The Simultaneous Rise and Decline of Battlefield 208
An anonymous reader writes: Ben Kuchera at Polygon recommends against buying the upcoming Battlefield Hardline first-person shooter. Not because it's bad — in fact, he doesn't really offer an opinion on how good the game is — but because it's time to stop incentivizing poor behavior from Electronic Arts and its Digital Illusions CE development studio. After EA acquired DICE, Battlefield game launches accelerated, and launch issues with each game were hand-waved away as unpredictable. The studio's principled stand against paid DLC evaporated in order to feed the ever-hungry beast of shareholder value. Kuchera says, "EA continues this because the Battlefield franchise is profitable; we as players have taught them that we'll buy anyway, and continue to support games that don't work at launch." He suggests avoiding pre-orders, and only buying the game if and when it's in a playable (and fun) state. "Every dollar that's spent on Hardline before the game comes out is a vote for things continuing down an anti-consumer path. If the game is a hit before its launch, that sends a message that we're OK with business as usual, and business as usual has become pretty terrible."
Re:Haha, nobody will do this. (Score:5, Interesting)
I did it. I loved BF3, but I didn't pick up 4 and I won't be picking up Hardline because of EA. In addition to everything the original article mentions, most of which I agree with, one thing not mentioned in the original article is the pay-to-have-everything (which is not "Pay-to-win" only in a very strict sense, but that doesn't make it right).
I don't mind these companies making money, but they do it at the expense of loyal customers, rather than in support of them... I don't think it's a good long-term practice, but that's just me. But it's definitely not nobody.
Re:Or Be an Adult (Score:5, Interesting)
Another lost customer (Score:3, Interesting)
I have bought pretty much every PC release of Battlefield. BF3 was the low point for me, with regular connectivity issues ruining the game, include a long period of EA blaming a DDoS attack. It is painful to be kicked off of server part way through a round because the DRM lost connection to EA servers... There were more in game bugs than an previous release. Origin is an added annoyance. The fact that I had spent $1000 upgrading my gaming PC for BF3 didn't help.
BF4 seems to be been rushed out well before it should have been and was full of in game bugs, like invisible objects, constant crashes under a range of conditions, more connectivity issues. It is only fairly recently that most of these have been fixed.
No release has been immune to aimbots and other hacks but the inclusion of a kill cam did give some amusing views of them in action. I remember being killed by someone shooting from one end of the map to the other in BF3, with their shots needing to go through several walls and floors to get me. This happened many times in several rounds and the useless cheater detection never picked them up. The number of glitches that allowed players to get outside the map to either sneak around or kill those inside the map was amazing.
After two releases I regret wasting my time and money on, I've decided to blacklist EA and DICE on all platforms. The positive side is that it got me to buy several games on Steam, including a few nice cross platform games that I play on Linux. I am not going to miss EA or their Origin crap.