So Battlefield 2142 is out.  And I don’t own it.  Why?  Check this out:

And that ad (and many others) are updated from online sources when you play.  “Gosh” you think, “that must have cut the price of the game down, right?”  Wrong.  It’s the same price it always was.

And from reports I’ve seen from people who played the demo, it’s just as buggy as Battlefield 2 was.  As someone who loved Battlefield 1942 a great deal I rushed out and bought BF2.  If not for the bugs, the game was a good updating of BF1942.  But the bugginess was outrageous, even after years of patching.  The one that stopped me from playing altogether was the “red name bug” where one of your teammates would randomly have their name drawn in the colour reserved for the enemy team.  It would do this even if the server had friendly fire turned on, and even if the server would kick you off for teamkills.  Playing when that bug popped up was an exercise in frustration, and I quit playing and waited for a patch that would fix it. 

A few months later, a patch came out.  Name bug: not fixed.  Then, a big patch.  Name bug: not fixed.  A year after the game’s release and the red name bug is STILL there.  Oh, and did I mention that if the game crashes to desktop (which it does often) that you have to totally reboot your computer to be able to run it again?

Joy.

And Battlefield 2142?  Here’s what I’m hearing: It has the red name bug in it.  But rather than fix their shitty coding they’re simply explaining it away as the soldier’s Friend-Or-Foe technology only works 98% of the time!

Oh, and those ads?  EA has tracking technology in the game that makes a note of how long you’re looking at them and reports back to their servers so they can inform their advertisers how successful they’re being!  EA is force-feeding you ads, spying on you when you can’t help but see them, not cutting you a deal on the game’s price, and not using their additional revenue to fix bugs that probably rely on a single “if-then-else” statement to draw player names.

Fuck you EA.  And fuck the Battlefield series.  I’m done.