Battlefield: Bad Company 2, Teething Issues
Some friends were very kind in buying me the brand new game from EA’s Battlefield series, Bad Company 2 for my birthday. It’s been years since I’ve been anything but a casual gamer, so I haven’t really rushed out and bought a game right after release since 2002 or so.
Perhaps early-release teething problems.. bugs, glitches, crashes - a generally interrupted gaming experience was always the way it went. And perhaps a modern world where millions of eager players are sitting there bashing at the battered gates of gaming servers in their infancy just means these teething problems are much more out in the open - routed through services under the horrible umbrella of ’social media’.. but it certainly makes for nightmarish PR right at the point where a company is trying to move as many copies of their brand new offering as possible.
In less than 48 hours, there have been 20 pages on the official Electronic Arts blog of angry, confused, desperate comments from gamers just wanting to play what they dropped ~$100 on, the same weekend that they made said financial commitment.
I’m not going to try and aggregate all of the issues being complained about and comment on them. But I will tackle the numerous issues I experienced in just a couple of hours of (mostly trying to) play.
- The online cheat detection program Punkbuster that accompanies B: BC 2 throwing me out of a game after a few minutes of action with a “Pb Init Failure” error.
- Me following their advice (some other guy’s blog link as EA’s advice is in-game..) on the issue above and finding that while I no longer get the error.. I get even less feedback in that it just crashes back to the menu now without so much as a cryptic error for me to grit my teeth and Google.
- The server browser taking forever to refresh games that I can join (not very new to the Battlefield series in general). I shouldn’t have to wait 5 minutes to see a list of servers, mostly very far away from me (in Australia) that I don’t care about, so I can try hopelessly to join a server with 31/32 players playing only to see that that spot was filled 4 minutes and 59 seconds ago anyway.
- Oh and the latest trick? Probably the most fun thing that can ever happen to software of any kind. Just crashing to the desktop. I mean, just disappearing in an instant, leaving me staring at the boring-ass wallpaper I haven’t changed in 3 months because I should be throwing grenades at an APC instead of interior decorating.
I’m sure that they’re working very hard at Battlefield HQ to solve all of this. And they are saying as much in their public dialogue, which is good of them. But I’d rather see a game released a month later that I can actually play and enjoy than turning 25 and spending a couple of hours being frustrated over software, on my day off from being a software developer.
Perhaps the worst part is, for the hour or so of playtime I got in around the chaos: The game was really bloody good. Gorgeous and immersive to a level unseen in previous Battlefields, or perhaps any war game online.
It’d be just nice to play it, that’s all.