I'd like to post about my experience with the Battlefield 2142 beta demo. I am an avid fan of team based fps's like Battlefield 2, Wolfenstein Enemy Territory, and to some extent, Unreal Tournament 2004, so naturally I was eager to check out BF2142.
So just this last week, EA released 10,000 keys for the beta program and I was lucky to snab one. I downloaded the 1.5 or so gigabyte file from Gamearena, and I was off to install.
I double clicked on the install file and.... nothing happened. After waiting a few seconds, I did what came naturally next, I clicked the file again. Again, nothing. So after clicking a third time, and not receiving any responses, I noticed that my HD was thrashing pretty crazily at this point. Windows task manager showed three instances of the BF2142 file doing something, so I tried to close them down, except the last one wouldn't and since it wasn't responding anyway, I shutdown the computer and restarted.
Upon booting up again, I tried the file again, and waited. And waited. Then I went off to do some browsing, and after approximately 20 minutes (when I had forgotten about the darn thing), it brought up the BF2142 graphic and the program was ready to install. o_O Ok, no worries, off to install then!
After registering an account, I was off to join a multiplayer map and finally check out the fuss with the titans and the loose mission objective, a huge change from the flag hopping nature of the Battlefield series.
So after a really long load, and when the game doesn't really start, I start to become restless. I try to click the button to start the game, and get no response. I click some more, and then the game crashes to the desktop, but not without providing some vague critical error message.
So I start BF2142 again, join a multiplayer map and wait. Then I remember one of the major pains with Battlefield 2, which is that after waiting for a map to load, the wait is by no means over as the game verifies game data. This takes almost as long as loading the map, which itself is a pretty long wait. In Battlefield 2, it at least tells you that it's verifying game data, so you know that you'll have to wait until it's done. In the BF2142 beta, after the map loads and the progress bar completes, it doesn't tell you anything further, so you're left puzzled as to what the game is doing at this point after a while.
Ok, so I'm finally in the game, I choose my spawn point, which happens to be on top of a Titan, and I jump in one of the air vehicles. I make my descent below, and after a mere few seconds, the game crashes to the desktop.
So I try the game again, and after the usual wait of logging in, loading, and verifying, I'm back in the game. This time I'm at another spawn point which is on ground level. I jump into the closest snazzy vehicle to head off to god knows where, and then.... the game crashes to the desktop.
Loaded up the game again, once I got in, I decide to run off on foot. I needed to check where I was in the map, so I brought up the map, and then.. the game crashes to the desktop.
I decide to give the game one more shot. This time, I thought, I could avoid any crashes by simply running on foot. To anywhere at all. My plan was to not bring up the map and not enter any vehicle whatsoever. This way, I could at least try and see more of this game. I run off into some hillside where nothing much was happening, and after a while I decide to shoot my pistol when.... yep, you guessed it, the game crashed to the desktop.
I rebooted my computer, started the game again, ran off somewhere for a bit, hit the jump button spontaneously at one point, and the game crashed.
So, that's my indepth writeup of my Battlefield 2142 beta experience, I hope you enjoyed it [:)]
It actually is near release of the game, with the launch date just a month away (October 10). I must have an unlucky hardware configuration of a typical Dell tower with an ATI gfx card [:(]. Battlefield 2 was pretty buggy as well (it used to frequently crash to the desktop for me when I clicked join game. They fixed it in the latest 1.4 patch - the bug appeared after the 1.3 patch).
I know I shouldn't be using Epic Games as a shining example of good, robust and reliable coding, but at the very least their games were very stable for me. And with the odd crash here and there, the game would at least bring up an error log that has a tonne of relevant information for the developers, and it's easily sent off to their mail form on their site. It's something DICE should have implemented. With BF2142, I get a crash to the desktop, and I'm not sure how useful my feedback would be if I posted "Game always crashes when I do stuff" [:(]
Oh man.. i was really hoping i wouldnt see that trend over and over again with BF2142. I remeber when i patched special forces when i got that the patch executable seemingly died all the time, locking up for 10-15 minutes. It took hours to complete. And all the mess with the stupid login system that just timed out and died more often then not, the clumsy server browser and the occasional CTD when having just loaded the map. These days i turn the TV on when im booting up battlefield 2, cause i expect about a 1/2 hour or so before im playing. The game itself can be so much fun but by god how many people left in fury after all the patch issues of BF2, youd think/hope theyd be trying their best to overcome that with the next release.
So, quake wars it is then?
I'd like to add that I downloaded the final public demo release of BF2142, and unfortunately the game still crashes to the desktop within a couple of minutes of playing the game. I wasn't planning to buy the game anyway, but I was pretty curious on the new game mode. Unfortunately, I don't think I've been able to do more than run a few metres before the game crashes.
betas aren?t the end of the world if it's a "sir-crash-a-lot" game. with possibly tens of thousands of hardware configurations what crashes on your computer works like a dream on someone else?s.
When you're getting to near-release of the game. Then you gotta start to question the solidity of the programming [though with the horror stories that come form EAs core projects I?m not surprised if the code is compromised in areas.]
Make sure to direct your findings to EA..they might just ignore it but you never know...