BF2S Forums EA has so much to learn from Valve and Steam

That and no blood in the games. . . WHAT WERE THEY THINKING!?

Today I opened up steam to play some good old CS for a bit, see if I still had it. Immediatelly an update started on the game, full with progress and estimated time to completion. Steam updates take like 2-5 mins, taking the longest only when they release a new map... so far, two 300mb patches for BF2... I hear ya man, steam is great.

like my opinion is use the way they do it about u have an main account name and u could change ur game name at ur will

I think we can all aggree that Valve and Epic are better in many many things than EA/DICE. We could on and on about features and everything. Bottom line is that Battlefield 2 is great to play even though it has crappy bugs and interface. Just don't understand how they can put so much effort into the game design and yet completely ignore the front end. It's like making a damn good car but the making the outside body look like a rusted piece of shit. Makes no sense to me.

why do you guys keep complaining about the game just play it as it is and stop whinning

GotMex? wrote:

kilroy0097 wrote:

Just don't understand how they can put so much effort into the game design and yet completely ignore the front end. It's like making a damn good car but the making the outside body look like a rusted piece of shit. Makes no sense to me.

Actually, it's like making a beautiful car with amazing stylish lines, but making the engine and all the inner stuff suck balls.

Actually, Kill is more "right". The Engine of BF2 is actually pretty sweet. The game play ROCKS. GETTING to the game play is a MAJOR pain in the ass and a repeatedly painful experience.

The first time I installed the demo I got fucking pissed off and uninstalled the game after I couldn't beat the first level -- you know, the one where you bind your keys? Yeah, it's got a really tough boss.

See, that's funny, because on all the CS posts I read about Valve, people are complaining that they take too long to release updates such as skins or maps. Valve says "Oh, it'll be ready in a couple weeks" but then it's not ready for a couple months. And then people complain that there's still stuff that needs to be fixed but they're concentrating on other less important stuff instead.

Yes, so much to learn, a friends list from steam that hasn't worked in about 2 years, no stats at all created for anything, constant fucking around with games that were great.


I'd say both companies are equal in their ability to screw over paying customers.

Somone's brought up a good a point, in EA's defense, at least they got out BF2 in a decent timeframe. If I recall correctly, half-life 2 had like years and years of delays and false promises, which pissed us all off as gamers. However, when I got HL2, I remember thinking it was one of the best games ever made, and the game play was amazing right down to the little details. Because of that I was able to forgive Pipe for the delays... oops I mean Valve. I wouldn't have minded if EA had taken a bit longer to release BF2 but included a fully functional server browser and less quirky game bugs.

Btw, I've been joining servers lately by finding my friends online at game-monitor and typing the IP address manually. It has come to my attention that if you hit tab to navigate the other fields (port, password), the cursor will switch to the port field but after that, hit tab again and it will jump to the back fields (behind the enter IP box) such as server name, etc, but not switch to password. That is one major usability issue that really shouldn't exist, but hey, we all know the server browser sucks.

I think that BF2 is a good game however there are few things done by other companies that are superior in many ways to EA/DICE's implementation of BF2.

1. Steam is a front end that is similar to the login for Gamespy. You still have to log in and you still have to have an internet connection to play multiplayer. However updates, when they come out, are clearly uploaded and run during this process. This would give DICE the ability to put hotfixes into BF2 that do not require a rather large patch file. This way they can fix bugs on an individual basis and immediately put them into the game upon log in. Also Valve may have released Half Life 2 very late but they made certain it was a working and bug free environment or at least much less bugs. EA/DICE wanted to beat the market and sacrificed quality for quantity in the selling department. Another 3 months would have been a much needed time span to fix many of the issues that were in the game on release. A better Beta team to really eek out all the bugs would have also been a bonus. In hindsight I would have prefered waiting the extra 3 months for a better product over the hardship we all had to face Beta testing the game for them.

2. Blizzards front end for WoW while pretty serves another purpose. In this the patches are released and it opens a Blizzard run bittorrent session in which the patch is then dished out and shared umongst many many players. This prevents putting an abnormal amount of load on the Blizzard Seed server which is one of the number one complaints for patches on BF2 beside them not working correctly. This could also allow DICE to put out patches in large parts like they do now except not have to worry about having the bandwidth to distribute nor having to worry about if everyone got the patch. If you "have" to patch before you play then everyone has the patch and it becomes a part of the login process.

3. Epic, the company that made Unreal Tournament, has a much superior server browser interface. Not only do they have a favorite section but also a buddies section. Their feed is very much faster and the updates on information from servers is almost instantaneous. Also their menu section to set options and audio/video settings is very much faster and better. This comes from cleaner code and also not using a Flash based menu system, which in my opinion is very stupid and hoggs even more computer resources. Give the option of a nice pretty menu or a simple nonfrills menu. Odds are most of us will take the nonfrills menu and it will be much faster.

These are just 3 companies that have proven that their methods in these particular areas are very good and these steps can be taken by any company. Simple things such as front ends that force patches, bitttorrent or share type programs to share the load of downloads and a better menu interface are not copyrighted things. These are basic programing functions that can be done by any company with the knowledge of how to do it. They are quickly becoming mandatory for all modern games and there really is no excuse to concentrate on only game content and completely ignore the front end user interface. It is as much a part of the gaming experience as the game itself.

These are my points and thanks for reading.

Cheers.

Last edited by kilroy0097 (2005-12-04 20:32:48)

Here's a thought, for those of you saying that Battlefield 2 got out on a decent timeframe:
Yeah. That's because EA knows how to make money. They put out the game, no matter how incomplete it may be, and make a quick buck. EXCEPT, unlike the now defunct Interplay, they actually set reasonable deadlines for the developers, so the product is always somewhere between absolute crap and the best thing ever created, period.

Which, despite the delays, you have to admit, Half-Life 2 was an amazingly beautiful and complex game.

The shitty frontend is a cause for concern in BF2, but it's not entirely too bad. It's reminicent of the original Counter-Strike/Half-Life server request-style frontends, and perhaps it's just a matter of choice. The fact that the patches are humongous every time IS a problem, and the lack of an automated updater included with the game is somewhat annoying.

However, that's not to say Steam is better. I've been playing CS since beta 5 and I can honestly say I prefer the old connection method. The friend's list never works, Steam's verification process is ridiculously slow on 56k connections or limited bandwidth connections (like campus servers, which limit most traffic except normal HTML and FTP traffic).

That's not to say Steam is without its benefits. It severely limits cheaters and really limits pirating (to the detriment of some, I suppose), but not having to deal with hackers all the time is pretty nice. And the fact that HL2 was released with very few bugs in the game itself once you got Steam to work (I'm not talking about Steam now, the verification system, as I said, doesn't work at times or is just intensely slow) is pretty impressive. And the auto-update is nice, I don't have to actually go check if a new patch has been released. (Yes, I realize now BF2 has a news system, but it didn't before)

On the other hand, I couldn't get Battlefield 2 to stop hard-rebooting my PC till a patch came out for it... so, yeah... I think Valve did a pretty good job there.

Someone mentioned UT. UT was fast, and it had hardly any problems. If you want a simple system, there you go.

I won't go into Blizzard's systems, since I worked at a Blizz fan site for near five years (some of our staff members went on to eventually work for Blizzard itself), and I am far too opinionated there.