Battlefield 4
Brief
After the success of Battlefield 3 there was a chance for EA to take back the crown as the worlds biggest 1st person shooter franchise from Call of Duty. The game was to be the culmination of the Battlefield franchise and a release title for the next generation consoles, Xbox One and Playstation 4.
My Role
I joined the team as a Sr. QA Analyst to support the testing effort of the game, focusing on the upcoming next generation of consoles. I spent most my time as a QA Analyst, improving the user experience of the game but also as a technical tester finding functional issues, and lastly as a liaison between the main development team in Stockholm and the external testing team in Romania.
Complication
As the game was being released on a new generation of consoles that were not yet released, I was not only testing the game, but by extension the new consoles as well. In total the game was released on 5 platforms; Windows, Xbox 360, Xbox 1, Playstation 3 and Playstation 4. The complexity of the game was also close to infinite because of the new way that guns and vehicles could be customized by the player. Every gun and vehicle had about 20 customization options, and there were about 30 guns and vehicles in the game. It was obvious from the start that there was no chance that every combination could be tested, therefore me, the tech team and the rest of the QA team did a thorough risk analysis before committing to the testing plan.
Resolution
While the game was released on time and was feature complete, the scope of the game combined with the 5 supported platforms were simply too much to handle and DICE had to commit to a very aggressive patch program to repair issues on all platforms. There was a lot of controversy around the quality of the game on release but while painful, it was an invaluable learning experience. Battlefield 4 rose out of this and still (Q2 2020) has a healthy player base of 330.000 MAU.
Media & Accolades
