Medal of Incompetence: EA

EA is intent on taking over the games industry with their shitty Origin / Autolog / Social / ShitForBrains account systems and self-contained EA store. So much that they’re shunning platform holders and destroying game experiences in reckless pursuit of this arrogant goal. We already have Xbox Live, PSN accounts and friend codes, so what’s the big deal? Why not just get an EA account too? Firstly, it means logging in TWICE to play a console game. Now let’s take a look at the biggest EA release of the year, Medal of Honor: Warfighter.

There’s already a day 1 patch for this game that “fixes” 100 different things, from menus not working to graphical glitches and numerous crashes. A company that can’t even finish a game before they ship it to stores; wants our credit card info. They want our names and addresses in their database, and they can’t even get a scrolling menu right. Did you think the whole PSN hack was bad? Imagine how insecure EA’s would be. Furthermore, how do you even fuck up a game that plays itself? The video above shows an impressive set-piece where the player just stands there and watches all these amazing things happen. Complete with generic swearing and explosions, it’s everything the market asked for. Here’s a sample of my favourite bugs present in the final game that shipped to retail shelves.

•(PS3 – Japan) Fixed an issue that prevented 17-year old users from playing online.

How does that even happen? 16 and 18 year olds, no problem! Did someone mash the keyboard and somehow type code that only blocked 17 year old Japanese users? The positive here is that EA has no 17 year olds testing their games, at least in Japan. Unless they blocked somebody just to test it, and forgot to unblock them. Whoops.

•Fixed some subtitle lines being cut off.

This wouldn’t really effect the game experience for me; but again, HOW? Text disappearing off the screen would not be a hard thing to miss if they actually played this monstrosity they made. Too busy drooling over their own explosions.

•Fixed a case of an explosion not playing the correct audio.

Oh. They can’t even get their precious explosions right.

•Fixed an issue where a player’s class was changing without their input.

This sounds like fun, actually. Would make an interesting game mode, adapting to your class every few minutes. We can’t have that in an EA game though, it might scare non-players away from this interactive experience.

•Removed hints and tips from the loading screens that were no longer valid.

Oh yeah, sorry guys. These neat things aren’t in the game anymore. Look forward to our DLC!

•Players can no longer join an invitation only party without being invited.

Naming it “invitation only party” doesn’t make it so, EA. You actually have to put the code in and set the rules.

•Cleaned up a number of other small navigation quirks and issues.

This reads like the poor person doing the list just couldn’t be bothered typing any more. Everything is fairly detailed and he just says “Fuck it, lots of other issues, that’ll do. I’m going home to play Call of Duty“.

This is just the first patch. Can EA break the record Codemasters recently set with F1 2012? 6 patches in 2 weeks. The challenge begins!