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.

I'm not really sure what you're talking about with regards to BF3. Saghen and I have played through all of the co-op missions. We encountered only one noteworthy bug that I can think of. Mid-way through Exfiltration, we couldn't mount back up in the HMMWVs when we were ordered to do so. As a result, we could not progress through the mission. We only encountered that bug once by the way - after we started the mission over, we never saw it again.

I'm inclined to agree with Meatshield. You have a weird habit of complaining about everything under the sun.

This goes back aways..

Janes IAF I could never get to run with any satisfaction except in software mode for video. When I bought it back in 2000, the Matrox graphics card I had didn't support Direct X. When I upgraded to an ATI Rage later the following year, it didn't like something about that either and just locked up altogether. I finally gave up.

That's Israeli Air Force right? I had a Voodoo 2 (8mb) video card when I bought it and it ran fine for me.

Yep. The one and only. Those Voodoos were pretty reliable cards.

This was one of those live and learn scenarios where I found out the hard way.

Because it works for you means it doesn't work for anyone else. Terrible thought process. I've personally had FO3 crash on me only 12 or so times at the most in 100 hours of gameplay. Others have have had it crash far more frequently. Just because I rarely ran into errors doesn't mean the issues didn't exist.

Between the keyboard and chair? I've been playing co-op BF3 with two friends and random people online. Both of my friends have confirmed the same problems. I doubt you have ever played BF3 because ArmA 2 is "hyper realistic (reloading an anti tank weapon in 3 seconds is not realistic), and I make missions for it!", so why bother commenting in the first place?

My worst mistake was buying CloD instead of RoF. I figured Steam and a single time activation was easier than managing another, game specific account, but at least RoF's demo works flawlessly.

How exactly does one "stick away" from something? Seems impossible.

Developers develop. Testers test.

Developers develop. we test.

Ah yes, many a time I became an unwilling beta tester and I even had the privilege of paying to be one too!

Arma 2 and Flaming Cliffs are fine, and don't belong on your list.

I think you are confusing Blizzard Polish on simple, linear games with cartoon graphics but awesome gameplay that dont' have ONE lick of physics, with complex games with tons of phsyics that have to account for a ton of improvisation, created by small developers. Some games take some work to get going. Arma 2 ran like junk for a little while for me... It now runs awesome. Do you really think Military MOnday and Tactical Thursdays are just hours of guys going "I crashed, wait, its sluggish, are you there Bob? Oh you crashed too?" It's not. Its hour after hour after hour of solid, awesome milsim.

There is also a big difference between being an unwilling paying beta tester and a willing paying beta tester. The first feels screwed and the second honoured.

Simple game comment referred to BF3. If ArmA 2 works online that is great. I don't play ArmA 2 online. Making AI infantry or vehicles simply cross a bridge is hit or miss in ArmA 2. Recent patches + ACE made the AI more competent at bridge crossing, but it is strangely still a difficult task for them to accomplish. Usually they will think swimming/sinking in water is the better choice.

Haha, my younger self used to buy games blindly, results in some really horrible waste of money POS(s). However, with the power of internet and also I am getting older. (Almost) Every single game I bought is excellent...(or so that I was told, cause I don't have much time to play them anymore).

I wish I was as lucky as you. Even at $3 I am being ripped off because almost no PC game works. Period.

To be honest, i think it comes down to correct information. I have no problems with game producers allowing people to pay for their beta as DCS is doing. I think that is a smart way to go. As long as the people know that what they are paying for IS a beta and an unfinished product.

What gets my goat is those games that are supposed to be complete and final products.(ok we all know computer games will have some bugs in them somewhere) but these games are either

# shambolic and don't run properly, (I am aware of computer hardware setups may have some contributory factor here)
# have missing features
# or just like most game producers, have lied about the minimum specs.

Lets name a few examples

Bugs and missing features.
Silent hunter series was famous for its bugs upon release and the lengthy waits for the patches that the dev team knew they had to do to get the game running semi propperly. The missing features advertised like milch cows (resupply vessels) etc. I gave up on the silent hunter series after 3 as i could not be bothered to wait the 2 years for people like grey wolves to mod it as they do.

Unfinished games.
A classic unfinished game was vampires bloodlines. This game was not even completed and they sold it on the market. It took user made mods to get it to actually work. I have no idea why this game was allowed to be sold in an unfinished state.

shambolic / don't run properly / lied about minimum specs.
Flight sim X takes the bait here. Minimum specs were an outright lie on first release. The game was so riddled with bugs it was not funny. Basic coding errors that made the game unplayable (e.g. the rediculous pan memory error where panning always stuttered your computer, a simple .ini file change and that fixed that one.) Not to mention they very very very lazy and poor effort to release Little or NO FSX only built aircraft with the game but port over FS9 garbage. Put that in conjunction the glaring errors between 2d and 3d pits (lets take the grumman goose for an example). The gear lever works in the opposite direction, and other switches do aswell between the 2d and the 3d pit.

Ohhh and lets see, they released a pay add on which was in all honesty, just a ptach to fix the game as it should have been on release.

Lets throw in that the aces team were only contracted to do 2 patches and that is all they did. No wonder they were fired and good riddance to for that rubbish.

So my point at the end of the day.> As long as a developer lets you know what you are getting, then that is fine if you decide to pay money for it, be it a finished product or a beta. I don't mind paying for a beta and quite happy to do so. But when #%&*$# is delivered on my plate at a restaurant when i have asked for a finished cooked meal of any price range.... well i expect something that resembles a finished cooked meal.