I've been trying to play through BF3 co-op as of late, only to find out it is a huge cluster #%&*$# that has so many bugs it is ridiculous. I also bought IL-2 Cliffs of Dover only to find out the simplest of graphical affects causes frame rates to drop town to 5-9, rendering the game entirely unplayable. Setting up a profile for your HOTAS/keyboard is a nightmare with the most idiot menu system devised for a game.

One has to wonder, do game developers even test their games for bugs anymore? I assume they don't. I've spend $80 or so on games this past year that simply do not work, period.

From now on I will pirate games. If they work, I'll buy a license. If they don't, well, at least I will not be ripped off anymore. Perhaps when the game developers start going out of business due to horrible sales they will learn to make functional products or the industry will just collapse. At this point, I don't care if it does.

In short, stick away from the following titles: ArmA 2/Arrowhead, IL-2 Cliffs of Dover, Battlefield 3, Lock On Flaming Cliffs 2.0, Crysis 2.

they do, but you moan about everything so .......

I take it you like buying non-functioning products. Be my guest, but I don't waste money on junk that does not work. I'm on my 8th attempt at loading BF3, and it still does not load. If that is your idea of a fun game, then all I can say is that simple minds are simply amused. Keep buying their junk and you'll get more of it. I'm done with their nonsense.

And it looks like DRM will not be an issue for me.

nope, but then just about everything i've brought the last couple of years has worked, cept the RF2 demo, but thats due to my poorish PC specs.



must ... resist ... posting ... "the problems most likely sat between the keyboard and the chair" ... must ... resist .... must ........ o ..



aaawwwww you know me so well!!



no .. but then pirateing games IS illeagle, no matter how you try and "justify" it ......

ArmA 2 / Arrowhead / BAF works for me, no issues, though I only play single player at the moment... Cliffs of Dover, can't really argue with you that much.. though I have decent frame rates on it now, it still stutters like hell when it shouldnt, I have an SSD for gods sakes how can it still want to stutter!? plus you have to play about with settings too much to get it to work.. plus usual AI traits of previous IL2 titles.. i.e. they like to do stuff you cant even though they shouldnt physically be able to.. i.e. bombers having a higher roll rate due to you being limited by physical forces at speed AI have no such problems
Plus the fact you are forced to have Steam on your PC to play the damned game!
Lock On worked on my older PC, not installed on this one so cant comment too much... moved onto DCS A-10 and BS 2
Battlefield works, though my main gripe is all the cheating sods online using hacks and such.... campaign played well forst time round, brings up very strange AI quirks playing it second time round though ! plus several issues of not getting stuff to work first time, or even the odd stop you playing bug due to a setting.....
I think they do test games these days, but not as much as they use too... the internet has made them a bit lazy, they can always just issue a 4Gb patch at a later date! Plus optimisation seems to have vanished, again.. increase in storage medium means they dont have to tidy things up as much to fit it on a disk...
hard to think games use to come on 1.4mb floppy disks at one point!

I can sympathise with you Flogger.
BF3 caused me more problems than any other game I have bought.In fact it still plays up now.
I went above and beyond the call of duty to fix it.The only reason I put so much effort into it was so I could play with my Clanmates.

I consigned CloD and ARMA 2 to the great recycle bin in the sky ages ago.
If a game requires too much effort to get working/set-up or is unintuitive then it's not fun for me.YMMV

I'm no lightweight when it comes to Sims.I play a lot of complicated stuff but sometimes game developers take the piss.

I had to assign Arma to the great bin ..too much stuffing around for no joy,but i think it may have been an sli/driver issue, spent weeks and could not get it sorted. Also BoB WoV , just didnt want to play despite heaps of help from various people and multiple attempts, reinstalls/patches / tweaks etc.

It took a fair while to get past a lot of EAW issues when i had xp and i had a lot of lockups/ctds etc. Il2 was a pain re fps because of system being not up to what was needed, constant tweaking through the whole series to juggle perfect settings and good fps..plus spastic ai and the many bugs Crysis, now theres a lot of nights of tweaking worth every bit too.

CloD..horrible release, frames in singles, that many bugs that obviously someone wasn't asleep at the wheel..they had died..airbag was deployed and the front end was in a tree.Many patches and tips and she too is also sweet re FPS and maxed out..still spastic AI though, its a feature

Betcha we could get you sorted and in the air if you dropped into the CloD forum Flogger

Arma2 had probs? I only bought it a few months ago so maybe they were patched away but it ran fine on my feeble little system.
I do see the OP's point though. Bit different I know but Capcom ( Resident Evil) sure do test games. My wife's cousin just joined last year and spent 8 months playing games 9-5 everyday and making notes, along with the entire freshmen intake. They also have about 300 testers, full and part-time, I think he said.

I still buy a lot of games these days and the only game I bought within the last 1-2 years which had significant technical problems for me was IL2:CloD, including some of the titles Flogger mentioned.

For the most part, I've been very fortunate with pc games working as advertised. There are a few notable exceptions that made me regret ever buying it though:

1. Cliffs of Dover - The single biggest flight sim disappointment of my life (so far).

2. Stalker: Call of Pripyat - It constantly crashed on me until I went to Windows 7 64 bit and 4 GB of RAM.