppet/victim or accomplice, the point is a trailer means nothing because it does not represent the game it promotes.
It doesn't matter that BF3's trailers were single-player gampaign, and that they were running on the PC, and that in the end if you look at it through a very narrow lens they were somewhat true to the final experience you got.
The whole point is that even the campaign I played was misrepresented in those trailers. They chose moments that would seem chaotic, but in reality the entire game was that disorienting and sloppy. Not to mention the frame-rate and texture differences, or the A.I.
An argument can be made that we're talking about two different platform generations. The Playstation 4, after all, is promised to equal today's PCs and then some, so it would make sense that it could run anything you might be throwing at it and would level the playing field. But that argument misses another point: the sloppiness in BF3 wasn't just in the techs, it was the balance and game design.
DICE and EA might be working on something that is literally the perfect FPS. BF3 was very nearly there, and a bit more power could very plausibly be all that's need to provide gamers with an enticing shooter experience. Considering some of the sharing capabilities Sony has boasted for their new platform, that alone takes care of about 60% of BF3's hurdles in terms of THIS generation.
Unfortunately, the DICE and EA duo showed their colors to a lot of people during BF3's almost-two-years. I for one will not forget how we were treated, and what we had to play, and it will be very difficult for the Battlefield franchise to get me in the mood again.