I love competitive multiplayer shooters. I love Microsoft’s big guns, Halo and Gears. I love Sony’s less successful counter-punches, Killzone and Resistance. And I of course love the big guns, Battlefield and Call of Duty. But one game had me more excited than the long line of potential sequels from my favorite shooters and that was Star Wars: Battlefront. As a huge Star Wars fan, Battlefront developed by DICE was a dream come true. Truly massive battles with Star Wars vehicles and weapons, in beautiful rendered iconic locales pulled from the massive lore of the franchise: my fanboy cup runneth over.
I specifically state that it had me excited though because that excitement is in the past. After my experiences with DICE’s premier product, Battlefield 4, I now have no confidence that Star Wars: Battlefront will be anything more than a shit show.
After a month and a half of Battlefield 4 being completely broken and a waste of space on the hard drive of my Xbox One, it seemed like the worst was behind DICE. I was able to play through the campaign with no issues and multiplayer seemed to finally be working fairly consistently. The $110 I gave to Electronic Arts on Xbox One launch day was finally starting to pay off. And then EA and DICE announced that February was to be Player Appreciation Month. I played over the first weekend with only minor issues and then on the 4th of February, while trying to partake in our weekly Battlefield Night, the game decided to appreciate me by not letting me play with friends.
I’d open Battlelog, select a friend’s name to join and the game would crash to the dashboard. After a few tries I realized that Battlelog, a slow and clunky experience normally, was to blame. It serves no real purpose other than to bloat the software experience and make everything operate at a slower pace.
After realizing trying to join friends via Battlelog only resulted in dashboard crashes, I tried to join via matchmaking. This allowed me to get into matches with friends but did not assure me of actually being able to play with them. If, in match, I attempted to open up Battlelog and join the game would crash, forcing me to play a game built around squad play and teamwork with absolute strangers. Nice.
Things got even worse. There was a match I joined that featured no sound other than the occasional, random explosion. There were multiple matches that featured 64 players and only 20 of them had gamertags attached to them. There was a match, on an official DICE server, that featured such bad lag that it was unplayable. And there was a match that saw the player count go from 60 to 15 with three of the remaining players being on my team facing off against 11 on the other side, this of course resulted in a super fun and balanced match.
I don’t find these issues acceptable when I play a game at launch, but they are at least more forgivable. Battlefield 4 is now, on Xbox One, two and a half months into its lifespan, and it still doesn’t work. I feel like EA and DICE, a developer I once had a lot of respect for, have stolen my money from me. I knew they sold me a lemon and was OK with that because they said it was going to get better, it hasn’t. And the fact that it is still a mess and EA and DICE are trying to make it appear as if things have improved by having Player Appreciation Month, makes me feel really bad about supporting them and this project and I don’t have confidence that they will make things better now or in the future.
EA has a big test coming up with Titanfall; if that game comes out a mess, I might be done with them as a publisher. DICE, though, has burned their last bridge. Barring a huge change in the coming months, I have no excitement for anything they are doing going forward: Mirror’s Edge 2, Star Wars: Battlefront, Battlefield 5, whathaveyou. Because of that EA should be worried. If I, a pretty forgiving fan, has drawn his last straw, there are others that have already hit that point and in a battle with Activision for the shooter supremacy crown, fans having no confidence in your product just gives Call of Duty an extra edge. Say what you will about Call of Duty, but at least it works.
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