At this point, Battlefield 4 developer DICE seems intent on testing the patience of its fans, who have had to put up with a broken game for months now.
On Monday, GamesBeat covered a major patch for first-person shooter Battlefield 4’s online multiplayer mode that fixed many of the game’s issues on PC. For the PC community, things were finally starting to look up. Today, a minor server update has reversed its condition to unplayable for many playing on PC.
The latest multiplayer server update from developer DICE, labeled “R20,” has created a serious bug which prevents players from redeploying their character after dying. The cause seems to come from PunkBuster, the anticheating software. A Reddit contributor posted a way to update PunkBuster, which many other Redditors claim has eliminated the issue for them. Some, however, attempted the update with no luck, leaving them stuck with the game-breaking glitch.
The conversation on Reddit quickly became a courtroom, with dozens of dissatisfied Battlefield 4 players indicting DICE and publisher EA for the way they’re handled (or failed to handle) quality control of the game. Months after release, this community is more frustrated than ever at continuing failures to fix the game’s problems. Since October, dozens of bugs and glitches have reduced the game to a mess of crashes and bizarre happenings for a large portion of its player-base on all platforms.
Updates like R20, which introduce new issues, only serve to further antagonize Battlefield fans.