» Sun May 22, 2011 5:23 pm
Look, it IS the fault of EA. People who blame Crytek are completely ignorant of how funding games and the developer - publisher relationship works.
The publisher has almost complete control of the release date. They 'own' the game as they paid for it and they can kick it out the doors whenever they wish. Sure the developers can appeal to their better judgement, but ultimately they are not in control here. People make uneducated comparisons with titles like Nintendo and Valve not releasing games until they are ready, and that's because they SELF-FUND their games. Sure, EA distributes some Valve games, but they do not fund them and so cannot influence the release.
The date this was released is significant too. It came out just before the new tax year, so any delays wold have pushed this into next year's results, with possible implications for EA's profitablity in the 2010/11 year - THAT is why it was released lacking polish (and make no bones here, that's all it is - there's no game breakers - the lag is largely a myth borne from bad players making excuses, bad connections or bad host and region selection - something all games can suffer from apart from the latter, which is the only thing that needs working on)
Will I buy more EA games? Depends on the title. Yes, glitches are annoying, but I won't allow them to prevent me experiencing a game I enjoy. Will Battlefield suffer from similar issues? Yes and no. In it's favour, it's the marquee title they have stated they wish to take the crown from CoD with - and the huge profits that entails. As a result, they HAVE to get it right first time, fail and they lose that chance, so they will hire as many extra staff as needed to have it ready. Problem is, in order to rain on CoD's parade it also needs to release at the same time or just before MW3. Later and it will fail too, so if somehow it still is unfinished, they WILL release it regardless and patch later.
It is annoying and yes something should be done about it, but it's the price all early adopters have to pay, even with hardware. You can have all the testing period you like anyway, but you simply cannot afford to hire a million people for a month playing a game, so when it releases and that amount of strain hits the game, then OF COURSE they will find issues the 30 or so people in a room for a few weeks couldn't, and as long as the patch is swift (seriously, a month is fine considering they need to recieve reports, isolate the causes, write the code then wait weeks for Microsoft cetification) then who cares? Does your life depend on playing this videogame every waking hour? Have you never played a big budget FPS where this is the case almost all the time? Take a break and come back when it's fixed, or enjoy it as it is in the perfectly fine state it is like the 99.99% of the community that don't endlessly whine here do (seriously, they're about 50 people out of what? A million sales?)
Long story short - game is largely fine, issues are to be expected, it's only been out a month, videogames are not life and death, complainers are a miniscule minority, I will buy the next EA game on its merits, same as every other game by every other developer.
