Tom's Hardware slams developers

[thekingraptor]

sad but unfortunatley true

[MikeBoogie]

Good article...

[Yezo]

All I gotta say is, new engines comes with new bugs, if this guy knew anything about developing games besides using the basic terms (such as htiboxes and netcoding) then he would have never posted the article.

The point is, everyone who whines and complains thinks that if they were handed the source code for BF2 and everything Dice/EA worked on, they could make BF2 bugless. Nobody truly knows the difficulty of making TODAYS games perfect for play. There is no game on todays market that does not have bugs. Yet, they continue to call EA/Dice morons for not fixing bugs that they consider could be fixed by 14 yr olds, BUT, I don't see the complainers giving out solutions to these bugs.

Sorry to tell you I do a bit. I've had to program entire functions within a matter of hours for the simple online-transaction system you have today.

Keep in mind EA and Dice have rushed BF2. A new gaming engine at least has 4 years of development behind it. Look at the Doom 3 or valve Half Life Engine. They werent anywhere near as bad as BF2 for sure. Even look at EPIC, their Upcomming game scheduled for 2005 was pushed back 2 years to 2007. Their engine will have been in development for close to 5 years with all said an done.

The fact is you need a stable base, and if EA and Dice cant do that then they should have held of BF2. Strategically the market would have bought it to play with it during summer hence their obvious deadline of the new year.

But the blunt fact is a BETA test stage is the longest stage in the life of a piece of software. I'm sad to say this, but EA pushes its game developers (dice) to the extent where they do not have enough viable time for the BETA testing stage, hence the awfully buggy releases made by them.

Aside from BF2 I'm possibly never going to buy another game from EA for about 5 or 6 years. I'll give them time to work on their problems. But seriously if EA keeps this for long, publishers known for quality releases such as midway, or atari, will take over EA's Monopoly.

[noobeffect]

Keep in mind EA and Dice have rushed BF2. A new gaming engine at least has 4 years of development behind it. Look at the Doom 3 or valve Half Life Engine. They werent anywhere near as bad as BF2 for sure.

If by the Half-Life Engine, you mean the recent Source eninge, then I disagree, the Source is a bad engine in terms of multiplayer play. The BF2 engine has recieved mixed reviews, especially the netcode, some reviewers call it solid, some people in the community call it unstable. I considered the engine to be okay and the netcode to be a solid relief from the Source netcode.

What I find ridiculous is that after over 4 years and over $40 million in the making of the Source engine and netcode, I still find myself tweakings console commands in CS: Source just to get near-good hitbox detection and registration. But with EA rushing BF2 and all, I find BF2 to bring better results in terms of netcoding than the Source engine.

but the bugs in a menu system is simply unforgivable... i guarantee they had a guy whos sole responsibility it was to design an interface

Yes, I definately agree with that. I especially don't like the server browser, Gamespy is such a bad browser and yet the BF series has always relied on them.

lol...the games should be tested thoroughly before released. i'd like to see the QA requiremnts for some games:

Can you install the game? yes
Can you launch the game? yes
ok, its ready for release!

The thing is, they only thoroughly test their games on uber-high-end systems, if you take a look at this video from the BF2 about the testing that went into it, it may answer some questions:

http://www.eagames.com/official/battlefield/battlefield2/us/videos.jsp?setID=Terry%20Barwegen&resID=hi

[GreatWhiteShark]

Just exactly what bugs are you dudes talking about when you say "the game still has bugs"?

[X-ander]

All I gotta say is, new engines comes with new bugs, if this guy knew anything about developing games besides using the basic terms (such as htiboxes and netcoding) then he would have never posted the article.

The point is, everyone who whines and complains thinks that if they were handed the source code for BF2 and everything Dice/EA worked on, they could make BF2 bugless. Nobody truly knows the difficulty of making TODAYS games perfect for play. There is no game on todays market that does not have bugs. Yet, they continue to call EA/Dice morons for not fixing bugs that they consider could be fixed by 14 yr olds, BUT, I don't see the complainers giving out solutions to these bugs.

If you had the enough intelligence to understand the article you would have comprehended that a main point of it is that the patches are a good solution in some cases but should not be considered a normal thing.

He also states as a main argument that ea/dices patch brought more problems than solutions.

So maybe you should stfu.

[TheInvisibleMan]

Just exactly what bugs are you dudes talking about when you say "the game still has bugs"?

Probably one of the 140+ that EA says it will fix in the upcoming patch :laugh:

[exocet]

Hi, I'm Tom from Tom's Hardware and I take bribes. This invalidates anything I say.

[Dr-X]

Good article, but like exocet, I'll never take any of Toms articles seriously EVER again.

[Professor]

Not to mention the guy looks about 12.

[AT39]

I guess this means that THG wasn't paid off by EA/DICE

[dmonk]

wana know a company that knows how to release a clean product?

ID Software.

[ud!t]

well I agree, lately games have just been complete crap, all these bugs are hardly something you would expect from a professional product.

Also I thing bf2 is incredibly badly optimized. Hell, for me it looks much much worse than farcry yet it also runs worse aswell! I run high on both games, very high on far cry of course, and bf2 looks worse and runs worse. It is the first real game now that really might need more than 1 gig of ram which is rediculous. Every other game runs fine on 1 gig.

These people just don't notice because they are all working on super computers, but by making the specs high they are losing a large market share from people with low-end computers.

[Zeratul]

EA sux my ballz. But I still like BF2 its a fun game... I dont play it too often but when I do its fun.

[jmuduke]

EA sux my ballz. But I still like BF2 its a fun game... I dont play it too often but when I do its fun.

See the E has this ball right here and then the A, the A has this ball right over here, so EA is suckin both my balls.