Sure it can. Might not be as we want or hope, but it can be released before 2017. Not saying it should or shouldn't be, just that it can be.
It could be released after first twitch with gaming process with Miguel in the end of 2014.It doesn't mean that the game is good for release.It's still not.
Most definitely not before 2017. Just an example why: the campaign How is bE supposed to introduce and test the campaign-mechanic if the game is already up-and-running? The players are paying customers at this point!!! They expect a game that runs smoothly!!! A bad patch and an unbalanced mechanic and they will badmouth the shit out of EC!!! How is bE supposed to insert the campaign into the game-code without the risk of breaking something? How is bE supposed to balance the campaign when all the balancing is supposedly already finished? For example: supplies What does the availability of ammo and vehicles mean for the campaign? How do you balance that against armies that have this or that advantage that makes them really good in this or that kind of battlefield? "Good news everyone! The campaign will come out next week! Also, in slightly not so good news, our patch can lead to all sorts of technical problems and the whole game will be unfair and unbalanced for a while."
I have this image where the devs are working really hard with epic effort to push a traincart over a set of rails up hill. Some of us see that there is a abyss once they push the cart over the top of the hill and desperately get them to stop pushing that cart and make a bridge first. Another group forms a defensive parameter around the devs and yells: nonsense! they are doing great! keep pushing the cart, Devs! edit: and as ive posted yesterday, if we have right now 255 concurrent players a day, it can take up to an hour to get into battle etc, the facts appear to be on my side. blindly cheering the devs on is not helping them.
By using a separate UAT/Founders/Test server where they can tinker with the game however they want without affecting live servers in any way? News, people; we made the campaign system and during the testing process it turned out to work like s**t so we fixed and tweaked it and now it works fine and goes to servers