Battlefield 3

Battlefield 3 is a fucking disgrace and a monument to everything fucked up about gaming in 2011.

So let’s start this by talking about the user experience. You load up Origin, EA’s malvolent store slash game launcher client thing that is not Steam and it has some validation thing that takes way too long. Then you click on Battlefield 3 and it runs another validation thing to make sure you don’t live in the future; once it confirms that you don’t, you can load the game. Except that Battlefield then doesn’t load the game – instead it opts to fire up your web browser and takes you to a website EA calls the Battlelog, some people have called it Facebook For Murderers, others ‘one of the worst ideas in video game history’. Your web browser will be as unprepared as you for Battlelog, forcing you to install two plugins for your web browser to continue. Now so far in this review I’ve talked about what you do when you first play Battlefield 3; I’m going to talk about what I did for a moment: At this point in the process I turned to my one, solitary friend on Origin, who was playing Battlefield 3 at the time, and complained about the validation shit. I said, “all I want to do is shoot cunts!” He laughed and responded with “I hope you like dying.” Now at the time I thought this was just him shit-talking my gaming skills, but in reality it was an ominous warning of what was to come. Battlefield 3 is a game about dying. Continue reading “Battlefield 3” →

The Hype War

Hours ago, war broke out across the North American continent – no platform was spared as Electronic Arts invaded, attempting to seize all Activision strongholds on the continent. As we speak, more EA forces are mobilising off the east coast of Australia and there are reports of the EA navy circling Europe from the North Sea to the Black Sea, preparing for an invasion before the week is out. This is of course the Great Gaming War of 2011 and just as the poster above depicts, your kids will ask you about what role you played in this pivotal moment in history.

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Two ways to do a content subscription service

Those of you who’ve been paying careful attention to Electronic Arts, and really you have no excuse not to, would know they’re pretty interested in this whole internet thing and how it could be leveraged to provide a constant revenue stream from increasingly dependent consumers. They’ve been pulling their games from Steam and relaunched Origin, the developer of Ultima they purchased a decade ago, as a digital distribution client, the only place to buy new multi million dollar MMO: Star Wars: The Old Republic. And then they ruined my birthday by announcing a subscription service to their sports games.

Now here’s what EA are planning to do.

The privilege of downloading their sports games a few days before EB Games put it on display and slap pre-owned stickers on last year’s edition.
Discounts on downloadable content, including on disc DLC.
Permission to use that purchased content on future roster updates.
Stats recorded on a webpage that you can browse with your internet communication gizmo.
A little badge so everyone knows you’re an idiot paying for the above.

I know right, some sort of joke. The very fact that EA’s offering, if I can indulge you and call it that, can be summarised down to five bulletpoints shows you everything wrong with their approach. You can’t summarise Xbox Live or Steam in 5 dot points and you shouldn’t be able to summarise EA’s either. If EA want to charge a subscription then they have to at least be on that level, offer a service of their own on the scale of Xbox Live. They’re a big company and their sport games cater to a big market – they can do it. God knows they want to do it but they’re too cowardly to try. The next few paragraphs I’m going to envision how they should run a subscription service that fosters the kind of sycophantic devotees, who’ll maintain their subscriptions indefinitely.

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