Let me begin by saying two things:
- I have not given up on playing this game, and I've had a relatively good experience in relation to the technical issues;
- I haven't played the campaign yet.
-
There have been many films made that had great potential and perhaps did certain things well, but were more or less sunk by poor editing, a confused script, bad pacing, etc. Sometimes, they were even directed by a well-regarded director; I think Orson Welles made a few films like that. Coppola might be another one.
Battlefield 4 is the video game version of those films that had so much potential but fell short of the mark. You can see the framework, the vision that DICE had for this game. It's obviously there. There is an incredible scope and depth to BF4. When it works properly, there is no better way to get your action fix--parachuting down with explosions around you, gunfire below and the sound of a 7.62 helicopter minigun above, all with a skyscraper falling apart and toppling into the bay below.
When it works properly.
Either DICE bit off more than they can chew, or EA rushed development to release the game ahead of Call Of Duty: Ghosts. There aren't too many other ways to explain what went wrong here. We will likely never know. What we do know is that Battlefield 4 was immediately a huge headache for EA/DICE and a debacle that they may never fully recover from.
To begin with there were, and are, the crashes. At launch on 360, a few maps always crashed the game during rounds. Some people had issues with crashing at loading screens. Did DICE release a patch to fix that? Sure they did! It just didn't fix the issue completely. The map "Dawnbreaker" still crashes in "bigger" game modes like Conquest and Obliteration. The DLC map "Operation Metro: 2014" tends to crash sometimes. There are occasional random crashes on other maps.
Then there was the "corrupted user profile" bug that deleted campaign progress and incurred other problems. If you hadn't played the campaign, it was more annoying than frustrating, but still.
Most damning are the infamous "netcode" and "rubber-banding" issues. The core shooting mechanics in a shooter need to be smooth. That's the point of a shooter. Everything else comes second to that. The core shooting mechanics in BF4 are not smooth. They are sloppy. People often refer to this as "netcode," which, I gather, is not strictly speaking what the problem is. Put simply, the game feels "laggy." Firefights don't always feel quite right. It's the classic "I shot him first, but he killed me anyway" problem, although that's a simplification.
What is "rubber-banding," you may ask? It's a lag-related issue. Say you're standing at a point on a map. We'll designate it point A. You try to move up in a straight line to point B. But as you move, the game seems to stutter, abruptly sending you back a few steps. That is rubber-banding. Your Xbox/Playstation/PC and the game world aren't in sync. Sometimes this is a result of a poor Internet connection, but with BF4, it's also an issue with the game itself.
The game's lag problems can be horrible one day, not especially noticeable the next. But for $60-110, it shouldn't be this inconsistent.
BF4 has been out for quite a while now, and progress has been made towards fixing things. It is much better now. But it's too late for many people, and too late for the game's reputation. No matter what EA/DICE do to rectify all the mistakes, every article, every forum posting, every tweet put out by the official Battlefield Twitter will be covered with this:
"fix the damn game"
"LOL nobody cares about BF4 anymore"
"everybody has moved on from this game, the people still playing it are pathetic"
"Brokenfield 4"
"I stopped playing this game a month ago and haven't looked back. I'm enjoying Titanfall instead of wasting my time on this crap!"
"I spent $110 on a broken piece of #$%& thanks DICE"
"Why don't you stop releasing DLCs and actually fix the netcode?"
"NEVER AGAIN guys NEVER AGAIN will I preorder a game made by DICE"
Etc., etc.
EA wasn't exactly basking in the glow of customer satisfaction before. Imagine how they stand with consumers now. Imagine what the comment sections will look like for the Star Wars: Battlefront reveal in June. Imagine what people will say when Battlefield 5 is announced.
All that said, there's a reason I gave this game a 7 instead of a 4 or 5. It can still be really fun. Like I said, the framework is there. I think I've also been one of the lucky ones re: the bugs, glitches, and lag. But the facts cannot be ignored. The game has to be considered a failure, and it's not a game I can unreservedly recommend. Are you willing to deal with the problems? Buy it. If not...stay away.
When BF4 and COD: Ghosts were nearing release, there was discussion of BF4 "killing COD" and the war between Call Of Duty and Battlefield. The funny thing is they may have killed each other.