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Battlefield 4 (PS4) Status: Stopped playing - Got frustrated I started playing this game on Saturday 27 April, 2024 // I stopped playing this game on: Monday 13 May, 2024
Current opinion of this game
No comment, yet.
May 13, 2024 02:39:55 PM
I decided to bail from the game - in frustration - I Was making "fine" progress in the campaign, but after losing a few times in a mission I decided to call it quits because - the checkpoint was too far (I had made slow but significant progress, then died, and had to go back to the beginning, and it was too many times at this point). But, more importantly, I just ran into too many technical issues that sort of "broke" the game experience for me. A few examples: a. AI partner is 2 meters away from an enemy, both are shooting at each other - super close, and no one hits. The partner AI just seemed obviously too ineffective (as well as the enemy AI). b. In the "escape from jail" mission - the part right after you turn off everything from a tower in the middle and then have to go back down to guards waiting for you - all the guards were somehow completely unaware of my presence, so I knifed them all, they died and then more respawned and ran in, and still did not see me. I eventually just moved on... c. I'm shooting at enemies, through the scope and clearly and obviously hitting them - but there's no effect. I wasn't "hitting the ground" nor was there anything in between myself and the target. And the target wasn't that far for the ballistic drop off or weapon range to be an issue. I have no idea what was going on to be honest but I had experienced earlier similar issues. d. They story/narrative started to rapidly decrease in its comprehensibility. I was captured in china, taken to a prison that was then in Singapore? Or that's where I arrived after escaping, but it was in the jungle, but the jail was at the top of a really snowy mountain? Maybe I'm just confused by the geography here? But there's also some super secret that involves a Chinese national I helped bust out, whose "wife" (not the wife?) was a double agent, she got us all jailed, but then she's "the good guys" again? But what's this all about anyways? Now, there's a difference between "the story's simple, but it's kind of stupid" which I'm usually fine with. But here I feel like it's in the "kind of stupid" camp - but too complicated to follow along with easily? All that being said... I though the weapon system was interesting - you can hit the "boxes" in the level and just equip whatever you want (that you've unlocked/found). I was partial to some of the Chinese-manufacture weapons (are they based on real weapons?). It was also fun to ride around in vehicles (once I learned how to exit them). I also thought it was pretty neat how the art direction on the cover (blue/orange color palette) is also part of the game - at least in some of the earlier missions!
May 7, 2024 01:04:49 PM
So, something strange happened - and it turned out the problem is the kind of thing that makes me really angry because it shows how stupid some decisions are.. Ok, so I load up the game and from the splash menu (press X to start) I get taken to a screen that says "Please reset your password", there's QR code, some instructions and the options to "Close" and "X Select". None of the buttons work. I have no idea what this is about, but ok - I'll reset my password. No idea why, or what password. The QR code takes me to a webpage, I reset my password. And nothing happens in the game. Ok, lets close the game, open it up again..see what happens. No luck. I reset my password (for an EA account) again, still no luck. Then I think, maybe I have two EA accounts? So, I try another email - still no luck. I close the game, change the password on the second account again, and still no luck. Why is this happening? I have no idea. AFAIK, I've never even linked my PSN account to an EA account. I start googling, no luck. But plenty of people complaining (from years ago). All the online help, EA customer support pages included mention stuff you do from your EA account. I try it all. From both accounts, just in case. In both accounts I actually can see that I have not linked my PSN account. This is stupid. I cannot play a game on my Playstation, lawfully purchased and all the rest, because EA wants me to update a password - which I have. And I don't know why. I spend about an hour searching around trying to get someone on customer support at EA. Their webpage seems designed to make this impossible. Maybe they don't even have that anymore? Eventually I do find a chat interface. I don't know where or now. I wait for 15 minutes before someone comes on. They're helpful. I tell them what's going on... I give them the emails I've tried (for the EA account) and my PSN account. They then tell me that none of those are the account. AND that my EA account (one I have no idea about) has been deleted because it hasn't been used in too long. No, bear in mind I was playing BF4 a week earlier and supposedly this involved it checking my account and whatnot. So, I don't know how that works. The EA chat rep won't tell me what email was used - it's probably (maybe?) the one I had over 15 years ago when I was a PhD student... BUT, they tell me they can unlink it. I say sure. Go for it. Account I don't know about, that has been deleted, is now unlinked. AND, I can now - from my computer - link one of my other EA accounts to my PSN account and it all works. Geez, is it really necessary to have all these accounts linked up? No. Can't they tell that the account is still "used" because I'm playing on Playstation? Isn't that what they wanted to know in the first place? Why was the account deleted in the first place? ALL of this is stupid. And none of it is necesarry. Sigh.
May 2, 2024 09:05:51 PM
In my default imaginary for (recent-ish) games in the Battlefield series, I don't like Battlefield games because their gunfeel is different from Destiny and CoD in ways I can't really articulate, but don't like. I'm pretty sure I played Battlefield 3 for 20 minutes or so, didn't like it and turned it off and never wrote a GameLog about it. I did play Battlefield 1 though and I do recall liking it, though I'd have to read my old GameLog (I hope I wrote one!) to see if there was more to it than that. 4, the one I started playing now, was getting off on the wrong foot, but I decided to stick it out a bit...and I think I'm getting used to it? I think I'm 3 or 4 missions in at this point and the story is crazy, overly hoo-rah melodramatic, but still kind of fun and interesting. There are some strange things I haven't figured out - on one early mission I boarded a truck and was driving it around and stuff...but I could not for the life of me figure out how to leave/exit the truck! So, I stuck with driving around and running over enemies until...I got killed. This was both a little bit funny, but also frustrating! (I still don't know how to exit a vehicle...so I now never board one unless I have to for the story...which, so far, has only been twice - gun boats both times). I was also unsure what the general practice is for weapons - what I've gathered so far is that you start with few weapons available to you and you're supposed to find new ones - sometimes it's just the ones enemies are using (the chinese weapons I picked up are so much better than the ones I started with by default! I'm really surprised by this tbh, it seems counter to the setting - elite US military force would drop their equipment for that of the enemy, no?). And every now and then you run into a little crate from which you can change your weapon loadout. I'm not super convinced I like this - it seems that the idea is that you'd replay missions with better weapons to get a better score to unlock more stuff? Anyways, my plan is to play the campaign - I don't think it's too long, and I've been having enough fun with that so far even though some of the missions are pretty dumb in annoying ways (I'm thinking of one where I had to destroy a tank with tank mines - which worked - but I had to sort of lay two in a row to actually destroy it? I had to redo this part a few times because the tanks kept on not getting destroyed, once it never even noticed me, and other weird behavior). It's also strange (to me) that the chinese are the enemy - a rogue general has taken control, and there's chaos in the streets. Stuff like that.

Battlefield 4 (PS4)