You’re supposed to be able to stay connected and absorb at least a few bullets during the online frenzy of a Battlefield 4 multiplayer battle. But persistent bugs on the PS4 have made crashes, one-hit kills and general instability rampant problems in EA’s flagship shooter and it looks like the wait for a fix will continue for a while longer.
Ever since the game has come out, fans playing Battlefield 4 on PlayStation 4 have been grousing on message boards about the game’s instability on sites like NeoGAF and MP1st. Just as the game’s China Rising DLC hits platforms worldwide, the developers at EA DICE quietly announced that a PS4 update originally due out today — which many players hoped would fix the bugs plaguing online play — is being delayed for further testing. In a recent Guardian interview, DICE CEO Patrick Soderlund has admitted that Battlefield 4 is facing a large-scale problem as far as bug-fixing and user satisfaction is concerned.
Over on Reddit, a DICE technical scripter with the username sliced_lime explained that while one aspect of a now infamous one-hit kill bug has been fixed, another part hasn’t:
Yes and no. There were two issues. One was an actual OHK (you shoot someone, they die from one bullet). That one was fixed.
The other is an issue with how deaths are communicated from server to client, which means you can sometimes appear to die instantly, but whoever shot you still actually shot the appropriate amount of bullets. The fix for this is a server-side fix, and we are looking at getting it out as soon as possible.
Sliced_lime’s comments seem to line up with an explanatory GIF and diagram that have been making the rounds on Reddit. But knowing why a problem is happening doesn’t quite make people more willing to live with it.
And, while BF4‘s woes seem to fall in line with the drama surrounding the launches of GTA Online and SimCity, it’s made all the more conspicuous by having a direct competitor come out at almost the same time and being attached to a high-profile next-gen console launch.
Kotaku has reached out to EA for comment and will update this story if they reply.
Comments
20 responses to “Battlefield 4 PS4 Patch Delayed”
Like I’ve said before, a lot of these problems probably wouldn’t exist if EA didn’t pass up on the QA part of a games release in order to beat Call of Duty to the shelves.
BFBC2 backs up your statement, we got a beta and it was the smoothest Battlefield launch I’ve been part of, BF3 was unplayable at launch and slowly improved. My PS4 can’t seem to get through more than one match online in BF4, always seems to be fine for one match then a couple of minutes into the next i get kicked and an error message pops up, so frustrating, I just wanna play 🙁
Apparently DICE asked for a couple of more months to work on the game and EA was all like, “No, Call of Duty! CALL OF DUTYYYYYY!!! BEAT CALL OF DUTYYYYY!!!!! Appeal to the Dudebros to beat Call of DUUUUUUUTYYYYYYY!!!!!!!”
so lame, they really shouldn’t have bothered, the new CoD is the laziest effort to date and not much competition, I bought CoD & Battlefield 4 for my PS4, I’ve played about 15 minutes of CoD and about 10 hours of Battlefield
They didn’t even need to try. It’s been quite obvious that CoD was heading for a crash (Infinity Ward CoD games anyways) and they only needed to make an adequate BF game to beat them. But nope, needed another lame campaign that poorly tries to rip it off and allow players to only work on their K/D ratio.
Yeah. This is why I agreed to wait for this. I bought other BF games and since BF2 this has been a problem. To this day I’m lucky if I have a match of BF3 on PC or console and don’t get the good old ‘connection to server disconnected’ or some other bug. And yes. I’ve spent days trying to fix it myself with various installs, ISP’s, upnp’s, PC’s, etc. (Frankly I shouldn’t have to ‘fix’ a $60 game -.- )
I remember the first time I rode a bike in BF3. The way you sorta.. glitched onto it.. Nothing like it. ‘Course it’s “better” now.
That and Origin… At least its better than uPlay 😉
Well the new update on PC made it worse.
Really?
I played last night and I actually noticed less “single-bang-dead-EFF-OFF” encounters
Came here to post the same thing, Shithead.
For a second i was thinking “no need for name calling” … but yeah
+1 can barely get a PC game out without it all falling in a lagtasic pile.
Also I wonder off turning building destruction off might help. It just seems like its all fun and games until the latter stages of the game when the buildings are falling down when the server goes lagtastic.
I would give up all destruction and levelution if it would give me a lag free game.
To be fair though I cant think of a single levelution event that actually makes the map better.
The best one is without doubt siege and all it does is just ruin the best part of the map, and of course there was the thing in the first three weeks where knocking the building over crashed the whole sever…
Paying to beta-test a product is one of the joys of modern gaming … EA can suck my nuts.
EA……. voted the worst company in the world…… for a very good reason.
Yeah, making video games is far worse then Bank of America
The statement is out of context.
Worst CONSUMER company in the world.
EA want to be number one ironically enough, but they’re not even going to get close. They’ll hit a triple this year and I say that as a BF4 premium member.
I’ve no doubt they’ll fix these issues looking ahead, but there’s no excuse for releasing the content before it’s ready to beat their competitor to market. In fact, it’s likely to have the opposite affect and alienate the playerbase.
But since EA don’t listen to their customers, someone should raise this as a big talking point at the next annual EA Shareholders conference…
Dam str8.
I’ve had the game crash once with a psn error, can’t recall what number but thats it otherwise its been pretty smooth for me with none of what is mentioned above happening, though there are a few one hits kills occasionally that i question, and the odd glitch like stretched players or the one where the player looks like they are stuck in the ground running around, but otherwise decent so far.
This is one of the main problems with vertical integration of publishers /devs. Sooner or later you run out of asses to kick. It’s just one big lumbering ass that’s concerned about the dollars. This is why I’ve held off on buying Premium this time around, the product and the service is anything but…
Battlefield 4 on PS4 crashes every two or three matches for me, and drops out to the OS. Though it seems to retain stats earned. It can be frustrating, and there doesn’t even seem to be Australian servers so I am playing US ones that are sitting at 3/5 ping bars. Other then that, most nights I can play for an hour or two without problems. Hardly the end of the world like everyone’s claiming it to be.