Well several guys who have already got the full game have said that it has been tweaked and is a lot better than the demo. This sure is good news.

One bad point though is that squad chat is still limiting the game’s tactical organisation. Also some Gamestop customers have been cursing the fact that their pre-order code for the sniper rifle doesn’t work. Serves them right for getting their orders before me heh. Apparently it unlocks the M60 instead of the QBU-88 sniper rifle and then the code that unlocks the machine gun doesn’t work. 

Some gamers have reported that UPS has failed to deliver copies of the game to the store they had pre-ordered from. Hopefully there isn’t a shortage of copies already like what happened with GTAIV with shops running out of stock fast.

I’ve yet to see for myself the new changes and will have to wait until the 27th here in the UK.

Can’t wait…

June 26th 2008

Well EA/DICE must have listened and got the sniper code snafu fixed quick because emails are going out to peeps already…

Dear Valued Customer,
We have learned that some of the codes Electronic Arts provided to us to unlock the bonus sniper rifle for Battlefield: Bad Company were not working correctly. If your original code did not unlock the sniper rifle, please use this new one below. If you have already unlocked the sniper rifle no further action is required.

Full marks to EA/DICE I think… Read further on this HERE

One of the nice things about Bad Company is that you can view your online stats… that is if the EA Accounts system works OK. Unfortunately it’s kind of buggy to say the least.

 I had it working at one point and being able to view your stats was great (even if it did show your wrong rank stripes heh).

But then I made a big mistake. I decided to change my gamertag from NeoMorphUK to… something less British (I have been TK’d several times because of people who hate Brit players).

So now I go over to the EA Accounts system and try to link my new gamertag. Ooops…. something wrong here as it pops up with “System Error. Please try again later.”

Great… more problems. Oh well… I’ll at least delete my old Gamertag Persona. Errr… yeah… right… seems I can’t even do that either.

Looking further into the “System Error” problem it seems that there are quite a few people suffering with it and support doesn’t seem to be helping. Requests for some sort of comment on the problem have been ignored leaving many users disillusioned with the system. Even a simple “We are aware of the problem and are working to fix this” from EA would go towards reassuring their customers but nothing has been forthcoming.

Hopefully this will be fixed before Bad Company gets released next week because viewing your stats online will give you a code to access an extra gun in the full game. If some players are barred from this because of the problems with the EA Accounting system there are going to be many angry players out there… including me.

24th June 2008

Well it looks like EA have been working on this System Error problem and at least some (me included) have had their accounts fixed now so full marks to EA for trying to get it fixed for launch day. Some of you may be getting “That gamertag is already linked” and yet not seeing it under “My Soldier”. This means that you must have another EA account and the gamertag is already linked to that.

After a LOT of play with the demo of Bad Company I found that I love the game…. and yet hate the game too.

With a game as ground breaking as Bad Company is there is always a worry that the game will not live up to the hype. I was really looking forward to Frontlines: Fuel of War at one time but then the demo’s were released and I found the game engine itself was laggy, the maps were very “muddy” and it was hard to see the enemies. Also TK’ing was rife on the demo servers which didn’t help much.

Back to Bad Company and destructible buildings with online gaming sounds great but won’t it be really laggy? Will the single player game be up to much? Will it be as much fun to play as the hype says? Well let’s see then shall we?

Single Player Campaign

The single player campaign sample in the demo is a short mission (well they don’t want to give the game away for free after all) but it shows how much fun it’s going to be. Haggard and Sweetwater are at it right from the start and it’s fun watching them play Rock, Paper, Scissors every now and again. But it’s the dialogue that is the funniest. You have to help a convoy by clearing out a crossroads for them and then stop a bombardment by calling in the airforce. That one sentence just doesn’t do the mission justice though as you have to take out squads of enemies (including armoured vehicles), watchtowers and machine gun nests… It’s really quite fun and I can’t wait to get the full version.

But the think most gamers buy Battlefield games is for the multiplayer carnage…

Multiplayer

The problem is lag… LOTS of lag. And who can we blame for this? Turns out that there is something wrong with Microsoft’s servers and that the demo on the Playstation 3 is suffering NO LAG!… Arrgghh. I knew I should have got a PS3 when I could have afforded it.

Read about the lag situation here…

But when you find a game that has no lag then OMG… what a game this is. Some of the things I’ve seen in the game are totally amazing. Like seeing an enemy sniper in a watchtower take cover behind a wall then someone fires an Anti-Tank missile at the wall and blowing the sniper right off the tower. Or watching a group of tanks come over a hill and totally obliterate a base with support from artillery bombardment and a helicopter gunship. A sniper doing recon from the far side of the river pointing out targets for the attacking team. It’s really awesome to see… and play for that matter.

But there are some real concerns about teamplay with this game. The main problem is “squad chat”. Your team is made up of squads of players and you cannot talk to members of another squad. This is rather annoying to say the least. For example I was sat in the machine gunners position of a tank and I spot an enemy tank come up behind us. I yell into the mike… “ENEMY TANK… 6 O’Clock” but he doesn’t answer and just carries on. I yell some more… and some more… still no indication that he’s heard me. Then I realise after I get blown up that the reason he couldn’t hear was that he was in another squad and COULDN’T HEAR ME! To me this is one poorly thought out idea and it is wrecking teamplay.

There are various other glitches with the game. Knife a wooden fence and you have to wait a second before the fence falls apart. Hand throw grenades have great splash damage but rifle fired grenades don’t. You can be at an enemy gold crate and it say “Hold down B to set charge” but even though you are holding down B it doesn’t respond. You have to let go of B and then press it again, wasting precious time. Snipers have a pistol that can kill you with one shot right through body armour but machine gunners have to empty loads of rounds into someone to kill them (nice balancing there DICE… NOT!). Fire a shotgun and it takes half a second to discharge and in that time the enemy has moved out of your aim.

In fact those are just a few of the glitches and design faults… (read about several more on the Ethical Gamer forums)… Hopefully these faults will be removed at launch and the lag based problems will be sorted by Microsoft fixing the servers. It’s now less than two weeks until the retail launch of Bad Company and I’ve already pre-ordered the game, even with the glitches that I know are still there. Apparently DICE know about the glitches and have fixed a lot of them so I’m expecting a patch as soon as retail goes live.

Conclusions

But when it comes down to it, is Bad Company a fun game to play… I think that once the lag situation is sorted (come on Microsoft) then the answer will be “HELL YEAH!”. It’s a great game and it reminds me of the days when I played Counter Strike and then Battlefield: 1942 came out and I migrated from CS to 1942 because the game was so damned huge in comparison. Today it’s COD4 and moving over to Bad Company. History repeats itself once more.

I’d give Battlefield Bad Company 9/10 - it loses a point for the glitches and poor chat support.

You may have noticed a severe lack of updates on the front door of the site for a while… this is due to the fact that most of the action takes place in the forums these days and as I am in the middle of doing decorating and house automation I’m what you would call mega busy at the moment. Hell, I haven’t bought any games recently either as I know I would be spending too much time in front of my TV instead of painting and wiring and doing software etc..But one thing I have been doing is working on updates to make the site a little bit more organised. A lot of the stuff has been there to make the site that much more stable and adding things such as automated backups to a remote site in the case of a server malfunction.

The Big Baddaboom

Recently Ethical Gamer was sent into offline hell when a huge electrical explosion totalled both mains and backup supply at The Planet (the site where EG is hosted). This meant the forum servers were down but thankfully not damaged. The Planet were absolutely brilliant about keeping their customers up-to-date and got the servers back online by using temporary generators. To read more about what happened head on over to http://service-update.theplanet.com/  and have a read. Remember that the entries are in reverse format (ie the most recent is at the top).

Even though I wasn’t happy that EG went down I was really reassured with how The Planet handled it and even went so far as to have the CEO make several statements as to what was happening. Currently the rebuild of the electrical supply gear is going well apparently and as you can see the site has been stable since they got the last generator up and running.

So EG hasn’t stagnated… it’s just reinforcing the foundations at the moment. Remember, this site is run by gamers and growth is decided by the members themselves. If they want something doing we do our hardest to try and get it done.

NeoMorph - Site Admin

Hello faithful users of Ethical Gamer. I will be hosting our second U.S./Canadian Gaming Session next friday, May 30th at 8PM Eastern Standard Time. Please check out the gaming session of the forums to R.S.V.P.  We will be doing a few private matches. These will more than likely include: Headshots & Pistols only, RPG’s only, Knives only, Grenade Launchers only, and other amusing and or ridiculous rule modifications. Along with the crazy private matches, we will do some standard Public Matches as well. Probably will include: Domination, Headquarters, Hardcore, etc. Game types that include teamwork in order to win. I look forward to playing with all members of EG.  

Well the variety map pack has arrived… but was it worth the wait?

Several players have said to me comments such as “over hyped” and “not worth 800pts” and “map rotations suck”. It’s sounding like the customers are really not as happy with the new maps as they could be.

I spent a few hours playing the Variety Pack Objectives gametype… What happened was it went Broadcast, Creek, Broadcast, Creek… no sign of Chinatown or Killhouse.

Sabotage on Creek is especially painfull… it’s full of stupid mapping errors (like the classic of the 6 inch step that you need to jump to get up or the rocks that won’t let you climb up that an 80 year old granny could climb) which make the game less enjoyable than what it could be. The falling leaf effect is here the same as on Overgrown which is annoying… nothing like getting distracted by a leaf when an enemy is nearby. Every game of sabotage on Creek went to Sudden Death because neither side could move without getting killed.

Broadcast is really confusing… maybe it’s because it’s new and we have yet to learn it’s ins and outs and flows… but I do know that a lot of the time I got killed by looking the wrong damn way and also getting outlined for snipers because the rooms were too bright.

 Killhouse and Chinatown I haven’t played much (because of the stupid map rotation problems)…

Overall though, the maps could have been beta tested more and removed some of the glitches. Some of the items like beds and barrels that you should be able to climb on you can’t for example. Steps that you could step up after drinking 10 pinks of lager you need to jump up… lighting in the cave on creek shouldn’t be there (ffs Night Vision IW… when are we going to use it) and the torch it’s coming from wouldn’t light a cave that much anyway…

Overall I’d give the maps 5/10…

The first EG gaming session will run next weekend (6th April) from 16:00 to 23:00 GMT…

This will be a “general” play session so it means that it will be open to players worldwide… this is just a trial session so if things go wrong, blame… err… anyone but me heh!

Discuss this on the forums (you have to be registered to use the link)

Forum Linky

Welcome to Ethical Gamer… your portal to finding gamers who want to play and not have to deal with annoying trash talking kids, avoiding TeamKillers and Racists who just aim to spoil your fun…

So if you just want to play the game then welcome (join the forums to start meeting other sensible gamers)…

If you are a TKer, Trash Talker or a Racist… you aren’t welcome here.

Game on…