Why would we buy Battlefield 2142?
Published on September 2nd, 2006
The Battlefield series is very popular among gamers. Many people (including me) are playing Battlefield 2 on a daily basis. This kind of multiplayer first person shooter is attracting many due to its numerous amount of features and advanced game-play. The developer’s support is very important to keep the game running, fixing bugs, and to prevent cheating. That’s why many online games are being patched all the time – sometimes the developer is making a mistake that can have a big negative influence over the game. For example, Client & Server stability issues that can lead to a crash. Usually, when a respected developer is making these kinds of mistakes, they release a fix in a timely manner of a few hours or a week. At least, that’s what usually happens when a respected developer (like Valve, for example) has a bug in one of their popular games.
On the 23rd of May, (3 months ago) Digital Illusions and EA released Battlefield 2 v1.3 patch. With the new patch, a serious server and client stability issue was exposed. Suddenly, both clients and servers started to crash randomly. The developer immediately confirmed the issues and claimed that they started working on a workaround patch to solve these issues. At the beginning of July, (one month after the original patch) the developer released a beta patch that solves the stability issues. But, since this is a beta release, the player will no longer be able to play on the official v1.3 servers, and on a very limited amount of beta v1.4 servers.
Digital Illusions has announced that it will release the final v1.4 patch on the 15th of August (two months and half after the original patch) but suddenly, instead of releasing this patch – or at least some kind of hotfix to resolve the crashing issues – they decided to delay it. Just for the record, they already fixed that issue in the beta, and they didn’t release a hotfix to resolve that critical issue. They decided to keep the product broken and to delay the patch instead of giving us some small patch to solve it.
The hours became days, the days became weeks, the weeks became months, and here we are at September – three months after they released the problematic v1.3 patch – and still without an official fix to these stability issues.
Instead of releasing a small hotfix do you want to know what the developer is doing? Digital Illusions is now busy with releasing betas of their upcoming title – Battlefield 2142. Instead of supporting their customers and attempt to fix their product, they are promoting greedy sites like 3DGamers and FilePlanet and making money out of a time-limited beta.
After we spent our hard-earned money on their products; after they made a very nasty move and gave extra weapons to Special Forces owners and forced some of us to buy it just to get a few new weapons; after some of us paid a lot of money to buy Battlefield 2 and all these expansion packs, and extra maps and skins (boosters packs); after all of this, they let us wait three months (and even more) for a simple bugfix that is suppose to resolve all these stability issues; and they already solved these issues. All they need is to release it! But no, that’s not enough for them! Now they’re going to put in-game advertisements in the game. After all of this, let me ask a single question:
Why would we buy Battlefield 2142???
http://www.ngohq.com/home.php?page=articles&go=read&arc_id=109
