stormonster

I really don't know. I remember the quote but can't remember the context completely, and unfortunately I wasn't in a position to make that decision :(

When I was in high school I dated a girl and told her about my history of BF1942 esports, and it turned out she knew the office manager at DICE. We started talking and I got a 6 month internship there and spent every day trying to help out with playtesting and feedbacking, and at the end of my internship I was offered a position in QA and worked my way from there whilst still modding and trying to dissect game mechanics at home :) I decided to leave because of a lot of things in my private life at the time were chaotic. I felt I got very stressed out about too many things at once and wouldn't be able to deliver a quality product, so I spent about 3-4 months handing over my work to other designers and left. I made it very clear when I left that I wasn't finished with DICE and today I would actually love to come back and work for them again to bring quality stuff to you guys! :)

I left not long after the game went in to the production phase, so I wasn't there for the actual launch - but my personal theory is that with new games the thinking seems to be "it needs more" and that eventually becomes impossible to manage and balance. Things will always go wrong along the way, and I think the development team did a really good job with the time that they had and I know I was very harsh during the first couple of weeks, but they cleaned it up quite well with patches. I think for the future the focus shouldn't be on just adding more stuff, but to rethink some things to make every choice important and interesting. Like for example - does BF really need as many guns and attachments and gadgets as it has now, or can we cut that down and make everything feel even more unique and of higher quality?

I was never on the project, so I don't know much. But I hope there will be real wookies and not just the fake ones that we've seen in BF :) Also, I want to see space dinosaurs. And lasers.

Well, there is always pressure from publishers, as well as internally in the studio to publish things. But as far as I remember, the actual development time on the project never got shortened in any way. I think with better planning and better demands to keep things simple, the quality of the game would have been much higher. Executives and marketing needs to trust the developers to be able to know what is best for the game from a gameplay perspective and not interfere with this - that way the game will be made from the core->out, making it feel very tight and solid.