Once upon a time a gamer would be able to go to their favourite games store, to buy the games of their gaming desires and play a game that was a game they wanted. That game would be exactly as was promised, excellent, fulfilling, a master piece in the eyes of the faithful customer that it appealed to.

Unfortunately "once upon a time" is a phrase usually reserved for fairy tales, and sadly for us gamers, the likelihood of a game being complete when we purchase it, might as well be compared to the frequency we encounter wolves who can talk and have a fetish for following little girls dressed in red.
Many of us know a game, I bet you've already had one come to mind, where we snapped open the box, thrust the game into our disk drives sweating with excitement only to realise we were playing a game that had been kicked out of the door quicker than shit flies from a shovel.

It's about time games were complete when they separate us from our hard earned and hopeful cash, instead of being like the new experience of Battlefield which on occasion lives up to DICE's choice of name "Bad Company".
Indeed they are a bad company, a company which without reservation or sympathy has unleashed upon it's customers a game with such amazing graphics, amazing sound and promising game-play, only to take a dump upon it from such a massive height as to not only ruin it before it got off the ground but bury it in a crater akin to those artillery makes in the game.

The gripes many of its players have are extensive and multiple, with the usual suspects tossed in such as lag, bad hit detection, a ridiculous party mode and faulty game mechanics. But the real kicker is that this will all be fixed at a later date, with patches, new game modes, promised fixes and updates full of things the gamers want such as private rooms, bigger squads and improved servers.

For example, my experience thus far of BF:BC has been one of mixed enthusiasm, packed with moments of awesomeness such as walls exploding, tank shells and bullets whizzing overhead, but all of that is often ruined because the game is interspersed with horrific examples of bad design such as my shots seeming to be in-effective, terrible lag and horrible features. You may be wondering if I am simply bad at the game, my answer would be possibly, but it is also possible that the game is just bad. Ask yourself this, when you shoot someone with something close to 50 bullets in the chest, yet they continue to run directly at you and thrust a knife into your screaming mouth, what is wrong with that situation? When you are shooting at someone and they suddenly teleport 20 feet to the other side of a field, is that my fault? I think you'll realise the answer to both of these is quite obvious.
That is the problem with this game, it promised so much and at first it seems to deliver, it is entertaining, shockingly realistic at times, but you are often taken out of the immersion and your experienced tarnished because of the inability for DICE/EA to publish a game which is appropriately completed.

The question is "Why?", why were these things not included from the very beginning? Why didn't DICE realise that many of these things are staple to what is expected from FPS games? Why did I eat so much at dinner time?
So here commenceth the vitriolic rambling. We are quickly becoming the beta testers for games, QA and testing is obviously quite an expensive endeavour for companies to get involved in, so logically, why would they pay for something they can get for free? Instead they are pushing these games out to the early adopters who will pre-order and purchase on release day knowing that they will play excessively while costing nothing to the companies that created them, in order to quickly discover the problems and then spend the minimum amount of time fixing it for those that take time to buy their products. After all, they've already got our money (the game fanatics), so our opinions whilst being worthless, are also helpful to them so they can fix the game for the casual gamers that come after.

There are multiple reasons companies release their games without properly polishing them, promised release dates, financial reasons or wanting to cash in during a certain fiscal quarter. But they know we will buy these games anyway, no matter how annoying and frustrating they may be to us. But the companies need to realise that people will prefer to splash out on games they know are pristine and perfect, exactly as promised instead of being forced to wait for patch's and their inherent laziness to catch up with the investment we make by buying them. I actually find the games introduction quite apt;


What DICE/EA is doing with your money.

Now I'm not suggesting that DICE is for one minute a soul grinding, faceless hate machine, but in actual fact they are just a bunch of people with wives, children and friends who also have a passion for gaming, trying to make a product, but they need to understand what is and is not acceptable from something which many people spend a small fortune on.

You may exclaim; "What can I do about this you penis? I want these games! I don't have any control over the companies!?"
Correct, we want these games, we want them to work, we expect all of that and we certainly don't have any say in what they do, but what we can do is make our voices heard, post in their official forums, write to them, inundate them with complaints until they realise that they should supply us with what we pay for.
Whilst this may be unrealistic and ultimately a moot point, at least it will make you feel like you are getting something done, but if they get enough evidence that there is a problem it could help fix the problem.

With this in mind I've sent this write up to the PR managers at DICE and EA to see what response I might get.

Stay tuned and stay gorgeous Destructoid.

Andy H.