Battlefield 3 PC Patch – Delayed Because of Consoles

Patrick Bach, executive producer for Battlefield 3 at DICE spoke to PC Gamer today regarding the delayed patch for PC players. The PS3 patch was released earlier today, so why wasn’t this major patch released at the same time for PC? Asked if the patch was going to be delivered in one big lump, Bach said, “yes”. And even though it is a frustrating way to deliver the patch, it also is effective.

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It’s very frustrating when it comes to… you have the fix, it’s done but you can’t roll it out. But again, it’s not unique to us – everyone lives in this reality

Bach stated that during the days of Battlefield 2’s development patches were released to fix a prior-patch’s issues. (1.21 would fix 1.2 while not really bringing anything new, but still being a ‘major’ patch release.) So even though PC (and Xbox) gamers will have to wait a little longer for the next patch, the wait should be worth it. Bach says the goal of DICE with this Battlefield 3 patch was to release a quality patch that won’t require emergency fixes.

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Our problem with support is we have a very big and complex game, so if something needs to be fixed, we need to be sure that it doesn’t break something at the other end and again, like I said, we don’t want to do emergency fixes to compensate for a problem in a specific area.

It should be noted that today’s patch for the PS3 was not because of some exclusive deal, but because the PS3 patch simply completed all the steps quicker than the PC and Xbox 360 patches.