Recently, the Battlefield 2 Demo was released for download on XBL Marketplace.
Being an original XBox fan of the game, I was delighted and quickly went to the Marketplace to download it. For one day, it was beautiful. Five different kit classes to choose from, five weapons in each kit, Apache helicopters, 120mm tanks, and the list goes on with cool toys to play with. The higher polygon count of the 360 also allowed for much more detail and shadowing, making this version a hands down step up from the original.
Day 2 was when things began to change. Servers were impossible to find. The ones that were found had phenomenal lag, making them unplayable. Even when I unplugged my router and hardwired my 360 I still got much of the same. The original XBox version also had similar problems and needed extensive patching to maintain stability. My hopes that the 360 version would be better in this regard were dwindling rapidly.
Finally, after no available server for EA Online for a few days, a patch was released. With some new skepticism, I jumped in once again. The servers were accessible, however there was still sporadic heavy lag, with some dropping of the server halfway through the game. I have to wonder, if this demo is the marketing tool for EA's top shooter, it seems we can only expect much of the same problems similar with the first version. I guess time will tell.
So what have your experiences been?
Day 2 was when things began to change. Servers were impossible to find. The ones that were found had phenomenal lag, making them unplayable. Even when I unplugged my router and hardwired my 360 I still got much of the same. The original XBox version also had similar problems and needed extensive patching to maintain stability. My hopes that the 360 version would be better in this regard were dwindling rapidly.
Finally, after no available server for EA Online for a few days, a patch was released. With some new skepticism, I jumped in once again. The servers were accessible, however there was still sporadic heavy lag, with some dropping of the server halfway through the game. I have to wonder, if this demo is the marketing tool for EA's top shooter, it seems we can only expect much of the same problems similar with the first version. I guess time will tell.
So what have your experiences been?
