Battlefield V

Maybe if they weren't working their QA testers to the bone, there would be fewer glitchy video games.

Still not embarrassing enough to stan billionaires or tech companies.

It isn't EA that writes the code behind broken features. They may not be helping in terms of their project management skills, but the actual code and the bugs therein lie exclusively as DICE's fault.

I don't think DICE actually employs QA testers, because they've been caught red handed on multiple occasions in previous games as having never tested their games or updates.

If they did test even for 15 minutes they would have caught on to some rather nasty bugs.

For example in Battlefield 1, the October 2017 patch as part of the Tsar expansion had a major bug wherein the icons in the game would all but disappear even if you were looking at it dead on. This icon transparency bug originated because they implemented an icon transparency slider in the update. Neither the slider nor icon transparency worked at all. It would've taken maybe 5 minutes of playtesting to notice that.

A second example comes a month later, the November 2017 patch that introduced Operations Campaigns. The icon bug goes away but a worse one emerges to replace it. In a nutshell they goofed something with the tank armor deflection system probably via typo to where the Landship, Heavy Tank (A7V) and St Chamond Assault Tanks would 100% reliably deflect any and all shots from the front regardless of the angle and type of attack that was incoming. Such a bug would've been found in about 5 minutes of gameplay and was found about 5 minutes after the patch went live. The system wasn't broken before, they didn't implement any changes to the system to improve it, they just broke it.

A worse example than that came a few months later the February 2018 patch that brought in the Apocalypse expansion. They introduced Afflictions and new Service Assignment dogtags as part of the update. What broke? EVERYTHING. They introduced a huge stuttering and framerate issue that occurred as a result of tracking the new assignments, the stutter was caused by any and all scoring actions no matter how minor or irrelevant. Damage someone? Stutter. Capture a flag? Stutter. Get a squad spawn? Stutter. It was plain as day they never tested the update before going live.

And when they rushed an emergency patch to fix it barely a week later, it failed console certification because apparently they didn't test anything again and it bricked the test machine dialing the patch back another week.

Given the plethora of beta bugs that were never fixed in Battlefield V, they never tested that one afterwards either.

"Allah may guide their bullets, but Jesus helps those who aim down the sights."

Huh Kojima is a God.

"I am Alpharius. This is a lie."

So I've been watching videos of Battlefield V's campaign.

I'll give DICE credit for making an earnest effort to add in a new spark to the World War II shooter genre. It's the first FPS game that I've seen where not only are there French and German campaigns, but the French and Germans actually speak their subtitled languages instead of accented English as did the Germans in the Company of Heroes games. Otherwise, there is no US campaign so far, while the actions of the Special Boat Service and Norwegian resistance occupy the other campaign missions.

The German campaign mission is particularly interesting. It's basically ''Fury III: The Last Tiger" (II was about a British WWI tank you see). However, it plays a creative twist where the relationship between the crew members of Fury's crew are inversed - the New Meat gunner is the one out for American blood (thus making this the first WWII shooter that I've seen where US soldiers are the mooks) while the other crew members are weary and are genuinely unsure of what the hell there still doing by this point. However, the game still falls into the same old video game fallacy where the Waffen-SS are conspicuously absent despite the fact that most Tigers by the end of the war were being issues to that branch instead of the regular Heer. Otherwise, the twist ending is an excellent play on Fury's last-stand climax with the youngest crew member killing the veterans after the latter decide to surrender.

Hm, yeah, not gonna lie, that does seem like a pretty decent ending.

New Battlefield 5 Update Available Now - patch notes included

Sounds beefy. Of particular note is how tanks and panzerfausts will now one-shot any aircraft they hit, regardless of armor or the flak defenses perk. I'm thinking they want to make things a wee bit more on the plausible side, but the pessimist in me sees every God-tier tank/rocket sniper grinning wildy at this news.

Still no Battle-Royale-wannabe Firestorm mode yet, but I was never terribly eager to play it either so that's no big deal. What is coming soon though is Combined Arms mode, which is supposed to play out as a co-op mini campaign... that alone seems tempting for me to finally jump aboard the BFV bandwagon. Any other potential takers? Could use the friends if so!

*Laughs in Assault main*

Edited by SantosLHalper on Jan 20th 2019 at 7:12:31 AM

Halper's Law: as the length of an online discussion of minority groups increases, the probability of "SJW" or variations being used = 1.

So apparently a new Internet Backdraft has erupted against Battlefield V. (Yet another.)

It's mostly of an I Knew It! variety because EA finally fessed up on some sales numbers at their Q3 Conference Call and...they were disappointing.

Specifically, they did about 7.3 million units, expecting over 8 million. Given that the game almost immediately went half off, it means the revenue took a hit too. They're giving off bullshit reasons why such as lacking Battle Royale mode and focusing on (a crappy) single player.

This is very underwhelming and very underperforming both against competitors currently, and compared to historical sales figures of Battlefield games.

For example Battlefield 3 widely seen as one of the best if not the best Battlefield games ever, sold 8 million in its first month and quarter. Back then it was much more of a niche title so that was complete Breakout Hit.

Battlefield 4 stumbled a lot for reasons we all know and it took 7 months to sell 7 million.

Battlefield 1 though sold 10 million PHYSICAL copies alone in its first quarter and about 15 million in total in the first quarter since launch.

Compared to BF1, this is an over 50% decline from title to title.

As a side note, 47% of EA's sales of full games on Playstation/Xbox were digital in all of 2018.

Edited by MajorTom on Feb 5th 2019 at 10:03:06 AM

"Allah may guide their bullets, but Jesus helps those who aim down the sights."

I said this about a half dozen times already in this thread, but to hell with it, I'm gonna say it again and perhaps for the last time ever.

This is a double karma, one for childishly gloating over BF 1 beating Infinite Warfare (creators of whom was a good sport and took the loss well), and mocking and condemning the player base.

Oh, that was the phrase? Clearly, it wasn't players who were...uneducated.

Oh yeah, that's totally going to be EA's "Save Martha!" line.

I'm a (socialist) professional writer serializing a WWII alternate history webnovel.

BFV requires more to learn. BF 1 was CHEAP. You could spam Q, shoot at markers that shown up through night and fog, and get a headshot (there's a Twitch clip on the Dzwiedz 24 fanpage on Facebook where I did exactly that) - no wonder people often disabled spotting altogether on custom servers. Also, there were mortars and artillery that played merry hell with pretty much everything - I know because I used and abused it often.

First, BFV is hard, second, please do remember that made-up-bullshit "boycott" by alt-right chuds.

"what the complete, unabridged, 4k ultra HD fuck with bonus features" - Mark Von Lewis

Problem is, those negative PR stigmas will carry on for a LOOOONG time.

Take a look at Battlefront 2: the game's honestly improved, and DICE has actually been adding in an impressive amount of new content lately, with Count Dooku being the latest addition to the Heroes roster. Yet, you STILL hear people whining about how it's a P 2 W game despite the older Star Card system being patched out halfway through last year. Only thing you can buy now are cosmetics, and even then you can still earn enough in-game currency to unlock all of that for free.

Battlefront 2 is EA's Never Live It Down, like Horse Armor was one for Bethesda. The fuckup they will be eternally known for.

Edited by NotSoBadassLongcoat on Feb 6th 2019 at 4:27:50 PM

"what the complete, unabridged, 4k ultra HD fuck with bonus features" - Mark Von Lewis

Is that what you really think happened? Some mass conspiracy by the "alt-right" whatever that means anymore?

It couldn't have been people being burned by the poor PR pre-launch, the Battlefront II fiasco and the associated wariness of live service games, the launch product VERY QUICKLY earning a reputation for technical incompetence, broken features, cut features galore, barebones content, and a UI that is universally reviled?

That bit certainly explains both the disappointing numbers and why it went half price permanently within a week of launch. Not some assumption that lack of BR is the reason why or that it was some "alt-right" boycott.

And as mentioned, negative PR lasts a very long time. It takes months if not years to build up a good reputation but less than 5 minutes to destroy it and condemn you for years to come.

"Allah may guide their bullets, but Jesus helps those who aim down the sights."

EA seems to be having a number of potential Never Live It Down moments lately.

They may not have been the true cause of BFV's failure, but the Alt-right were certainly the loudest and most obnoxious in their complaints (nor would they ever shut up about that woman with the prosthetic in the reveal trailer, which is naturally gonna attract attention from the left). Probably why everybody associates them along with the game's barrage of development screw-ups these days.

Or, more depressingly, how the gaming community itself tends to harbor a distressing amount of them. Pretty sure you yourself Major Tom might've noticed more than a few comments online or on the reddit about how some gamers think this game's part of some sort of SJW conspiracy, of all things.

It was partly an alt-right boycott. I saw tons and tons of shitty people coming out of the woodworks with alt-right talking points constantly over the crime of putting women and minorities in the game and they are right now claiming victory over the game not doing to well and EA's stocks going down. This is despite the fact that like you mentioned there was more reasons that the game wasn't picked up. It released near several other big games, Battlefront 2, and other things. EA's stocks going down is actually not too unusual as a lot of gaming companies stocks are going down atm due to trade war consequences.

To say it wasn't partly alt-right/shitty parts of the gamer communities fault is disingenuous as you can literally find them harping about anything EA constantly right now.

Hell a perfect example of this is with Apex Legends, Respawn Entertainment's new Titanfall BR spinoff (that is backed by EA), is getting heat from alt-righters right now because atleast 4 out of 8 of the characters are minorities, Gibraltr in particular is gay, Mirage might also be hispanic, Wraith is possible Korean, Bloodhound is confirmed nonbinary by there voice actor, and the only character that is white is literally named Caustic and his whole kit revolves around toxic gas, he is also is described as a amoral sociopathic villain.

Once you strip away the excuse of it being respectful to a historical setting a lot of those shitheads will reveal that their racist, sexist, homophobic, and anything toxic really fast. Apex Legends takes place in the Titanfall universe so they have no excuse to use to hide their shitty views.

I personally was only annoyed with the prosthetic and the woman having a more form fitting soldier uniform in the original BFV trailer as prosthetics were nowhere near that advanced at that time and soldiers of both genders tend to wear neutral uniforms. Beyond that I found adding women and minorities as customization options was harmless. It's not any more disrespectful then making a WW 2 shooter a glorified killfest which most WW 2 games are.

WW 2 was a tragic war were the soldiers tended to die in No Mans Lands via digging into trenches and getting killed by stray gun fire or mortars. It was not a glorious war by any means.

Edited by Wispy on Feb 7th 2019 at 12:45:03 PM

Just like tropers here who think this game's utter failure is part of an alt-right conspiracy.

Does anyone have actual data that proves connection between this game's reception and coordinated alt-right boycott, rather than just personal observation? I kinda doubt that there is, considering even the very term itself lacks consistently definition.

From the sounds of it here, it's almost as if "alt-right" is the Illuminati of this decade.

Or hey, maybe I am just a sheeple, or worse...(gasps) uneducated.

I'm a (socialist) professional writer serializing a WWII alternate history webnovel.

Seriously?

Look at Youtube, Reddit, Twitter, Discord, Facebook, hell now even Tumblr has become a haven for alt-right types since the fucking morons controlling that site decided to go full puritan.

The alt-right is everywhere, they are not some secret conspiracy group they are openly active and constantly peddling their agenda in everything they can.

I genuinely don't know why in the hell they would ever be compared to the Illuminati out of all things

Edited by Wispy on Feb 7th 2019 at 2:07:26 AM

Because there seems to be no objective or even consistent definition of who or what the "alt-right" is. Unlike that of SJW's who do have a consistent definition of folks who find racism and offensiveness in everything and demand everything be torn down and catered to their sensitive natures no matter the subject.

"Alt-right" by comparison from what I've seen is simply a hugely broad brush painting wide swathes of folks on the basis of "I don't like them" or "they disagree with me" on whatever the subject is at hand.

For example, people raising questions or concerns about women in WW 2 in a front or army they did not participate in or any aspect of grand scale historical revisionism are branded "alt-right" even though they may be purely looking at it from a historical perspective and nothing more.

The definition of "alt-right" however ultimately has no bearing as Battlefield V is simply a low quality entry in the series. Low quality and poor content are the driving factors, not some nebulous label used to terminate all debate.

"Allah may guide their bullets, but Jesus helps those who aim down the sights."

Oh hey, a pissy rant about skeletons on a video game forum. Must be a day that ends in -y.

Still not embarrassing enough to stan billionaires or tech companies.

what does skeletons mean in that context?

Maybe that which remains after setting your enemies ablaze with a flamethrower? Sadly Battlefield V doesn't do that.

"Allah may guide their bullets, but Jesus helps those who aim down the sights."

I have a Chrome addon that replaces 'SJW' and similar with the word 'skeleton,' just to make sure to take anyone using the term extremely seriously.

Still not embarrassing enough to stan billionaires or tech companies.

Well, it worked for The Last Jedi... which of course doesn't change the fact that alt-right chuds were popping out of the woodwork to bash the game for bullshit reasons.

Sure, BFV still has some crippling bugs (it was caught on my most recent stream that I couldn't respawn, forcing me to quit the match, and couldn't use my primary weapon after switching class), but it's nowhere near as bad as the haters say.

"what the complete, unabridged, 4k ultra HD fuck with bonus features" - Mark Von Lewis

SJ Ws are not a cohesive group like your saying they are either. Not sure where your getting this idea where the few that actually exist 100% agree with eachother.

Edited by Wispy on Feb 7th 2019 at 11:52:06 AM