Battlefield 3‘s well hyped release has been plagued by severe issues with the PC multiplayer portion of the game.
Battlefield 3 players across the world are expressing their frustration today as the newest member of the Battlefield franchise suffers from a slew of release issues with it’s PC multiplayer game. Among the problems reported are severe lag, crashes at launch and at the end of rounds, rubber-banding, and being continuously kicked due to punkbuster issues. Many are unable to play the multiplayer game at all. To add insult to injury, today it was found that Origin, the non-optional third-party utility you are required to install to play BF3, reported it was having problems activating product keys, so new players could not activate their brand new game and thus were unable to play. 588 pages of responses to that issue shows the sort of reaction EA and DICE are getting to the post-release BF3 problems.
Here’s an example of the disconnect issue
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdnkAISCvkQ&feature=related
However DICE appear to have acknowledged the issues and are working to resolve them. On their twitter feed a DICE team member confirmed this by responding to inquiries with “We appreciate your support and understanding! We are working hard to resolve the issues users are experiencing.” and “Sorry no ETA, but we’re looking into it and will update you all when we get more info. Thanks for your patience and understanding!” The reiteration of the “thanks for understanding” comments are telling.
Hopefully the Battlefield community will see a patch soon, with Senior Designer Fredrik Thylander making reference to patch-code in his post on twitter by saying “It’s the day after release here, so i do not for the life of me have a schedule, but the fix has gone in to the patch-code.”
This whole debarcle is a major embarrassment to EA, and not the sort of launch they would have been hoping for in their own battle with the Modern Warfare franchise. Especially after CEO John Riccitiello bragged about how well the game stacks up : “But head-to-head with Call of Duty in Q3, we have the superior game engine, a superior development studio, and a flat out superior game.”
If only they had the superior quality control to go with it.
In the meantime, several fixes have been found by the community for some of the problems affecting BF3’s multiplayer. I include links here to the forum posts below. Please be aware these are not fixing everyones problems, but they are helping many so they just may help you. One of them certainly fixed the punkbuster disconnect problem that I had. If you know of other possible fixes for any other issues then please leave a comment below.
PUNKBUSTER DISCONNECT ISSUES
GAME NOT LAUNCHING
GAME CRASHING
Crash problem possible workaround
MSVCR100.DLL ERROR
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The PS3 version isn’t exactly that great either. Really looks like a case of flash over substance.