Buggy games
I’m as guilty as anyone else with this particular pet peeve of mine, but I’ve gotta get it off my chest. 🙂
At smugmug, we have a “Work Hard – Play Hard” mentality. Luckily, our jobs often combine fun with work, but every once in awhile we like to let off some steam and play video games all weekend. Everyone hauls their gaming PCs over to smugmug HQ and we play LAN games 24/7 for a few days.
We’ve all been anxiously awaiting Battlefield 2, the sequel to one of our other LAN staples, Battlefield 1942. It finally arrived last week, so of course we all bought copies and settled down for a long weekend of online squad-based combat.
What actually ended up happening was the following:
Rinse, lather, and repeat. End result? 72 hours of Warcraft III instead! Thank goodness for Tower Defense, Hero Defense, and every other mod for good old Warcraft.
I know shipping bug-free software is tough. I’ve been there, we blew it with SiN, and I’m in the middle of it every day at smugmug. But come on, people! We’re talking about a highly anticipated game from a $17.5 BILLION corporation.
We have 6 PCs in the room, all with widely varying system configurations, all rock-solid on every other game on the planet. But not the one we’ve waited years to play and took time out of our schedules to enjoy.
I don’t think it’s an accident that the titles which sell really *really* well from Blizzard, id Software, and Valve actually tend to work right out of the box for most of their customers. Yes, they had bugs, but not to the extend that BF2 has – go read any Battlefield message forum.
SmugMug's Don MacAskill 
Having read alot of stuff about the appallling way EA treat their staff. I suggest that this may have a major impact on output quality.
David
The bugs are awful, but even worse, it seems unfinished. The way the menus work – very slow, the inability to escape from trying to launch a game, no respawn protection – people just sit and spawn kill, they made separate pages for each type of vehicle control then had their default button default ALL pages – useless. The bugs range from mildly annoying such as the friend or foe indicator indicating teammates as foes to the game being unplayable due to crashes or ridiculous lagging while injured.
It appears that I paid fifty dollars for an alpha level release.
Cool stuff. Keep up the good work. opponents can fetch soldier