This seals the deal: never pre-order a video game.
BROKEN VOIP: A game that requires communication has none. Dice has only been repeating during the past 5 weeks, "We're aware of this problem and are working on it." I wouldn't be surprised if they just bury it. It should have been fixed by now. Instead their tweaking weapons that no one cares about. Why? COST.
INPUT LAG: it's so frustrating it makes me want to throw a kitten through a wall. I either under or over compensate, and the result is it's like playing totally drunk. Again, DICE is ignoring this game-breaking problem.
SQUAD DISBANDING: We set up a squad, but when we start the game we're either on different squads or ENTIRELY DIFFERENT TEAMS! And this is even when we use the server browser to find a game with only a few people in it so the teams remained balanced. We try again and again and experience the PS3 freezing completely. We spend more time trying to get into a game than we do playing a game.
BETWEEN GAME WAITING PERIODS: Between games we have to wait 50 seconds without the ability to drop out, to check our stats, customize our soldiers, or do anything at all. TRAPPED. Then the next round starts and we're stuck waiting another 20 seconds while standing still on the map. So for every 10 minutes of playing time you have to wait more than a minute...more than 10% of the experience is waiting and doing nothing.
BAD HIT DETECTION: I dump a clip into an enemy with a fully automatic assault rifle and get a nice beautiful flood of hit markers. But that amounts to JACK SQUAT when he often just turns around, shoots me with a pistol and drops me in one shot. Perhaps it's lag? Whatever the reason, it's terrible.
TERRIBLE MAP DESIGN: The BF series is known for its huge, open environment maps. With the exception of 2 big, neat maps we have tiny little CoD maps and average sized BF maps. Hallways, buildings, hallways, dark corners. There are lots of flanking paths however once the other team has about 2 hours of game experience they can easily cover those halls and just spam rockets and grenades down them. Sound familiar? Yeah, it's called CoD BLACK OPS.
NEUTERED DESTRUCTION: Bad Company 1 and 2 were awesome. You could level forests, blow up buildings, blow huge craters in the ground that altered vehicle movement. By the end of the round the map had changed to practically a different map. It was beautiful. And in BF3 the destruction was a huge advertising point. DESTRUCTION 4.0! UNRIVALED!........Seriously? It's non-existent. Only a fraction of the buildings can be taken down. Small objects such as crates, garbage cans, fork-lifts can't even be moved. Walls remain intact when you launch bazookas into them. There is an entire labyrinth of storage containers on one map that can't be altered in the slightest. Combined with the small, cramped maps this game is a camper-friendly CoD wannabe.
EMPTY SERVERS: Dice still doesn't get it. They don't merge lobbies so often people will drop out and the match will become completely lopsided. An entire team might even drop out with no one to replace them! I've already experienced 5 vs. 3, 7 vs. 2, and even one game of 5 vs. ZERO for about 20 minutes. It's meant to play 12 vs. 12 and it's not often you'll have a full game. This was the biggest problem in BC2 and it hasn't changed a bit.
AWFUL MENU INTERFACE: You have to hit the d-pad, then use one of the top triggers, use the circle, then use the square, then use the X to get to a weapon and customize it. I couldn't think of a less ergonomic way to customize/change loadouts during the game. It's too time consuming and it's like playing a game of BOP-IT just to prepare for the next spawn...which leads me to my next point:
HORRIBLE SPAWN SYSTEM: One of BC2's strong suits was the awesome spawn system. You can spawn on a squad-mate, back at your base, or on the various captured spawn points in Conquest mode (that's Domination for you CoD fans). When you capture a flag you're at a tactical advantage, and spawning on that flag keeps you at a tactical advantage. Here it's the other way around. You will often spawn right in front of an enemy or vice versa. Spawn killing is commonplace in this game. So the next best idea is to spawn on a squad-mate. But the screen is so dark and blurry you can't tell if he's safe to spawn on. And you can't ask him if he's safe because the VOIP is TRASH. So...just spawn back at your base and go for a mile jog to get back into the action.
TEAM DEATH MATCH TO SUCK IN THE CoD CROWD: Dice added a TDM, with infantry only, and condensed maps. It's a spawn-killing crap-fest. It's worse than CoD. Dice says they will patch this by fixing it so the players can spawn on their squad-mates. Cool, I guess, but this game mode is crap. There is no objective. It's a CoD baby-sitter in the middle of a tactical, strategic game. Obviously I don't have to play it. But because it exists, it has sucked in the CoD crowd and they have infected the objective based games, which leads me to my next point:
UNBALANCED MATCHES: You're either on a team filled with morons, getting completely smeared across the map, or you're on the side that just spanks the other team mercilessly. It's rare the games are close with well-matched teams. There's no intensity there. You're either bored or you're pounding your fists as you watch your teammates run around aimlessly and refuse to support your team's objective. Dice claims to have implemented a skill level system to balance the teams, but it does not work worth a cat turd. The game is so complex and what really makes a soldier good cannot be captured by a formula. The result is nothing but awful imbalance for the majority of the games.
SINGLE-PLAYER CAMPAIGN MODE: Play CoD. It's the same thing. Linear maps. No flanking. No open environments. No vehicle piloting (with the exception of one tank mission). And a plot that is practically a Black Ops clone in its execution.
CANNOT ACCESS UNLOCK PROGRESS OR WEAPONS STATS ON PS3: In order to look up your progress on unlocking weapons, attachments, specs, and gadgets, you need to go onto the internet, log into the battlelog website, and go through a series of tedious menu navigation in order to look at your unlock progress. You can't do it on your TV. You also can't look at the weapon stats (accuracy, power, fire rate, etc.). You have to sign up on a website and set up an account. Why should I have to do that? Why do I have to play around on Battlefacebook instead of just moving forward in-game on my PS3? Ad revenue! Make it more difficult for me to enjoy the experience while you make it easier to line your pockets with cash, EA and DICE. Thanks a lot.
ARE THERE ANY GOOD THINGS??? Yes. It is fun on the extremely rare occasion that it's working. The sounds are awesome. The graphics aren't the best and the textures suck but the lighting and movement is amazing. Weapon recoil is realistic and there is a real sense of power when firing a tank, or an assault rifle. While the campaign is a CoD clone it is still fun to play. Most, if not all of the game's problems are supposedly going to be fixed at some point.
But I don't have my hopes up. Dice has our money and they don't have to give it back. There are too many BF fanboys in denial of the failures of this game to keep DICE believing their broken trash-heap is still a winner. They have refused to respond since launch on some of their failures. They released 2 patches that claimed to fix some of the problems and so far neither patch has worked. And not everyone is experiencing all of the game's problems. Perhaps I'm just unlucky. And I'm not going to wait around to see if they fix it. There are so many unforgivable game-breaking bugs and core failures that I simply cannot be optimistic they will be fixed. I took my game to Gamestop and traded it in for a $30 credit, and I was ripped off. Sadly, there was a big handful of used copies in the store already, less than 5 weeks after release! That's a sign of this big, gigantic failure.
This is the biggest disappointment of a game I have ever experienced. I will never pre-order again. This game was released well before it was ready. But, if 6 months down the road the game is actually completed I will pick it up on eBay, but not for a penny more than $30.
I'm not optimistic EA/DICE will ever be able to convince me that it's possible to pick this turd up by the clean end...but we shall see.