I think the Score should reflect the game AS IS.

When the game reaches its potential or whatever, then amend the score to reflect it.
Don't give a score for something that hasn't happened yet, it may not happen.

From what I hear 9/10 is not worth the score for this game in its current state. Generous scores like these make me less confident to trust in Steve's scores and in Ausgamers overall.

No disagreement trog, experience suggests waiting.
I wholeheartedly support the idea of whinging and bitching when a game is broken though, because you haven't got what you paid for and it encourages timely patches. Accepting it as 'par for the course these days with most new releases' as Calsy said lets folks in the wrong off the hook.

I think the Score should reflect the game AS IS

Just because they picked it up first day, tried to play multiplayer like a billion other people that day and it didnt work they want to run around crying.

Well pretty much every other PC game I've purchased has played just fine online on day one. If they have the brains to release a dedicated server, then there shouldn't be an issue. DICE and EA totally went balls up with the launch, and even now, it's hard to find servers. I don't know about you, but I expect to get what I paid for.

In this case I think Steve's score is based more on the potential of the game

Trog. I review should be on "what has been delivered" not the potential. Otherwise, its pure speculation. People make purchased based on reviews and we will NEVER see game companies deliver good quality off the bat with s*** reviews like this singing their praises when they HAVE NOT YET DELIVERED the correctly working product.

Steve, review what has been delivered FFS. Help the gaming community, not the $$$ hungry multinational game companies happy to deliver faulty products. f*** me, please have some balls and give what has been delivered a 7 or remove your review until such a time that a patch has been released and lets see what it actually delivers.

/rant, for now.

last edited by E.T. at 18:22:08 16/Mar/10

month after release??? its been 2 weeks tops since the game came out.

Yes and q3,TF1 & 2,CS,HL,UT etc etc. were all completely flawless straight out of the box, damn none of them ever needed a patch and they worked fine on everybodies PC a week after release. I have never had to bust my arse trying to get those games working for multiplayer.

I dont know this must be some crazy lalla land seriously. ITS BEEN 2 WEEKS SINCE RELEASE.

Ill just feel sorry for you when people are still playing this game couple of years from now and your response to not playing it will be 'ohh didnt work in the first week it came out so I shelved it'.

That aint PC.

Am I correct in saying the first was not on PC?

Speculation??? the multiplayer is there its not missing.

Do you know how reviews work ET? I mean here you have a game that will be played for the couple of years from now and you have a week to make a judgement call.

You cant hold off on the review, you have deadlines to meet much like the people who made the game in the first place.

I for one whole heartedly agree with the review and think people will be well worth investing the $89 for the months of multiplayer action they will receive.

If you cant see the potential, then why did you even buy the game?

ET, I see your point completely. I personally would have scored it much lower for the reasons you defined. I have talked to Steve about this extensively because I want to be sure we're scoring games appropriately - I believe games should be scored on the out-of-the-box basis that you've described, generally.

At the end of the day though, Steve didn't experience any crippling problems when playing the game. Many users haven't either - if you're a casual gamer that doesn't give a crap about renting servers, playing on specific servers with friends, etc, it's possible you can just fire up the game, play, have a great time, and then call it a day.

To mitigate this problem somewhat though we're in the process of revamping our review process to try to make sure 'genre specialists' are the ones that are reviewing each game. For example, I know that our score for this review doesn't have a lot of value to me, because I'm thoroughly aware of the problems on the game back-end that would seriously impact me (as a hardcore FPS gamer). I want to know that when I read a review, it's written by someone who is obsessive about s*** like that as I am.

At the end of the day though - if a game comes out and is really freakin' awesome fun to play, even if there are a few obstacles to playing, we're more likely to score it high.

The other problem ET though is that it sounds like you just went out and bought the game immediately anyway without waiting to read our review! I'm not sure if you did that on the basis of the beta or other reviews or what, so it probably wouldn't have made any difference what we said.

This is my big goal for our reviews - to distill down all the reams of description, screenshots, videos, thoughts, and ideas that come out as a result of the review process into either one of two bits of information: buy the game, or don't buy the game. Because at the end of the day, I feel that this is the only reason to read reviews. Our BC2 review clearly says "buy the game", and - while it might not be perfect right now - I'm pretty confident in thinking it is a game that most hardcore PC gamers are going to want to own.

Compromise? If they haven't fixed the game in a couple weeks I swear before Zeus and Bacchus that we will revise our review.

2 weeks/4 it's f***ing irrelevant.
the core multiplayer mechanics should work OUT OF THE BOX
they didn't, did they?
and before you start with the "gee too bad for you when its patched" s***, I play this game and love it. I just hate its s***ty server browser and connection issues, wich, once again should worked out of the box. Didn't have to be awesome,just had to have it working.

Yea, I rage up at this game every time I play it for its faults, but it's still worthy of a 9.0 in my books, I as most people expected it to be a little buggy, ok maybe a little less buggy but still I know that they are actively working on patches as quick as they can. The overall gameplay is still fun as long as your not getting spawn sniped.

Calsy, your fanboy logic hurts my head. I was going to try and post a reply here, but every time I try and make sense of your argument my brain goes into meltdown. I think you're trying to say its ok (or in fact, good) for PC game developers to ship broken games, and that we should all be thankful for it and happily pay $90 for it based on some speculative, fantasy idea that "Oh, but one day it'll be awesome!" And apparently complaining about any of this is tantamount to declaring your hatred for PC gaming in general?

Yep, there it goes, brain meltdown.

I just hate its s***ty server browser and connection issues, wich, once again should worked out of the box.

A lot of this stuff was exposed in the beta though. If you're paying attention to back-end details (which unless you're me and a handful of other really hardcore nerds with too much spare time to think about things like this instead of just shutting up and playing games), then you would have noticed that it doesn't have any good mechanisms for joining servers from outside of the game (means no good support for things like ServerQuery/The Arena/Xfire etc).

There's lots of little things that they could have done that, I feel, would have completely and utterly mitigated the problem. I'm reading the BC2 server mailing list so I know what is going on and why its broken, and (I can't talk about details because of non-disclosure agreements) I think their problems would have been pretty embarrassingly trivial to solve if they'd followed a few of the lessons of some FPS forefathers.

I think you're trying to say its ok (or in fact, good) for PC game developers to ship broken games, and that we should all be thankful for it and happily pay $90 for it based on some speculative, fantasy idea that "Oh, but one day it'll be awesome!"

But THAT IS EXACTLY WHAT EVERYONE DOES!

I have been whining about it for years and trying to tell gamers to be more discriminating!@# But for better or worse, when people buy a game and it sucks at the start but then it gets awesome, people forget what it was like at the start. And when it comes time to buy a new game, all they think is "oh yeh, that game was awesome".

Holy s*** i just got this game today, yep, agreed on the server browser front. f***ing woeful.
How do i play? I cant even add Gamearena servers to my favorites, it just sits there "waiting for data"
and refreshing the whole list takes forever. i cant even refresh an individual server.
I cant believe its been released in this form.

Can servers be refreshed outside the game and connected externally ?

I will disagree with most of the people in this thread. I'd rate the game higher despite the browser issue, I expected it and just worked around like any competent PC user. I've resolved the issue with joystick via the BC2 forum users work around and flown with both good pilots and gunners.

Multiplayer is where all Dice games shine and BC2 is no different. Whilst my own opinion could be discounted my 17yo stepson played over the weekend and said it was "awesome" (about a 9.5 in his rating), he even mentioned some "classical" moments in the game that I've experienced myself. I think that these "classical" moments is what adds to the game, all relate to some form of pure dominance by you and your squad.

To that extent if your problem is browser/master server related, which does require fixing, what have you got to whine about when it is fixed?

wow, look I'm a hardcore FPS fan, I play all my games on the hardest setting and can hold my own in most multiplayer scenarios, it's not that I'm not an expert on shooters, in fact it's one of my most loved styles of game to play. But I reviewed the game on its gameplay merits, of which it has the goods. I barely had any issues playing online multiplayer here, but that's not ignored in my review. The score I gave the game is reflective of gameplay, I agree out of the box it's not a whole game, that's not an argument here, and anyone who actually read the review, will see that I've covered all of the server issues and even pointed people in the direction of any answers they might be seeking as to "why" or "how long", to ensure every aspect of the game is broached in writing. A score is only one part of a review, the other part is the body, and I stand by all the stuff I wrote in the body. I don't agree with scoring it 6 now and then 9 later when all the issues are ironed out - that's just retarded.

At the end of the day there are massive teething problems here, and much of that is due to the overwhelming success of the game on the PC platform, EA were not expecting it to pack a retail punch like this, which means they've had to review their process and attend to fixing it immediately. While the early days are not good as a result, the latter days will likely be even more solid as a result.

I'm not here to review EA or DICE, I'm here to review Battlefield: Bad Company 2, which I did.

On another note, being a games journalist means I don't always have the time to invest entire weekends or evenings on a single game or its multiplayer, because we're always working on something else, this comes through in my, and everyone else's reviews in the industry. I've scoured, and some of the more respected sites I peruse agree with every facet of what I've said and I feel validated that a lot of other players in this thread have had more good games than bad and agree with the body of my review /rant

Fanboy??? Maybe I should be the eternal pessimist who thinks of only the worst and that the game will never get better and that its a 'fantasy' to think they might fix some connection issues, yes Khel that sounds good an all but ill leave that you.

I think you're trying to say its ok (or in fact, good) for PC game developers to ship broken games, and that we should all be thankful for it and happily pay $90 for it based on some speculative, fantasy idea that "Oh, but one day it'll be awesome!"

But THAT IS EXACTLY WHAT EVERYONE DOES!

I have been whining about it for years and trying to tell gamers to be more discriminating!@# But for better or worse, when people buy a game and it sucks at the start but then it gets awesome, people forget what it was like at the start. And when it comes time to buy a new game, all they think is "oh yeh, that game was awesome".

!!!!

At the end of the day there are massive teething problems here

And the problem here is that we could see on the EA web site:
"Ausgamers 9/10!" and ignore the rest of the concerns raised throughout the BFBC2 thread here. If you want to rate the gameplay 9/10, then fine do that, but make that part of your review and not the some total of your summary score. Ie, gameplay 9/10, interface functionality 6/10, overall ?? if you want to be taken seriously Steve, you'll give this some thought without being defensive about it. The argument you have put forward would see Silent Hunter 5 rated perhaps around 8/10 and a lot of people just like me cant even get passed the stuffed DRM to play online. The "game" is a package of the entire product, not just gameplay.

Trog, thanks for your feedback man, appreciated.
Re the review and me purchasing on the basis of it, give me some credit :p I'm happy to make my own decisions, good or bad. My point was that a lot of folks out on the interweb may very well read this review, see the big "9/10" and purchase without reading a lot more into it. Hold the buggers accountable. We want quality delivered from new products FFS. Patches used to indicate extensions to gameplay, not fixes for what should have been delivered in the first place.

I'm going to give my props to Steve for coming here and defending his review, it's nice to see that happen.

I agree with you changing a review at a later date is retarded, and it is definitely deserving of a 9/10 despite its problems.

I'm not saying I agree with devs releasing a game that is full of bugs nor am I saying that I agree with releasing a beta and fixing almost 0 of the bugs that came up in that.

A review should stay the same though and to do that you should take into account every aspect of the game which does include how it will play after bug fixes.

E.T.

So what if the 9/10 shows up on the EA website, the more people that buy this game the better way I see it, I could do with some more nubs to pwn.
It is an awesome game and personally I think you are blowing some of the problems a bit out of proportion.
The game still works and there is nothing really game breaking, and its still fun which is the most important thing.
I'm not saying don't hassle the devs to fix the problems but at least do it somewhere where they are going to read it like the EA BC2 pc forum.

It would be a shame that a good game would get a 5 or 6 because of a few weeks at release but company's shouldn't get the kudos for a s*** heap at release.

L4D2 got the same treatment from Aussie reviewers even though it was an awesome game and quite a quick and easy process to avoid the censored version.

BTW, whats the problem?? The majority of people dont have issues with multiplayer. Steve said himself that he had no issues getting into games and whatever issues are currently being reported presently are being delt with by the DICE team.

Whats the problem here, that it doesnt work for you? should he knock down the score for your sake?

'Take that you heartless multinational corporation, strike one for the little guy, even though i like the game i dont care'.

Ohh btw, you should check out a site called metacritic.com man it will blow your mind. You got plenty of complaining to do though cause not a lot of people actually agree with you.

I have two friends playing regularly, both say the game is very buggy and have had problems with it.

I mean E.T. have you ever read a review in your life??

interface functionality??? that is not a sub group.

It just s***s me when people try to have an opinion on something they have no idea about.

interface functionality??? that is not a sub group.

Unscannable!!!

seriously, wtf? plenty of reviews split their scores out to reflect where a game performs badly. i.e. the single player experience may get 9/10 whereas the multiplayer may get 5/10

hey pricks...! :)

my kids love this...after two (count em) two fukin years on a s***ty wireless connection in our new home Smelstra finally have set me up with an adsl2+ port at last!!

Adam, my eldest is pretty bloody awesome in this game let me tell yas. he plays often as 'somedudewithguns"..i keep telling him to play on GA servers but like other he can't seem to find that many.

might even get 'into' this and show him some old school, quake style fraggin!

:)

omg it's a semi annual post by Psycho!

I feel your pain - dial-up from Jan 2004 through to Jul 2007. It sucks hard!

THIS GAME HAS NO LAN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

when i buy a game that is meant to have such good multiplayer capabilities (as to be expected from any battlefield game) i also expect all of my friends and myslef to be able to get together and LAN!

sorry but, if i were to meet the game devs, i would be saying awesome job, but im not buying cuz it has no LAN.

and they keep saying that they may include LAN into a later release, but thats just not good enough for me.

LAN is dead :( It's pretty sad. But I don't think it's coming back any time soon.

this game kicks the s*** out of mw2

your loss..

when I'm at a lan with m8's, we all jump into a pub server anyway.. or setup our PC's, don't play at all and have a major piss up party..

i dont think lan is dead, we have at least one lan party a month... and we would just jump onto a public server but then we get retarded 12 year olds from the states calling us noobs and saying that we hack just cuz they r loosing. plus most of the time we the only place we can setup doesnt have an internet conection. but really what is better than being able to lean over a table and yell "HEAD SHOT" at a real person! rather than typing it.

I think the PS3 version of this is a 9/10 i think the PC version is a shoddy 6/10 and i got both.

Whilst the writer can say his setup runs it fine theres a lot of people out there that cant and im one of them with:

E6750 C2D OC @ 3.0Ghz
1GB GTX285
4GB DDR2 800

I found the PC version to run terribly slow 25 fps on most maps even on low, no aa or af, and res of 1024x768 improves nothing (my rig kills all other games).

The server browser is useless and looked as if it was hacked up in the week before release (favs dont work, theres no refresh or auto-join), i could never even join a game at all in fact i couldnt play multiplayer for the first 3 days at all. Plus i seem to get no hit registration like the auto server join is putting me on a server in china.

PS3 version, looks fanbloodytastic, plays fanbloodytastic, join almost every single time, great hit registration every time. I love this game on PS3.

Lets not sugar coat this game, this is a console game ported to PC, which is a real shame but its the truth...

It just s***s me when people try to have an opinion on something they have no idea about.

This just had to be quoted, for irony's sake.

I think if half you f*****s had been receiving the "Failed to connect to EA online" message for 2+ weeks, you definitely wouldn't be saying how f***ing glorious this game is.

I am yet to see a single server in my browser, and EA is doing f*** all about it. I have e-mailed them with all the solutions I have tried, and they told me to TRY IT ALL AGAIN. ARE YOU f***ING s***TING ME?










f***

like i said, game works perfectly for me and plenty of others. maybe its time to upgrade or maybe your a giant nub

ET
* N U K E D *
Reason: Abusive


OWNED !!!!!

if your looking for aussie servers
Type in "GameArena" (exactly like its spelt) into search term
Many aussie servers put that into the name even if they arent GA servers

i dont even bother with the favourites list anymore (because it only updates 5 at time anyway!)

Many aussie servers put that into the name even if they arent GA servers

only until we catch them and tell them to stop being a jerk!

But trog, they say Not GameArena! :P

The initial online experience seems to be split. I have had pretty much no issues apart from the odd CTD which is understandable giving buggy software.

A lot of you just sound like a bunch of winging newbs. Just use a bit of tech savvyness and get it to return some results. I agree its buggy but in no way in my opinion should that have stopped the release.

You forget games developers work for a business, a business that wants to make M O N E Y. Yes, that's right money.

Multiplayer. In this department Battlefield: Bad Company 2 delivers intensity in spades with excellent game modes, a solid destruction model, dedicated servers and a tight engine.

Do any servers anywhere give a ping of less than 200? I've not seen anyone with a ping of less than 150-200 even on servers claiming to be hosted on gamearena and even servers claiming to BE game arena servers (I'm with telstra big pond). The server browser will say the ping is about 16, then when I get in game it's more like 160 and to be honest I'm noticing about the same amount of lag in this game from when I pull the trigger to when bullets hit/people die as I do in MW2 so it's really quite sad coming from a dedicated server.

edit:

E6750 C2D OC @ 3.0Ghz
1GB GTX285
4GB DDR2 800

Something is wrong with your PC then because you've got pretty much the same specs as me and I can run it everything on high @ 1920 x 1200 although I turn all the AA and AF down to 1x because seriously who needs AA at that res?

I've got:
E6850 @ 3.3Ghz
GTX285 1Gb
4Gb of geil s*** running at who knows what but CPUz says it's running at 372mhz.

I'm also using 32bit windows because I'm too lazy to migrate to 64bit to take full advantage of all my memory.

Fraps says I get about 62fps whenever I look at it but I tend not to care to look while I'm being shot at or in a firefight but I don't notice any slowdowns most of the time.

You forget games developers work for a business, a business that wants to make M O N E Y. Yes, that's right money.

I remember a time when buggy hardware/software meant customers would stay away from that product for quite some time, seems these days nerdy gamers need their games so badly they're willing to put up with buggy s*** time and time again so long as it gets patched "eventually".

last edited by iWhoop at 19:48:36 30/Mar/10

i dont even bother with the favourites list anymore (because it only updates 5 at time anyway!)

What's with this? Is it a bug with the favorites?

It's easy to find aus servers in bbc2. Just click on server browser, click on the Oceania tab and click search. Hundreds of aus servers should pop up. Works for me. By the way, your internet speed needs to be above 1 Mbit/s to play online.

By the way, your internet speed needs to be above 1 Mbit/s to play online.

i think you will find that is the wrongest thing said anywhere on the internets today

iWhoop, the ingame latency reading is not the same as a server ping. a 100-200 ingame reading is normal.

I get pings of 32 in the server browser, which is about right for most servers that I play on for steam games.

There are various settings.ini (or whatever) tweaks that you can use to make the game feel better, a particular one is renderahead (set it to 1 or 0) and something else that you set to your ping. Google it.

duuuuuuude, I posted that like, 2 months ago. Thread necromancy FTL.

p.s. pings in the browser for GA servers is around 15 :)

Blame the other guy.

I forgot what i posted that caused it to be nooked.

Now i'm curious about what i said in my own post.

:/

LAN is dead :( It's pretty sad. But I don't think it's coming back any time soon.

we've all known for some time that you haven't the time for lanning Dave. still the Qgl crew set an example that many have followed in the hope they they measure up to your standards.

no one in the AG crowd who work for a living talk about their love of gaming. why is that? and who who is this Steve F dude?

Jim pops up occasionally - though I think he has Daddy issues :/