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Battlefield Bad Company mixed in with EA slagging

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dennis:
My friends and I enjoyed the demo, so we went out and got copies of this USD60 game.

Single player campaign is fun, though it takes a lot of cues from Call of Duty 4.

However, multiplayer is awful. It's like they just didn't bother to QA it. The maps are unbalanced and buggy, player spawning is utterly broken, and matchmaking based on skill is something they decided they didn't need.

We joined a server and got our asses kicked because everyone on my team was level 5 or below and everyone on the opposing team was brass. There's no way to switch teams and apparently no autobalancing in the game. And this is when you join under "normal" challenge. There's a "hard" as well.

If that weren't bad enough, all the maps have been mastered and the game's been out only a week. So you have one squad or team exploiting all the weaknesses of the map and the opposing players don't last long enough to become familiar with it.

Spawning is completely broken. Not only will the game spawn you directly under an incoming artillery barrage, or directly in front of a moving tank, it'll spawn you on any available teammate, instead of just your squad leader as happens in BF2.

The game will also spawn you inside a destroyed piece of environment, such as a oil tank. Even though it's destroyed, it has invisible walls and you're trapped forever. The only way out is to suicide.

Seriously, when 50% of your spawns result in immediate death, there's something wrong with the game.

There's currently only one mutiplayer mode, called Gold Rush, which is basically a one-way territory capture, a la Team Fortress. What inevitably happens is the offensive team hides a player behind enemy lines and spawns off that player in waves. Respawn times are short enough that it's nearly impossible to clean them out entirely, and they only need one surviving player to spawn on.

They're releasing a new MP mode, so hopefully that will be an improvement, and maybe they'll fix some bugs along the way.

Melodic:
The team out of DICE that worked on BF:BC were under enormous pressure to release on time, as far as I was aware. Half of the development time was spent twiddling their thumbs waiting for Frostbite to be finished, and the other half was working their asses off.

Obligatory "fuck EA".

dennis:
Well, kudos to Digital Illusions for managing to get something entertaining out. I'll hang on to the game a little longer hoping they can fix it in patches.

MadassAlex:
The issue here is that EA are a bunch of fuckwits that can't manage a game studio. Valve and Blizzard do fantastically, both in terms of quality and finances. Perhaps EA could learn from them?

Melodic:
Blizzard and Valve both work on a "when it's done" basis. EA doesn't have that luxury. It's like telling Microsoft to behave more like Apple.

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