EA's Advice is to Uninstall Battlefield 2

Grym writes "The recently released Battlefield 2 was met with various levels of acclaim by reviewers. Besides the insane hardware requirements, the chief complaint was the amount of bugs in the game. Hoping to address the situation quickly, EA hastily released a patch to address the concerns cited in reviews. Big mistake. The patch turned out to be littered with bugs. One of the biggest was a huge memory leak. Another actually turned teammates' names red--just like enemies. The game became unplayable because of the patch. Tycho at Penny-Arcade discussed the issue in his latest news update. EA has owned up to the buggy patch and has said that there will be a hotfix released soon. In the meantime, gamers have been offically told to uninstall Battlefield 2 and play without the patch; advice that many fans are not happy to hear. Meanwhile, some sites are still offering the 1.01 patch for download on their front pages, only adding to the confusion. When are game companies going to learn? Quality assurance and play-testing should not be an afterthought!"

Comments

Good

[yotto]

I hope EA gets totally burned by this and the games industry learns a lesson about sacrificing quality to hit a release date.

I also hope that they make a better tasting pie that isn't fattening.

No, no, no, no...

[Zathrus]

Sigh. Grym got it wrong on several levels -- as others have pointed out, the official advice from EA is to reinstall -- which does involve uninstalling and installing again. I agree, this is silly -- EA should've come out with a de-patcher.

But that's hardly the only thing wrong with this story.

Another actually turned teammates' names red--just like enemies.

This bug exists in the 1.0 release and is not due to the patch. I've seen it myself prior to the patch being released. It appears to be random and isn't persistant -- once you die (or the teammate dies) their name may be back to normal.

The game became unplayable because of the patch.

And yet it plays just fine on my PC (Ath64 3000, 1 GB, GF6800 GT). I slightly prefer the 1.01 patch to 1.0 because the server browser is slightly better. The other issues it alleged to resolve were never problems for me, and the memory leak hasn't been a huge issue either (close the game and the client side leak is gone; the servers still suffer, but I haven't had severe problems except for the first day of the patch).

Tycho at Penny-Arcade discussed the issue in his latest news update.

Actually last Friday's news update, no longer the latest one. And most of what he wrote he got wrong too. Excepting the memory leak every issue he listed was in the 1.0 release -- medic revive issues (which are mostly user error and/or a misunderstanding of how things work), the server browser problems (were much, much worse for me in 1.0 than 1.01), etc.

Hopefully this won't get /.'d, but BattleWiki has a lot of good info, not only on how to play but also on known bugs.

Meanwhile, some sites are still offering the 1.01 patch for download on their front pages, only adding to the confusion.

Which isn't really EA/Dice's fault, but those sites.

When are game companies going to learn? Quality assurance and play-testing should not be an afterthought!

Agreed here, but come on. What did you expect? BF1942 and BF:V were buggy as hell when they were released too. The demo was buggy (although perhaps less buggy with respect to netcode at least) too. That the release was going to be buggy was hardly a surprise to anyone who'd been following the game.