America's Army 3 Has Rough Launch, Development Team Canned

incognito84 writes "The development team responsible for the creation of the freeware game America's Army 3 has been canned, days after the launch of the highly flawed game, which was distributed mostly via Steam. 'The anonymous America's Army 3 developers in touch with Kotaku unsurprisingly didn't sound too pleased with the current situation, venting that "a lot of good people [worked] insanely long hours on this game that was butchered by outside sources.' The game's launch was plagued by massive server authentication issues which inhibited most players from playing it even two days afterward. One of the developers made a post on the official forums saying they were 'effectively stabbed in the back,' and that much of the funding was filtered to the bureaucracy. A patch has been released to address some of the game's issues."

Comments

Abysmal builds

[Stray1]

As a member of the beta team , I can tell you everyone was pretty damn concerned about the state of the game so close to its release.

It was obvious SOMETHING was wrong given the alpha state of the builds they were giving us.

As it is, you load, hit a button and crash, repeat. I tried to withhold my judgement until they released into open beta, but its just horrible.

Re:How Ironic

[Shadow of Eternity]

Lets put it this way: the worst and most common insult in AA was to call someone an "Obj nub", which stands for "Objective nub".

The honor system heavily favored deathmatching and just plain surviving a round despite your team losing to the point that the easiest way to be successful in the game was to just run off and camp somewhere and try to get a few kills before the timer ran out.

It didnt help that there were literally no controls on honor servers. They could and often did have all sorts of wierd mods running on them.

Re:It's not quite that bad . . .

[Ihmhi]

I had the authentication problem yesterday for just a couple of hours, the real problem is that everything else is bugged, I've completed one of the training mission with full score, yet at the end it says that I failed it completely,

That's a problem with the auth server. After you complete training, the game needs to successfully communicate with the auth server to update your stats. If it can't, it automatically defaults to "YOU ARE A NO GO!". This in an of itself was a mistake on the devs part IMO; they should have had a message encoded in which said "Unable to communicate with Authentication Server" or something so people didn't think that they failed training.

Moreover, every time you restart training, you have to sit and listen to the same diatribe by the D.I. This is not necessarily so bad for some things (where the speech is like a minute and a half long), but I feel really bad for the people who didn't get CLS (Combat Life-Saving) done the first time. You actually have to sit through a video and like a ten-minute lecture on how to properly administer first aid. Thankfully, the pass went through on my first try.

I've tried to play online but after joining a server and choosing side, I couldn't choose any class, so I changed server and it was even worse nobody could choose any side, so I changed again and with all other servers after the loading screen it sent me back to the menu. I tried again the next day, I choose a server with a ping of 32ms yet it was lagging like hell and I even spawned without a weapon, I had to find a dead body to steal his

You got further than me.

Even though I've completed Basic (qualifying on most stuff with Expert, otherwise Proficient), I can't actually join any games. Last night I was in a game where there was literally *one* guy playing and 23 people sitting in spec because they flat-out couldn't get in.

Again, it seems to be some kind of problem on the AA server's end, because more than a few people have set up LAN servers and you can play on there just fine.