In my last article about Battlefield Bad Company and Electronic Arts, I did little to disguise how incredibly irked I was when I discovered that the game was full of glitches, lag, cheaters, and plagued with massive server instability. My annoyance with them only increased when my emails to their tech support went completely unanswered (they sent me an email a few weeks later asking me how their customer service performed at resolving my issue -I thought that was funny). However, some readers felt my criticism was too harsh or unwarranted, and in retrospect, perhaps I was a bit hard on them. It may have taken them almost a month, but the servers are running fine now and you can no longer exploit glitches to point boost. I still stand by my belief that the game should not have shipped in its original state, but at least I can play it now without bugs and glitches hampering my fun.
Recent purchasers of Electronic Art’s new NCAA College Football 09 and Nascar 09 apparently haven’t been so lucky.
Brian Cook of NCAA Football Fanhouse reports that NCAA 09 game play is full of bugs and glitches. Roster editing is flawed, AI sliders are broken, CPU pursuit angles are messed up (which usually results in the computer being incapable of tackling your players), etc. etc. EA has announced that they’re working on a at least two patches to fix these problems, but Brian reminds us that last year (when NCAA 08 shipped with tons of bugs) it took Electronic Arts almost two months to release these patches.
One very unfortunate gamer has discovered a serious glitch in NASCAR 09 for the Xbox 360 that causes your game to freeze up. The only way to fix it is to delete your game saves and profile and start all over again. It doesn’t matter if you’ve already invested thirty minutes or thirty hours in your game -if you run into this problem you’re pretty much screwed out of all your work. It’s also being reported that Electronic Arts has done nothing so far to address these complaints with absolutely no response being issued to posts in the company’s public forums or tech support emails.
It’s things like this that make me genuinely believe that Electronic Arts does not care the slightest about the quality of their games. It’s asking a whole lot to believe that these game breaking glitches somehow escaped their tester’s notice, and that Electronic Arts shipped these games out completely oblivious of the plethora of problems plaguing these games. More likely they knew the problems existed, but instead of doing the right thing and delaying the game’s releases until they could iron out the glitches, Electronic Arts decided to sell the games, make their money, and then try to fix the problems later if at all.
I think Kotaku puts it best when they say,
“Seriously, EA Sports, why is it amateur hour all of a sudden? What the fuck is the matter with you people?”
The only thing I can disagree is with the “sudden” part. I’m pretty sure EA has been messing up their games for quite sometime.
Mark Fujii: I'm your typical college student who plays too much video games. I also work as an electronic sales associate, meaning I sell Ipods and violent video games to your children when not trying to sneak off and play Super Smash Bros while the boss isn't looking. Oh, and I'm totally awesome. True fact.
Comments
Bruce Simmons (Bruce Simmons) says:
(Posted July 21st, 2008 at 1:34 pm)
EA has had a reputation for dumping things on the community and giving minimal support after their first patch or two is released. It’s been that way from their earliest versions of NASCAR racing when they locked up the franchise license. Which was a bummer since Sierra / Papyrus had done such an excellent job supporting the users.
DC Shipman (DC Shipman) says:
(Posted July 21st, 2008 at 7:00 pm)
Not everyone who buys Nascar 09 for xbox 360 is online. They will buy a defective product and won’t be able to get a patch. At this time EA knows it’s defective and continue to sell it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3vC-fe5d7g This is a widespread defect that many people are posting.
Jim Chapman (Jim Chapman) says:
(Posted July 22nd, 2008 at 6:47 am)
This is and has been has ongoing problem with EA. This first NASCAR effort for the PC, NASCAR Revolution, was rampant with problems and utterly failed to meet both EA performance claims and gamer expectations. The dissatisfaction/feedback on EA’s NASCAR forum, at that time, was so negative that EA actually shut down the site.
While the present forum has not been shut down, at least not yet, the moderators are presently engaging in behavior, which in my opinion, is designed to minimize the effective of negative feedback. Threads and constantly being closed, moved, and/or buried. For example, feedback on NASCAR 09 has now been moved from the NASCAR 09 Feedback area to the NASCAR 09 Technical area.
dcshipman (dcshipman) says:
(Posted July 23rd, 2008 at 10:32 am)
Part 2 to the video mentioned in this article.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-YHk_AuOQKU
This also shows what Jim Chapman is talking about.
NASCAR Racing Games - A Perspective on EA Games | NASCAR Bits and Pieces (NASCAR Racing Games - A Perspective on EA Games | NASCAR Bits and Pieces) says:
(Posted April 25th, 2009 at 9:20 pm)
[…] on the217 gamersguide they have a great little article that takes note that the EA NASCAR 09 has a serious glitch on the […]
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Mark Fujii
I'm your typical college student who plays too much video games. I also work as an electronic sales associate, meaning I sell Ipods and violent video games to your children when not trying to sneak off and play Super Smash Bros while the boss isn't looking. Oh, and I'm totally awesome. True fact.
nikki (nikki) says:
(Posted July 20th, 2008 at 10:47 pm)
Welcome to the era of online patches. Now that developers can just send out a nice little update and hit the majority of people who bought the game, it seems like they’re investing less time in through testing.