Battlefield 3 -- the buggiest piece of crap I've ever played (not a CoD fanboy)

[Owyn_Merrilin]

Now, first and foremost, I love the Battlefield series. Battlefield 2 is one of my favorite multiplayer shooters of all time, and I had really high hopes for BF3. Unfortunately, the beta is so buggy that I don't know why they ever moved past the pre-alpha phase. There's a laundry list of bugs, which anyone can find on the bug report forum, but the absolute worst one has to be the invisible player model bug. It makes all of the player models go invisible -- you (including your gun and iron sights) your allies, and your enemies. For obvious reasons, this makes the game literally unplayable. And I get it every time I log into the game. From what I can tell, this is an AMD specific bug; Nvidia users aren't reporting it.

Now, what little I can see of the gameplay is promising. I don't like some of the design choices (no commander, medic and assault merged, engineer and anti-tank merged, spec ops removed entirely, four person squads...) but the graphics are some of the best I've ever seen, even on the lowest settings and at a resolution that hasn't been impressive since about 1994, and the actual gameplay seems to be at least decent. Too bad I can't properly test it; I'm seriously concerned that it's this buggy this close to release. They aren't going to have time to fix a lot of this stuff before it goes gold.

Edit: Oh, by the way, the engine scales quite nicely. My graphics card is way under spec, and I can still just barely get a playable framerate. I would think that was what was causing my bugs, if it weren't for the fact that people with cards well over the recommended specs weren't reporting the same bug.

 

[EvanJO]

Every single BF game has been amazingly buggy. BF2 was built upon quite possibly the worst engine known to man and somehow still managed to garner immense support.

Although really, I've ran into surprisingly few bugs in the few hours I've played. Only one that really got me was when some guys animations glitched out and he was slithering at me like a snake, and even then I only died because I was frantically smashing my record key.

 

[Zeema]

ive never ran into alot of bugs instead of not being able to place my 'T.U.G.S' or 'Radio Beacon'. But it is still a beta so bugs are expected

 

[Scizophrenic Llama]

The only bug I ran into that is severely broken is the sinking into the map stuff, especially when people do it purposely to get easy kills.

Aside from that everything else is fairly miniscule and I expect can be fixed pretty easily. Then again I'm just hoping so because I thoroughly enjoyed my time playing the beta.

 

[Matrixbeast]

The only gamebreaking bug I'm running into is losing the ability to aim down my sights.
And it's not even all that devastating (Except when it occurs when I'm sniping. Then it gets to be a problem).

Also I should note that I'm playing on consoles.

 

[Canus]

You should report these bugs. That's the point of a beta. To find the bugs. It isn't a preview, it's getting the game onto as many different computers as possible to see what video cards glitch, which processors overheat, what antivirus conflicts with it, for example.

 

[Vardermir]

don't feel too bad, when I try to play on my desktop no matter what server I connect to, regardless of the reported ping, the game responds about a second after any input. On my laptop I get the same error you get, but I have an nvidia 9600m, not an ATI card. On either computer, I'm screwed :-(

 

[AJax_21]

After playing 2 hours of the beta, I recommend waiting a month or two before jumping in. I love DICE and their games but they are always, always buggy as shit on release.

As for gameplay, it's fine. Metro is the worst possible map to represent BF3. They should've went with Caspian because that looks phenomenal.

 

[Hummmy]

How do people not understand that this is a beta?
There was always going to be bugs in it.

Just report the ones you find and they'll hopefully be fixed in the final release.

 

[Mace Tulio]

There's a pretty significant difference between an open beta and a demo, it you're worried about bugs, don't play the beta, wait for a demo.

 

[gideonkain]

Wait a minute, there are bugs in a beta?! Well that's it I'm done breathing.

 

[Canus]

They probably have a bunch of fixes stored up. It's much easier to patch 100 bugs at once, once a month than to release a new patch every day as they stick band-aids on the code.

 

[Owyn_Merrilin]

You should report these bugs. That's the point of a beta. To find the bugs. It isn't a preview, it's getting the game onto as many different computers as possible to see what video cards glitch, which processors overheat, what antivirus conflicts with it, for example.

Oh trust me, I have -- I listed my specs and everything. I'm actually kind of annoyed, because there are other bugs I could be giving them data on, but this one is so bad it's getting in the way of my finding them.

There's a pretty significant difference between an open beta and a demo, it you're worried about bugs, don't play the beta, wait for a demo.

Wait a minute, there are bugs in a beta?! Well that's it I'm done breathing.

How do people not understand that this is a beta?
There was always going to be bugs in it.

Just report the ones you find and they'll hopefully be fixed in the final release.

To all of you: There are the kind of bugs you expect in a beta, and then there are major engine problems that should have been fixed during the pre-alpha. What I'm experiencing is one of the latter. It should have been fixed before entering the alpha phase, and to have something like that get through the alpha and actually into the beta is inexcusable. Considering that the game is due out in a month, and will likely go gold at least a couple of weeks before that, it's a bit much to expect everything -- or even just all of the major things -- to be fixed in that amount of time. If I were the kind of person to buy a game on launch, I would wait on this one until a couple of patches had been released.

Edit:

There's a pretty significant difference between an open beta and a demo, it you're worried about bugs, don't play the beta, wait for a demo.

i don' tunderstand why you would assume the two are mutually exclusive. They released this 'beta' (if that is what it is, seems retarded to have a beta a month before release) to demonstrate the game.

This too. If they wanted a real beta test, they would have started the closed beta at least a month or two ago, with the open beta following a few weeks later. For years now, "Open Beta" has been code for "limited time demo," instead of, you know, "open beta." It just gives a convenient excuse to axe the demo as soon as the game goes gold.

 

[Owyn_Merrilin]

After playing 2 hours of the beta, I recommend waiting a month or two before jumping in. I love DICE and their games but they are always, always buggy as shit on release.

As for gameplay, it's fine. Metro is the worst possible map to represent BF3. They should've went with Caspian because that looks phenomenal.

I've actually played it (the passwords are getting leaked almost as soon as they're released), and I have to say, it's a lot of fun. My biggest complaint, in all honesty, is that the map is hard to read, whether it's minimized or maximized. BF2 did it better, with what was supposed to look like a satellite feed of the area; in BF3, it's this weird green outline without anything to represent the terrain, and it's almost impossible to read.

 

[LookingGlass]

If it's buggy when it's a released product that you've paid for... sure, complain away. But really, I don't think it's fair to complain about a (free) beta... ever.

They're doing you a favour by letting you play an unfinished version of their game. You're doing them a favour by helping them do load tests and find bugs. Everybody wins. If it's not fun, you don't need to play anymore.

But yeah, if the same issues are present in the final product then you'd have the right to be disappointed and not buy it.

 

[Aragatory]

When will people stop complaining about bugs in beta. It's endlessly frustrating. Do you not know what a beta is for? Everytime a game does beta testing people whine about it being buggy. Ofcourse it's fucking buggy, it's still in beta. It's not a demo. /rant

 

[Owyn_Merrilin]

If it's buggy when it's a released product that you've paid for... sure, complain away. But really, I don't think it's fair to complain about a (free) beta... ever.

They're doing you a favour by letting you play an unfinished version of their game. You're doing them a favour by helping them do load tests and find bugs. Everybody wins. If it's not fun, you don't need to play anymore.

But yeah, if the same issues are present in the final product then you'd have the right to be disappointed and not buy it.

Au contrair; complaints are exactly what they want. It is a beta after all. What really worries me is how close this thing is to release; you should see the lists of reported bugs that the users have been compiling. It's insanely long, and a good quarter or more of them are game breaking to one degree or another. Unfortunately, the ones that are going to be easy to fix are not the ones that break the game, and I just don't see it being ready in time for launch. Best case scenario, there's a day one patch.

 

[StANDY1338]

Falling through the map occurs way too often and sometimes there are probublems with hit recognition mostly while sniping which is strange.