Is Battlefield 4 Really A Complete Mess?

Before the accusations start rolling in (because I know they will), I have not played Battlefield 4 (I don't really care much for shooters); however, I have been reading about the game on NeoGAF, Reddit, and /v/ among others, and the general consensus is that EA and DICE dropped the ball completely.

From what I gather, the game is unstable, doesn't run without crashing, has a plethora of bugs and glitches that either have not been acknowledged, or have not been given a projected timeline for getting addressed, or are worse after getting addressed, with more cropping up every day. The netcode seems to be unstable, the multiplayer seems to be awful, the single player campaign we know sucks, and in spite of all of this, EA is pushing DLC for the game some how.

With all of these player impressions, and news like Polygon dropping the score of the game to 4/10 because of its continuing issues, makes me wonder: is the game really that bad?

I want to know what System Wars thinks here: did EA and DICE really **** it up that bad? Did they really devalue what might have been the best brand to go up against Call of Duty with a rushed, broken release?

Worst than a mess. The messiest mess i have played online. Im still playing it daily because i have nothing to play on my POS4.


Edit 2.0: I also have to mention this, i've beaten the campaign to unlock multiplayer shit and get dem trophies and its the worst singleplayer experience i've had in at least 4 years, no joke. Like are the ppl writing this thing going full r*tard? Please tell me DICE!? Are you people fucking stupid? We all know multiplayer is their main focus but why can't it be both? What do you say? Can't do that cuz it takes too long? Well then fking release only multiplayer and charge $40! Your campaign is the worst in the industry...

I wasn't very interested in this game, but it had a great Black Friday sale, so I couldn't pass it up. I've been playing it for a few days, and all the claims of it being a buggy mess are true. The game crashes almost every other game for me. Sometimes the maps textures get currupted or fail to load in properly. The single player is also buggy in various ways and has yet to be fixed.

If you are interested in buying BF4, I would wait until most of these issues are fixed.

Edit: Oh yeah, and one of the most annoying bugs is the sound getting cut out in the PC version. Really lame.

Battlefield 3 was the same way, they just patch it up over time, still an excellent multiplayer FPS

The PC version is the best one still. It does have crashing problems but its mroe or less problem free when i'm playing.

at first the pc version was awful with crashes ect, but thats all gone for me at least... plays perfectly fine now.

@charizard1605:

I am having much better luck with BF4 than I ever did with BF3. (PC for both games)

BF3 was always an unstable crashy mess for me. Tons of hard crashes (requiring reboot), lockups and the like.

BF4, while not perfect, has been much more forgiving for me. It rarely crashes on my PC, and when it does, it is a crash to desktop. Also, I could never overclock my GPU's in BF3 or would hard lock almost immediately. BF4 allows me a modest GPU overclock, but if I get too frisky with the OC it will still CTD on me.

Aside from technical issues, I find BF4 to be a much better game overall. I just seem to have more fun when playing BF4. BF3 always felt like a frustrating chore to play.

I had a much better time with BF3 than BF4.

It's OK for me now.

The Mrs has had it since day 1, with premium. Very bad value initially, games were too low on tickets, and crashes were too frequent.

However, the game has gotten much more stable. Over the weekend I got BF4 for PC for $30USD, a real steal. It runs pretty damn well on my Pentium G860 - a dual core CPU. Also have a 7850, everything looks amazing and I achieve 60fps.

I'm not the biggest battlefielder, and I'm considering purchasing a Logitech G700s just to enhance my experience (with this and all PC games), because I've been enjoying the game. As for the Mrs, well, she still thinks BF4 is an awesome game, despite the tough launch period.

Its being cut off on all platforms even last gen ones. Rubberbanding is what BF4 does well and should win awards for it...

It's REALLY disappointing, it seems like they managed to make a glitchier BF3.

I am actually saying that out of disappointment and not hate, since Halo has kind of a dead community and I needed a new console shooter to look forward too.

bf3 wasn't anywhere near as fuckedup

I'd love to get BF4 on PC, though remembering back to the first 4 months of BF3 I decided against early adopting. 3 was an unplayable mess on PC, with ridiculous stutters (despite maintaining a high frame rate) and connection errors galore.
I look forward to blasting some BF4 sometime in the new year!

I was with my friend while he played it for around 3 hours on PS3 a while back. I think it crashed twice for no reason that I saw.

On the PC, I had a few crashes in single player towards the middle of the game. Multiplayer, didn't really play it enough to say. Then again, my first steps into it weren't that great, seemed like a step back from BF3.

I rarely disagree with you Silver, but this time I do.

BF4 runs a lot better and more consistent on my PC than BF3 ever did.

But I do understand that everyone's experience will vary. I think I just got lucky with my current hardware configuration this time.

DICE has a track record of BF games being buggy as all hell at release time. I had tons of issues with BF2 and BF3. But they do tend to get everything sorted out eventually. Gotta admit though, that sounds sad as hell. This shouldn't be an issue anymore. It's not like they are a new, untested studio.

It has it's problems, but it's still a fun game

The game crashed on me a few times but other than that it seem to work fine. Although i do notice when you go into those 64player games, it gets a bit weird in some parts

They didn't f*** up bad, but they did F*** up. It's great when it works, annoying when it doesn't. 1/10 games I hit a snafu, other days everything is great. Still, I can't discount those snafus because they do annoy me greatly.

I threaten the game, "I have other amazing games to play BF4, so stop F***ing around or I will move on, and I may not come back."

It works sometimes.

Poor DICE having to fix this game for the next month or two.

ive had rubber banding a grand total of 3 servers out of 100s... dont know what your talking about.

What im talking about? Every single Goldmud Railway watch is a rubberband. I have never played this map without some crazy rubberbanding. You zoom with a tank and your scope moves, skip frames and unscope by itself is soooo fking annoying when you're trying to snipe another tank across the map and it has nothing to do with my connection either.

I've only been playing since Thursday but its been working pretty great for me for the most part on PC. I can't wait to play this on a next gen console. The vehicles are a nightmare to control with a kb/m

its not a complete mess it's just frustrating at times. Some days it's great other days it's horrible. I've put this game away till they fix it.

@charizard1605: It's fine for me on Xbox one, but not without its shortcomings:

-Saving does not seem to work in single player, but apparently a patch is coming soon perhaps this week....no biggie, I buy BF for the multiplayer.

-In multiplayer, quick match will almost always put you in a deathmatch, no matter what mode you select...no biggie either, just use server browser.

-Depending on your luck, it may take you a few minutes of using server browser to find a game....best thing to do is keep trying every few seconds in the same game, you will usually get in within a min or 2.

-The infamous sound cutting out glitch from BF3 reared its ugly head a few times.....they need to patch that asap, how embarrassing it's still not fixed.

Once you get in a match it's overall smooth sailing, I've played 64 player matches in Metro 2014, without any lag, was pretty intense.

sounds like a problem your end. play all maps including that one without rubberbanding, only time that is EVER an issue is when the server is really screwed and everyone rubberbands.. which lilke i said ive experianced 3 times... and that was launch week

I thought it was a mess even before the online issues. I feel like that whole series just became popular because it was the best alternative to Call of Duty, and it's been popular to hate Call of Duty for a few years now.

Battlefield has always been the same to me. Super-large maps where you spawn forever away and by the time you run to almost halfway to where the battles actually are, you get sniped by some neckbeard sitting in a bush somewhere.

I don't know what system you're playing on but every single person i play with rubberband in this map on ps4. This isn't the only map but the most noticeable.

BF4 is overrated trash! I just don't see the appeal Vs. CoD. I guess it is dependent on your tastes in FPS's. I find BF4 to be very Halo-ish in the fact that it generally takes a full clip to drop someone. Where are the Hardcore modes? I might like it more if it were half way realistic. It is a visual stunner on PS4 and I'm sure PC, but to me the gameplay is lame compared to Ghosts!!

Nah, people are blowing its issues out of proportion. It's not actually that bad since the update. I've only crashed twice since the last update. Other than sound not showing up in my uploaded BF4 vids and not being able to pick servers I have no issues with the game. It's a lot of fun and I'm quite pleased with my purchase. Yea, during the 1st week on PS4 it was crappy but the last update fixed a lot of the crashes for me.