I suppose the last paragraph is targeted toward me
Oh well, here we go again:
1. Consumers are not supposed to go around looking on the Internet for fixes for producer mistakes (though I did do many "fixes" suggested by in many thread and non have yet to work).
2. I wouldn't "bitch and trash" DICE if this was the first time I get a bugged game from them. This is probably the 5th or the 6th game that DICE release with so much bugs, BF2 didn't crash that many times for me.
3. I get irritated when people start saying "I'm playing the game fine" and then follow it with a few sentences making you feel as if you are liar or something.....so again, just because the game is working fine for you or your friends doesn't mean that the majority of players are playing it fine. Just do a short tour in the technical section.
4. It seems that many people forgot their rights, I've a right to receive a good product and service, it's not my job to go around looking for fixes, and I want this to be clear for the big companies who making this a trend where they keep releasing unfinished products and expect the consumer to pinpoint and fix their bugs by themselves.
I find it quite astonishing that people still defend DICE after all the crap that we had to go through all over these years, bugs here and bugs there.
One last thing, I hope that no body start with the "if you don't like it, don't play it" argument, I'm getting bored of it, I want to play the damn game but the amount of bugs is ruining the fun.
Sorry for hijacking the thread.......
I actually ran across this thread while trying to do some research on a bug. But I have to agree with the above statements. I am absolutely annoyed with the product quality that Dice considers good.
BF2 - Great game, while it had some bugs they were addressed and reasonable.
2142 - A little worse than BF2 and many balance issues they struggled with, overall not a bad game.
Bad Company - Console only so I didn't play it but heard it was good.
Bad Company 2 - Absolutely horrid game. I hated it from Day 1. It was clearly a console port to PC that they just didn't even bother to put much effort in. I mean really... what company thinks it's ok to release a product where half the customizeable controls simply don't work. Not to mention all of the other major gameplay issue and the fact that it released in an almost non playable state. After years of patches it is still horrible but at least it doesn't constantly crash anymore.
BF3 - I'd put this just under 2142, I can tell the core gameplay is actually pretty good, balance doesn't seem to be too far off (unless you count vehicles). However, this suffers some of the same basic problems that BC2 did. Controls that just weren't ever setup and/or tested. Joysticks still don't work unless you own only a basic joystick with basic functionality. Some controls won't allow you to set them, there are a variety of bugs and crashes in the game. And I was all excited when I read they added a colorblind option until I tried it. What retard chose the colors? Sure lets give hostiles an almost pink color that blends in with the background if you are colorblind. Why in the world would they not simply allow players to choose the colors, it is a very simple function to add in the code, they are just too lazy to do it.
Dice has been a horrible development company for years now, releasing crappy product after crappy product. BF3 is the first game I have purchased in the last 5 years that was related to Dice that I didn't just hate. And that's mostly due to how much I really love the battlefield series, more specifically BF2 and 2142.
A good program is one that just works right out of the box who's controls are intuitive. This is why the Apple iPhone was such a major success. It was very simple to use all controls were intuitive and it just worked and worked well.
A bad program is one that doesn't work, doesn't work correctly, or you can't figure out how to make it work. Dice falls into this category, not the first.
I would love to see Dice belong in the "Good" category, but the simple truth is that they don't. The program doesn't work correctly, certain functions don't work, it randomly crashes, and people have to scour the web to try and find fixes for these issues. This is bad programming. The saddest part of all is that I can look at many of these bugs and they are relatively minor fixes. Controls that aren't setup correctly should be very easy to go in and fix the mapping for. The colorblind option would be an easy fix if they simply allowed the players to use the color pallet to select their own colors. The crashes, etc... will take a bit more work as tracking those kinds of issues down can take a while. But why in the world wouldn't you fix all of the really quick and easy bugs while we're waiting (unless they only have one programmer trying to fix bugs).
The only way all of these minor fixes become difficult is if the program was poorly written to begin with, which can then easily become a nightmare. But again this would fall under the category of bad programming and the blame would once again belong firmly on Dice's shoulders where it belongs.
Now, I'm not saying every game should be 100% bug free, that's just not realistic. What is realistic is to expect it to go through at least some form of QA before release. Those control mapping options are absolutely something that should have been picked up in QA. I expect the random crashing issues are something that most likely should have been picked up in QA, but at the very least should have been addressed in the BETA which I know for a fact they were reported at that time.
What I see with Dice is clearly a good programmer somewhere wrote the Engine code that they are using. But as far as I can tell the engine is the only thing that is well written. The entire interface is horrible (what moron in their right mind would actually encourage the use of the Browser to handle the game interface), talk about the most clumsy interface ever (ok second most clumsy, BC2 was clearly worse). I really want to like the BF series, but they make it very hard when they release such utter crap as BC2 was and try to pass it off to us. I almost didn't buy BF3 just because of my experience with BC2, if a friend hand't really pushed me to buy it I wouldn't own BF3 now.
lol, did you ever seen a game without any bug? DICe and EA, always at the begining, there is some majors bugs (even I didn't get any since I play BF3), and after it will be okay. BF2 was unplayable before the first patch lol.
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