DICE: Primary Battlefield 3 build doesn’t contain beta bugs

They should have mentioned that before the beta…A lot of people canceled their pre-orders…including me. I’m not a fan of the game either way.

Wow people are so dumb! I didn’t know people didn’t know what beta means. Smdh @ noobs

@2
People has come to expect a beta is a demo, and not a beta. I blame both publishers for actually labeling a lot of demos as a beta, but i also blame the gamers for being ignorant and spoiled.

#1 your a fucktard

If anything it is because this “beta” wasn’t that. It was a older build that was demod. To me a beta is a build that needs work. From bugs, compatiblity issues to gameplay balancing.

Now DICE is saying that the bugs found in beta were already taken care of. They are saying that before the beta/demo launched the real game was pretty much done, as we would expect a game to be that was going gold in 10days time.

It was a sloppy demo.

I stand by what I said earlier, and got blasted for, this wasn’t about beta testing the game. It was a PR move, that backfired, to make players feel special by having them think they mattered and were part of the games development proscess. It was also an attempt to reach across the isle, to CoD players, with a CoD style map, which lacked vehicles, vastness, and any real destruction at all – all things the BF franchise is known for.

@1 Or maybe you should look up the word “beta” in the dictionary.

Christ, people’s perosonal laziness sometimes is fucking astounding.

@5 “If anything it is because this “beta” wasn’t that. It was a older build that was demod.”

It was a beta. It was labelled as such. They announced fixes to the game based on problems noticed during said beta. There is nothing here that is hard to understand.

“It was also an attempt to reach across the isle, to CoD players, with a CoD style map, which lacked vehicles, vastness, and any real destruction at all – all things the BF franchise is known for.”

So the franchise isn’t allowed to step outside of its pre-defined boundaries in the slightest way whatsoever? You know what happens when you do that to a series? You end up with Call of Duty.

Metro was something a little different. But the assumption that it’s “like CoD” is fucking ridiculous. The *huge* map starts up with a wide open battle for the COM points, before heading into a tight and enclosed space, which varies things up and makes for a difference feel for strategy – pushing your way past the choke points – before heading outside again to a location with lots of vertical approaches for targeting.

Now please, tell me how any of that sounds anything like Call of Duty. The map itself is three or four times larger than anything you’ll ever see in CoD, and the game-mode doesn’t even exist in CoD either.

And it’s *one* map.

My bad, you could have been a bit less cruel though.

@7 Cruel? The word beta has a definition. Cancelling your pre-order based on a beta makes no sense.

What if there had been no beta at all? What if it had just been released without any play preview at all?

@ Michael: No need to be so horrible man.

Normally when you test a beta you receive updates and you must use the latest build to do the testing. It would have been better for DICE to send beta testers the latest build of the client. This way they can still test and update the server side and receive reports from the testers about the client. If a more up-to-date build was available why using an old one?

After playing with this buggy client on that so-so Metro map I’m not sure if I’ll get the game now. I think I’ll wait for a sale.

well whoever thought that a BETA was a final product who is suppose to work w/o any glitches then u’re a definite retard. (idk how u survive in the world.) even more with THIS beta. everyone decent BF fan knew that the code was that of an alpha version.

The beta wasnt really about the beta build, it was more of a server stress test.

#10 if you did notice battlelog was updated during the beta a couple of times

#5 of course they gave us a CoD style, in a curtain way. Wrong.. You apprently dont play alot of BFBC2.. Of course they want some of the CoD players, and they will get some of them. Without a shadow of a doubt. You people that have canceled your pre-order. Is it just because you been hyped up so much, that even if it was the best beta/game in the history of man, you still would be disappointed.. For the people who tried Caspian Border, now that was a real BF map, maybe the flags were close, but come on. Because they are, they is action all the time, and not just once in a while.

If anyone has played any of the previous BF games, you know that BF3 won’t be shit, not perfect but what game is?
This will take me back to BF2 on the PC, epic games had there, but this time I’ll have to slum it on the 360, but it’ll be fun never the less.
And they always look to tweak the game to fix it, I’m looking forward to this very much.

Maybe people should stop whining so much and enjoy their games instead of looking for faults.
I did suffer from falling through the world map a few times. but I’m sure it’ll/has been be fixed

All in all, I’ll have my BF3 soon. I just hope it’s as solid as DICE is claiming to be.

People are just strange when it comes to this game. Everything we have seen so far about the game makes it look pretty amazing. So much so that a lot of people pre-ordered.

Then they play a beta and complain about bugs… and then try their hardest to make out that this is a demo. And then say that DICE are to blame, because people wanted the beta to be a demo… They are angry, because the dev has done something properly by giving players a beta and not a demo.

I honestly don’t think it was as bad as people make out. Even compared to other games out there, the beta was still impressive on the PC. Despite the few bugs, the game looks great, and for the most part played really well.

It’s a tough one. DICE should have really stated that the code was old and an open beta was released to ‘stress test’. But this has been a total PR disaster from the start.

I cancelled my pre-order not because of the bugs in beta, simply because I dont see ANY point to using EAs spyware – Origin to play the game, when Battlelog does everything instead.

This over on IGN made me laugh – “If there’s someone who’s never played Battlefield before, then we’d definitely load up a level like Caspian Border, have them sit down and look at the mayhem of a 64-player server,” grinned Gustavsson. (http://uk.ps3.ign.com/articles/120/1200604p1.html) *note on the PS3 IGN site(!).

He is right, which is why beta should have been Caspian Border from the start.

This is not Call of Duty, they both are very different games.

@16 Why preorder on PC?

@ Grim, It doesn’t matter what map they used though which is why the “they should have used CB map” point is irrelevant. It was, at the end of the day, a beta. And Metro serves as a much better map on which to test a variety of issues.

People should get over this whole “it was a demo and not a beta” thing. And I very much doubt that it has been a “PR disaster”, you have to remember that unhappy gamers are generally more vocal, and smaller in number. I imagine if you asked everyone that played the beta, you would have an overall positive response than negative.

That’s all speculation of course but I think there’s some truth in it.

@17
I’m not a console gamer and never will be.

@18
If you are looking to win new fans to BF(which EA/DICE are and mostly away from CoD), then you need to show why Battlefield is better. BF is famed for its big maps and vehicles. If you want something smaller and tight, look at Bad Company 2 – which Metro feels like in almost every way.

Lots of forums are littered with people who dont know the difference between beta and a demo – which is why this has turned into a PR disaster. They simply didnt communicate their message across about stress testing, if that was the case. And it has been a nightmare, hence why suddenly all they can talk about is how old the code was for beta and that its not the final game.

@19, People being confused over what a beta is and isn’t hardly strikes me as something that DICE can be blamed for. I would go as far to call it complete ignorance in a lot of cases considering how many people in those forums and on sites like this are quite happy to explain what a beta is.

The fact it’s in the title “Battlefield 3 Beta” and not “Battlefield 3 Demo” should be enough for people to know it’s not a demo. And yeah, maybe they are backtracking in what they are saying about the demo but again, is that because they got it wrong or because people are just making such an unnecessary hullabaloo about it.

I’m sorry, but if gamers find their way on to forums to complain about a demo/beta, I find it hard to believe they don’t know what a beta actually is.

This Is what happens when people fall off the hype train. Their is no confusion over beta/demo. For months gamers were being spoonfed the idea that BF3 would be drippimg with awesome sauce.

So finally when that beta came out the expectation was palpable, guys & girls didn’t care it was a beta. IT’S BF3!! IT’LL BE GR8!! EA PROMISED!!

& what did they get? Well basically a long narrow, dull looking, snipe-fest of a map, WITH NO JETS

Hence the lashback.

I am pretty much done. However let me try one last time to put this into perspective.

I am a writter. I am written stageplays, scripts, shorts, novels, poems, etc. Yes I know I have no grasp of mechanical structure, spelling or grammer, and yes I apreciate the irony, and a good word procsessing program along with a patient editor. But…

If I have a story that I am testing out. And I am looking for feedback. …from an audiance. What build would I use? One that was months old, outdated and already changed in several meaningful ways? Or the newest version, complete with the latest revisions?

Thats one of the biggest reasons I hang up on the word Beta. Many of the would be issues that testers would have concern over, have already fixed/changed. But, OG, they stress test the servers.

Maybe. But wouldn’t a demo have done the samething?

Much of what I have been saying is supported by statements from DICE for goodness sake.

““It wasn’t like when things surfaced in the beta we were caught by surprise and started fixing the main game,” creative director Lars Gustavsson told Destructoid at the EB Games Expo this weekend.”

And:

““The main game was more or less done. It was more validating what we knew. We just checked our lists of already implemented fixes and said ‘Yeah, yeah we know about that one’ or ‘Oh yeah, that old one.’””

So I ask again what were they testing? What peice of video game code was being tested? Little or none. Now if something unexpected poped up, I am sure it got looked at, as it would in a final build of any game.

IMO, the beta consisted of outdated code that had already been changed, reworked, and evolved into something different. There was no need to beta that build at all. The only sliver of testing I could see was to judge gamers reactions to the Metro map. Over all i don’t think Dice enjoyed the maps reception as evidenced by also releasing CB map as well as a but load of video showing what many BF fans would consider a more traditional BF gameplay experience.

End of.

And I agree Michael, you were being a bit bullish. I am on your xbl/psn friendslist. We haved played games(one of them being BFBC2) together, and we also make it a point to trade back and forth on online lreaderboards. You of all people should know that I am not trolling or whining. At the very least its ok to agree to disagree.

For the record, I had no intentions of picking up my preorder. I hadn’t yet driven to the store to physicly cancel it yet. However at a family function, i found out that a couple of brother in laws are getting the game, and were even willing to buy me a copy of the game. None of us have a lot of money right now, but I would rather me buy it then have them spend their limited cash on getting it for me. So i am still wrestling with that one. I may end up buying for that reason. I doubt the whole game will be bad. Prolly pretty good infact. It is just that when you have limited funds, you have to make choices and trimming the fat away is a must. I can think of games in the next 12 months that I would enjoy more then BF3. Add that to lack luster experience I had with the Beta/Demo thingie and you can see my hesitence in buying. I never said anyone else couldn’t/shouldn’t buy it. And I never put anyone down for enjoying something I didn’t.

The CoD4 beta took players away from Halo and sold a whole lot more copies.

I for one, almost certainly wouldn’t have bought CoD4 without playing the beta.

It’s obvious that EA were trying to do something similar here…

Big problem, though, is that while the CoD4 beta only had a handful of issues, the BF3 beta comes across as more of a pre alpha bug-fest, so they’re having to worry about pre-order cancellations instead!

I don’t believe that the RC build will be free from the beta bugs.

No chance.

“If I have a story that I am testing out. And I am looking for feedback. …from an audiance. What build would I use? One that was months old, outdated and already changed in several meaningful ways? Or the newest version, complete with the latest revisions?”

No need to explain yourself, OG.

It’s DICE who are coming out with the nonsensical waffle.

No-one releases a broken version of their game to the public except amateurs. If they expect people to believe that they would do such a thing, then they don’t deserve your money.

At the very most, all any dev would do is a closed beta, where they would have people under strict NDA’s and have some sort of list of known issues, as is the norm.

There’s plenty of nonsensical waffle here to easily match anything DICE have come out with.

G1GA, shut your fanboyish trap about COD 4 and what EA or DICE should do or what they copy.

DICE everytime makes a beta since Battlefield 1942

Everytime there are bugs + problems and especially graphical glitches. BF3 had only graphical glitches because it has a new engine. It’s a big game with giant maps, vehicles, destruction and if someone expect it to be bug free, well, than, good luck guys. If you don’t know what is Beta it’s your only problem.

But when they release a game it’s a decent build. Same was with Battlefield:BC2 beta and etc. if someone don’t remember it had a lot of glitches.

Battlefield betas will always contain bugs. Always.
Battlefield 2142 was a bug free fest, but thats because it is a copy of BF2 in Sci-fi with the same BF2 engine.

@25: Sorry, but nothing here matches the implication that they would intentionally release a broken product to the public and think that it was no big deal.

That’s on a level all on it’s own.

Jesus, Mary and Joseph, why am I still reading tripe about why an older build was used?

The old build was used because that was what they had ready in order to push through certification in time for Sept 29th.

If they knew about the client bugs what was the point in the beta? Because, as Dice have explained before, the beta was to test the BACK END. Server side stress tests on each platform, that was it.

Seriously, some of you I’m pretty sure commented on the articles where this was explained. Read below the fucking headline.

@27, What was “broken” about the game? Considering how much people are complaining about it, they must have spent a fair bit of time in the game experiencing it.

If people go into a BETA expecting a DEMO and a perfect experience, and then act as if they have somehow been hard done by or lied to because what they actually got was actually a beta, then they need a reality check.

People are acting like they paid to get into that beta or something.

“Battlefield betas will always contain bugs. Always.”

All betas contain bugs. That’s why they’re not called ‘release candidates’.

However, there is more than one category of bug.

Betas should not cantain ANY class A bugs.

A class A bug is a game breaking bug that prevents the user from continuing in the game.

The BF3 beta was full… no, overflowing with those.

Class B significantly affects the gaming experience, and class C bugs are purely cosmetic.

In the development process, the alpha build is used to remove all class A bugs. The beta (closed, open or public) is then used to test and remove all class B and C bugs.

This beta, no matter what it was supposed to be, or what the correct definition of beta is, was actually something that cost DICE sales.

I didn’t do that. CoD didn’t do that. EA/DICE did it all by themselves. I don’t really care if the truth hurts you, but that’s a simple fact.

“The old build was used because that was what they had ready in order to push through certification in time for Sept 29th.”

Certification from who?

Bad Company 2 released with lots of stupid bugs that MUST have been seen in beta but werent fixed until weeks after.

I liked some of the bugs in BF3 especially the human jets…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FUYoItEjfKc

haha

@22 What were they testing? Uuuh… everything? The whole point of an open beta is to test problems that can *only* occur in live gameplay.

Code is not this simple thing that just “works”. Half of these bugs would not occur under closed testing, and that’s why open betas exist at all.

And they posted numerous lists of things they fixed based on feedback from the beta, so any assumptions that it *wasn’t* for testing are null and void.

@31 Microsoft and Sony, obviously.

@29:

Seriously?

Go to any BF3 related forum and take your pick from the mountain of reported issues.

I agree that a beta is not a demo, and that the two should not be confused. However, any wet behind the ears marketing graduate will tell you that people don’t care about such definitions.

They want a perfect product, and a taster, no matter how it’s labelled, should be a perfect sample of that perfect product.

Surely EA, with all of their big money marketing professionals and wealth of experience should know that.

This was a Beta and this is an example of people expecting a demo out of it which is just wrong. And using older build has two benefits; 1) Stress testing the game. 2) Regression testing where the developers are seeing if all the bugs in this build are not current in the final build and that’s exactly what this was.

Most of the time developers outsource to other countries to do regression testing but people wanted to try the game so DICE got to do it for free.

If people can’t understand the word ‘testing’ than there are bigger issues than how BF3 was marketed.

“@31 Microsoft and Sony, obviously.”

Really?

And the PC version?

Who was certifying that?

@30, I didn’t play much of the beta, but I encountered zero bugs in what I played of the ps3 version.

The way some people talk about it, including the terminology you’re using, had me expecting the game to be unplayable, but I played several rounds without witnessing anything that could be remotely conceived as a bug, which leads me to believe they’re not quite as common or as game breaking as some would lead you to believe.

@31, the Platform holders who are not EA owned.

@36

There is no certification process for the PC its a free market however they have to make sure that the GPU manufactures and their drivers are compatitable so you have that process.

@36 They obviously wanted the same build on all formats.

And Caspian Border seemed to be extremely stable from all reports I heard.

@34, “Go to any BF3 related forum and take your pick from the mountain of reported issues.”

Good for them. They’re doing exactly what you’re supposed to do in a beta. Reporting the problems. Haha. It’s so ridiculous, “MAN, THIS BETA IS SO BUGGY. U KNOW WHAT IMA DO… I’M GO AND TELL THIS DEV EXACTLY WATS RONG WITH IT. THAT WIL RELY SHOW THEM!”

I spent a good number of hours in the beta and came across very few problems. Non that I can remember that stopped me actually playing the game. And yeah, just because I had a good experience doesn’t mean others didn’t but on the flip side just because some people had a bad experience doesn’t make the game a complete failure like some are making out.

The only bug I encountered while playing the beta myself was the weird Kill Cam glitch where it ended up in some weird outside the map location. That was about it.

A lot of this stuff, like falling through maps, is usually server side problems caused due to excessive pressure being put on the servers… you know, the whole damn point of the beta…

|doesn’t make the game a complete failure like some are making out.

The game, no. The demo/beta as a PR exercise to generate more sales, yes.

@42, My bad. Even so, it still doesn’t make the beta a failure. We will all see when the game launches anyway. I’m sure we will all hear about how all the bugs are there and it’s such a shock bla bla bla.

And while all the sad people are complaining about it, most of the others will just be enjoying another good Battlefield game.

@43

From a marketing perspective, the beta was a failure. Regardless of whether the players are right or wrong in their expectations, it was a buggy mess that made more people question their pre-order than rush out and make one (I’ve no data to back that up, it’s a general feeling).

From a technical perspective, I imagine the beta was a success. Load testing is something that’s very hard to get right without real players, so the game should be a lot better for it. The bugs that people found would’ve been positive too – even if DICE said they knew about them all, there must’ve been some they didn’t.

@44, It would have been a failure if they had said, “come and try the demo”. But they didn’t, from the get go it was a beta and so if anything, they labelled it correctly. You can’t base the feedback of what is most likely a small number of people compared to the thousands that have pre-purchased it.

Even taking this site as a small focus group, I would say the people that are for and against the beta being bad is somewhat even if not more in favour of it not being a failure.

If this had been called anything but a beta it would be a marketing failure but that’s not the case. Just because people are moaning about a beta means absolutely nothing. Mostly because you have forums about almost any game with people moaning about something concerning the game, and usually for a released product.

I bet you anything, if the reviews launch to good scores, all this beta nonsense will be quickly forgetten. That’s what I’m waiting to see.

People wouldn’t be moaning about these bugs half as much If the beta had been fun.

@40: There’s a difference between reporting and complaining. People complained more than they reported. Feedback, in order to be relevant for the devs players need to include information like specs, settings, situation, what they did before they got into this situation, if it is repeatable.

@45

Look, you don’t seem to understand (nor do a lot of people on this site).

It doesn’t matter what DICE called it, or what it was. People expected something of a demo quality, and didn’t get it. You can defend DICE all you want, call the people stupid, that doesn’t matter, the damage is done.
You can’t use what it was intended to be as a measure of success, you have to use what it was received as.

If you honestly thing more people played the beta and were swayed into buying it than swayed out of buying it, then the beta was a success. I don’t think that’s true though – anyone who was on the fence would be more likely not to buy based on the beta (buggy, not terribly fun, shit map, etc). And, again, it doesn’t matter if they expected a demo and DICE gave them a beta. The horse has already bolted.

I’ve no doubt if the reviews are good people will go buy the game. That’s not the issue. My experience of the beta made it go from a “Day 1, definite” to a “Wait for reviews”, I’d say I’m not the only one in that regard – from reading forums and such, some even went from day 1 to “cancel preorder”.

bugs or no bugs the game doesnt play like battlefield

@48, And I’m sure that this “disaster” of a few cancelled pre-orders based on a buggy beta will have DICE and EA shaking in their boots with worry.

If the game launches to mediocre reviews, that will be somewhat of a disaster. However, until that time I’m sure they’re pretty satisfied with the way things are going. Despite a few complaints about a bad beta experience.

Additional: I’m not even defending DICE or EA. I’m simply stating the facts: this was a beta, this was for testing, this worked perfectly fine for me.

All this stuff about “damage being done” and the that DICE didn’t do enough to clarify what they were releasing is based on some forums. I will wait until the game comes out, the reviews are in and we get an idea of how successful it was before I start speculating on what “damage” has been done.