Battlefield 3 Day One Patch Makes The Game ‘Final’

DICE’s David Goldfarb has confirmed that the day one Battlefield 3 patch will take the game to its proper state, incorporating all the last minute changes the developer didn’t manage to nail down before the game went gold.

In a response over Twitter, Goldfarb replied to a query regarding IGN’s stalling of a console review, saying that the patch, which is around 170MB, has “all the final stuff”.

Existing reviews of the game have all been for the PC version, with no officially sanctioned console reviews currently on the ‘net.  We’ve pinged EA again this morning for an estimation on delivery of review code so we can let you know what it’s like.

Current word is that whilst the multiplayer is amazing, single player is – according to one review at least – ‘lacklustre’.

38 Comments

  1. Should be used to all these day one patches now. Dead island, Resistance 3…list goes on.

    • I know its out of place, but what is this lovely font TheSixAxis has?

      • Glad it isn’t only me who’se noticed it. Not sure whether I like it or not though.

      • I believe it’s Segoe UI.

      • Its definitely not Segoe UI

      • It’s still Tahoma, the same as before, just slightly smaller I think. Looks great though.

      • I would have said larger if anything. Looks like it’s gone from about 8pt to 11pt (or something).

      • And its not Tahoma either lol!

      • Looks like Humanist to me. Love the font. Great choice too (for TSA comments, etc).

      • Looking at the source code, it could be Verdana.

      • It’s Open Sans, a Google font.

      • Love how a battlefield article has turned into a discussion about fonts & which one’s are nicer! XD

      • Ah, it’s Open Sans (which is the open source Sans font based on Humanist). I was kinda right. Gold star for my school book? :-P

      • Glad that’s settled! :)

      • well my comment opened up an unusual discussion. I like the new font, looks great.

  2. Shouldn’t that be on the fecking disc? Sorry, i’m a bit annoyed atm.

    It looks like those without net are going to get an incomplete game then. :-/ Seriously, why can’t developers push for it to be delayed so that they can finish coding it and fix any bugs?

    Hmm, seeing as Dice are “perfectionists”, it shouldn’t have a day one patch. Methinks, EA were lying.

    • I agree. I guess they can slip these delays through as a patch rather than the bad PR they’d get if they missed the release date.

    • that job withdrawal has really got to you (your massive rant on twitter) :P very true about DICE claiming to be perfectionists. Surely a perfect release is one that doesn’t need a day one patch.

    • Simply put, any delay costs them money.

      I see what you are saying about non-online consoles (& i actually agree), but i suspect that their view will be somewhat percentage based – As in potentially somewhere around 80-90% of consoles are online (which is a guess on my part), so they’ll take the hit on the minority.

      I’d hope that the day one patch was just a bit of spit & polish to be honest, but who knows what “all the final stuff” involves?

    • If they delayed the game it would probably cost them a lot of sales. Remember, MW3 is out in 2 weeks.

    • The vast majority of the fixes will be for multiplayer, so won’t affect the tiny percentage of people who haven’t got Internet anyway.

    • Whilst I agree to a degree, the majority of the updates/fixes are for MP, which you will of course require the net for…

  3. While I can see that the ability to patch games after release helps improve the experience for the end user, I worry that developers are relying on it more and more. I can’t remember the last full disk-based game I bought that didn’t need patching straight away, even on day one.

    • Agreed. Devs should be working to a better standard. I can understand if there are a few things to patch here and there a month or two after release, but a day one patch especially for such a high profile game is not on. What of all the people playing offline with no connection or hope of getting that patch? recent stats show that 50% of global xbox 360 owners are not online, what about them? This also puts the onus on reviewers ad sites like TSA to review pre-patched code only (which i think is already the case) and not hold back on criticism or use the excuse “it’ll be fine once the patch comes out”.

    • Day one patches, more often than not, are patches for the multiplayer part of the game.

      I’m not saying that’s the case for every single patch but its surely the case for most of them. So in the dev’s eyes, if you’re going to be playing multiplayer, you’re obviously going to have your console online.

      • Multiplayer patches are a little bit better, but it’s still getting annoying.

  4. Day one patches are no issue for me. I have no problems with the pressing the discs and getting the packaging sorted out in advance, I would rather have a day one patch than a game with no patch or a delayed game.

    As to the fact this should be on the disk to help those without the net, I would be surprised ant any console owner or gamer buying a FPS with no internet. Why pay 40 odd quid for a short game, the multiplayer is what this is all about.

    • For you maybe, but global xbox 360 figures show that a large number are not online.

    • I play an awful lot of FPS and mainly for the SP campaigns, I had my fill of all the competitive stuff as a teenager with Quake and UT, so now the only one I bother with is MAG because of the team stuff. I’ll buy them at release, rip through the campaign and then trade it whilst the value is high.

  5. While I have no problem with ‘day patches’ I do sympathise with gamers who either have no internet connection or have severely limited packages.

    Both consoles should have the ability to patch a game using an external storage device and game developers should host console patches, so that they can be downloaded via PC (work or friends) for installation later.

    Heck, BF3s isn’t even a bad patch size, what about the likes of GT5 and others which stretch to GBs worth of patch data.

  6. Hardly a huge surprise given the public beta was released so close to release date (seriously, why not earlier?…)

    I have to give DICE credit though for getting a patch ready for day one. Killzone 3 (which also had a beta very close to release) was rubbish online compared to KZ2 in terms of features and gameplay and it took them quite a while to patch it properly.

  7. Thats the most surprising news I’ve heard all day. ugh, I’m getting bored of day one patches. They’re here to stay though, for sure.

  8. 170MB? Could have been a lot worse!

  9. its not a bad patch, compared to R3 and others. Wont take long and is hardly massive. Just another 10 minutes before I get to play it. ..boooooo !

  10. I just dont get this at all, why couldn’t they get the 170mb of code in the final product! Getting tired of this attitude from developers on launch day, especially after Dead Island.

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