Re: Why do DICE bother...not what you expect!
I don't mind about the new features, and OBVIOUSLY a huge amount of work has gone on since release. But I think their priorities aren't aligned with what people actually want.
We have 3 expansion packs already, Battlefield 2146 (or whatever) is being worked on and we are getting a bunch of new features added to the mix with every point release of BF2 I just don't like this approach. It's the opposite of "less is more."
IMO, BF2, fantastic game as it is, is the epitome of "more is less." To me the BF2 patch team don't have the priority of fine tuning, polishing and "perfecting" the game. They are simply adding things, as if they are trying to prove they should be on the main battlefield team.
Each expansion pack runs progressively worse than the last, in terms of graphics and performance. My Frames per second on Spec Ops was AWFUL. And this is from someone who thought Battefield 2 performance (pre-expansion pack) was *great*. I defended it as a great engine to other people who claimed it wasn't, explaining it's complexity, the size of the maps, the shadows and the bump mapping.
....but Spec forces (and from what I've seen of Euro Force) definately has lower quality of graphical content to it WHILE ALSO runnning A LOT worse. OK, so they are farming out the expansion packs to lesser developers (Dice Canada) fair enough, I don't have to buy them. But I think my complaints about the original game are still valid......here they come...
We get these point releases every so often, that break as many things as they fix........ they have to make another patch immediately afterwards to fix the things new things that have broken.... I think this can be expected, and it's par for the course.
My actual problem is we are downloading all this stuff *manually* every time, and that it seems to be becoming a spiraling mess out of control. If they game simply came up with the message box when you loaded it saying "out of date, download the new patch to play on ranked/official servers", that would at least be something. It doesn't. For someone who hasn't played in a few months, and doesn't follow BF2 or gaming news sites, it's CONFUSING. I'm not that stupid a guy in general, but twice since BF2 has been released I have had trouble figuring out if I was up to date, and twice I've downloaded the wrong patch. They DO even have an advert for a new patch that is displayed in the main menu, but it's very confusing, because it's there on everyones client if they've updated or not. Not only that but the patch name/number compared to the general version numbers makes it very difficult to tell if you are actually up to date. No, you don't have to be a genius to work this stuff out, but I installed Diablo 2 the other day for the first time in 4 years. That game patched itself up automatically in a couple of minutes, I didn't have to think. That's an OLD, OLD game too. Compared to my BF2 patching experience it was HEAVEN to get that game updated.
Seriously, how hard would it be to stop work on all these fancy new features, and just start developing a "framework" patch so they can make little incremental upgrades of a few megabytes to all clients without doing the whole alert people / point release / download thing. Then they can make radical changes, and problems will arise, and they can fix the problems straight away. They can make no big changes at all, and just POLISH, bugfix, and tweak, and I think people will still be over the moon, because it's such a great popular game. For big complex multiplayer releases where there are bound to be a progressive amount of exploits and cheats and bugs with new drivers, point releases are just antiquated. Games / drivers / computers are just too complicated thesedays to deal with all issues with the occasional big patch.
I honestly would prefer they just locked down the general gameplay, gave us nothing, but polished the bejezus out of the game. Gut the menu and replace it with something less rediculous and loud. A simple elegant menu like Counterstrike / Half life 2 would be so much more functional and welcome.
So in summary...
- new menu/server browser ( the current one is a hall-of-famer in terms of *bad* menus. )
- polish and balance and tweaking on whats already there
- forget all new features, appreciate the effort, but would rather the game was just polished to perfection, and had a solid framework for sending us these balance fixes, tweaks and elements of polish. Manual patches for multiplayer games are old-hat. Follow the blizzard/ valve way.
DICE...you OWN...you make the most complex/innovate games...but you can't greate a good menu. I feel like i'm telling off einstein for not brushing his hair.
Sorry to come across like an annoying little b**ch concerned only with the menial, but you are scoring direct hits in terms of genre defininig ground breaking gameplay, but flopping on the "basics" like menu's and patch frameworks. The menial crap that might seem unimportant, but it's not.
I don't mind about the new features, and OBVIOUSLY a huge amount of work has gone on since release. But I think their priorities aren't aligned with what people actually want.
We have 3 expansion packs already, Battlefield 2146 (or whatever) is being worked on and we are getting a bunch of new features added to the mix with every point release of BF2 I just don't like this approach. It's the opposite of "less is more."
IMO, BF2, fantastic game as it is, is the epitome of "more is less." To me the BF2 patch team don't have the priority of fine tuning, polishing and "perfecting" the game. They are simply adding things, as if they are trying to prove they should be on the main battlefield team.
Each expansion pack runs progressively worse than the last, in terms of graphics and performance. My Frames per second on Spec Ops was AWFUL. And this is from someone who thought Battefield 2 performance (pre-expansion pack) was *great*. I defended it as a great engine to other people who claimed it wasn't, explaining it's complexity, the size of the maps, the shadows and the bump mapping.
....but Spec forces (and from what I've seen of Euro Force) definately has lower quality of graphical content to it WHILE ALSO runnning A LOT worse. OK, so they are farming out the expansion packs to lesser developers (Dice Canada) fair enough, I don't have to buy them. But I think my complaints about the original game are still valid......here they come...
We get these point releases every so often, that break as many things as they fix........ they have to make another patch immediately afterwards to fix the things new things that have broken.... I think this can be expected, and it's par for the course.
My actual problem is we are downloading all this stuff *manually* every time, and that it seems to be becoming a spiraling mess out of control. If they game simply came up with the message box when you loaded it saying "out of date, download the new patch to play on ranked/official servers", that would at least be something. It doesn't. For someone who hasn't played in a few months, and doesn't follow BF2 or gaming news sites, it's CONFUSING. I'm not that stupid a guy in general, but twice since BF2 has been released I have had trouble figuring out if I was up to date, and twice I've downloaded the wrong patch. They DO even have an advert for a new patch that is displayed in the main menu, but it's very confusing, because it's there on everyones client if they've updated or not. Not only that but the patch name/number compared to the general version numbers makes it very difficult to tell if you are actually up to date. No, you don't have to be a genius to work this stuff out, but I installed Diablo 2 the other day for the first time in 4 years. That game patched itself up automatically in a couple of minutes, I didn't have to think. That's an OLD, OLD game too. Compared to my BF2 patching experience it was HEAVEN to get that game updated.
Seriously, how hard would it be to stop work on all these fancy new features, and just start developing a "framework" patch so they can make little incremental upgrades of a few megabytes to all clients without doing the whole alert people / point release / download thing. Then they can make radical changes, and problems will arise, and they can fix the problems straight away. They can make no big changes at all, and just POLISH, bugfix, and tweak, and I think people will still be over the moon, because it's such a great popular game. For big complex multiplayer releases where there are bound to be a progressive amount of exploits and cheats and bugs with new drivers, point releases are just antiquated. Games / drivers / computers are just too complicated thesedays to deal with all issues with the occasional big patch.
I honestly would prefer they just locked down the general gameplay, gave us nothing, but polished the bejezus out of the game. Gut the menu and replace it with something less rediculous and loud. A simple elegant menu like Counterstrike / Half life 2 would be so much more functional and welcome.
So in summary...
- new menu/server browser ( the current one is a hall-of-famer in terms of *bad* menus. )
- polish and balance and tweaking on whats already there
- forget all new features, appreciate the effort, but would rather the game was just polished to perfection, and had a solid framework for sending us these balance fixes, tweaks and elements of polish. Manual patches for multiplayer games are old-hat. Follow the blizzard/ valve way.
DICE...you OWN...you make the most complex/innovate games...but you can't greate a good menu. I feel like i'm telling off einstein for not brushing his hair.
Sorry to come across like an annoying little b**ch concerned only with the menial, but you are scoring direct hits in terms of genre defininig ground breaking gameplay, but flopping on the "basics" like menu's and patch frameworks. The menial crap that might seem unimportant, but it's not.
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