What I am wondering with increased frequency lately is what EA and DICE are doing with the Battlefield series of games. We know about all the upcoming games they have announced but their inability or unwillingness to provide a road-map of any kind is getting to the boiling point with some gamers.

Lets start with Battlefield: Heroes. The game was supposed to be launched last Summer but it was held back to add some social components EA said. This made sense considering the company bought up some social networking companies and they would of course want to incorporate these things. We got a closed beta with random contests to get access that made some happy and frustrated more. We kept being told soon, soon. Once into the Summer of 2008 the date was pushed to Winter 2008 but we were informed that an open beta was going to be forthcoming. Nuh uh. No DICE (bad pun I know) on that. They continued with their loopy beta contests at irregular intervals and it wasn't until Fileplanet got some keys did they open it up a bit more. Still, no release date.

Here we are in the Summer of 2009, we have passed through an E3 where Heroes was not mentioned at all. The beta is still going and the game is active enough and seems to work. You can even purchase upgrades at this point through their commerce system. Why, with all this seemingly working and good to go has the game not been released? Curious isn't it? I honestly do not understand the hold up and it isn't making people want the game any more so it's a Chewbacca thing. Does. Not. Make. Sense. Finally, today (June 25th) the game was launched with as little fanfare as possible. Truly a whimper of a launch if there every was one.

Now lets move to Battlefield 1943. Announced last year, the game was to be released for consoles and PCs at the same time. Woops, not exactly. The PC time-frame has been moved to September but excuse me if I'm a little more than skeptical. There was also talk about a demo being released because this is an arcade game and just about all of those get demos on PS3 and Xbox 360. Still no more word on that. Now lets get to the real rub - no release date. We are waiting until June just like they said. Right, it's June 25th and the game has been submitted to Microsoft and Sony for certification (the step right before release if there is nothing wrong) but the date is still up in the air. When I posted about the date being listed as June 30th after seeing it change on a popular gaming press site it was shot down by the developer who said that was simply not true - it would come out sooner. OK, Gordon, what happened here? Maybe you were a little too quick with your dismissal it seems.

The number one problem with DICE and EA is their lack of communication. Let's go further, it's their lack of communication and follow-up. There just seems to be a never-ending moving line of dates that will never be met. This isn't uncommon for either but it's certainly something that DICE excels at. Just looks at the BF2 1.50 patch if you want a great example of over-promising and under-delivering. This of course was supposed to be ready last year but it's still in beta phase now with little news coming out of the devs. Don't even get me started about the lack of BF3 information.

One would hope that a franchise that has such fierce loyalty - just look at how many people still play BF2 - would want to keep that by being up-front and honest with their communication and estimates. Clearly there are forces at work here that complicate the process but more transparency is needed or they risk alienating gamers even more. Contrary to the belief of some marketers, we do have a gaming memory and the bad taste we have now is getting ever more bitter as the days tick off the calendar.

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