For those of you hoping that SSX’s online multiplayer will be available to everyone, I’m afraid I have some bad news. Though it was not outright stated, in a video off of GiantBomb you can clearly see an option to “Get Online Pass” in the bottom left corner.

EA has been using the Online Pass system for over a year now for many of its hottest online titles. A new copy of a game using Online Pass will have a code printed on a sheet that the customer can redeem. However, if somebody has a previously used copy of a game requiring the Online Pass, then they will need to purchase a Pass directly from EA. In other words, it’s EA’s way of getting in the used game segment of the market, a segment that publishers normally don’t get into.

Though it’s not surprising that EA is using this system for SSX, the trend in general is a little bothersome. By forcing people to pay money directly to the publisher for the “crime” of using a second-hand game, they’re essentially preventing people from enjoying the game they’ve otherwise bought legally.  And, it’s only looking to get worse, as Microsoft may be looking to prevent your system from playing used games in general, as noted here.

Eleven new publishers will be making games available to Electronic Arts Origin service, it was announced today. Trion Worlds, Robot Entertainment, CD Projekt RED, Freebird Games, Recoil Games, Autumn Games, 1C Company, inXile Entertainment, Paradox Interactive, Core Learning Ltd., and N3V Games will all start selling games in the “coming months”.

Steam is Origin’s biggest competitor, and by many estimates is absolutely the industry leader in digital distribution of games and DLC. EA, however, has been trying to level the playing field a little bit as they’ve been making some of their recent games require using the Origin service, forcing users to forgo using Steam.  These deals reached should only help EA in their endeavor to compete with Steam.

But will this actually affect Steam’s fan base? I would guess that for the moment, Steam doesn’t have much to worry about. Many people use Steam because of the simplicity it provides, not only in purchasing and downloading new content, but also in the way it connects other people. Steam has a following and reputation that at the moment, it just cannot be beat. Origin just plain does not have that reputation. It doesn’t mean, though, that there can’t be more than one successful digital distribution service. This might be the thing that gets the ball rolling for EA.

One of the biggest problems that Battlefield 3 players on the PlayStation 3 are having are voice chat bugs. Look at any Battlefield 3 forum or community site and you’ll see scattered comments and posts about this recent plague. Players are reporting cellphone-like call drops when talking to their friends with the occasional static and inability to talk.

DICE is getting a lot of hate mail regarding the way they’ve handled the problems as of late. A patch just recently rolled out that didn’t even acknowledge the problem as well as created other problems. PS3 players are reporting that since the last patch they are having problems with the game not loading properly. DICE’s only suggestion is to talk to the EA Help Center.

DICE acknowledged the community and said, “We apologize for lateness for the fix and are aware of the inconveniences with the VOIP on PS3. We are working hard to address this concern.” There will hopefully soon be a fix to the VOIP problems but there’s no word on the newest problems.  After all, Battlefield 3 isn’t the same without communication.

When buying a racing game, what is one aspect of gameplay that you are looking for? It’s smooth and realistic driving that mimics real life, right? Racing games are meant to fill the void in our life that consists of driving down the highway going 160mph with not a care in the world. When racing games aren’t the smoothest is when we start to have a problem, though.

A couple of days ago EA released its newest game titled Need for Speed: The Run. Fans held this game on a pedestal because of the potential it had. This game is created on the Frostbite 2 engine (the same engine as Battlefield 3), so the its gameplay/graphics is undeniably awesome, but there is one massive problem!

Electronic Arts’ and Black Box’s anticipated NFS:The Run is LOCKED AT 30FPS. We’ve seen this scenario plenty of times before such as the L.A. Noire case, but compare the pace of each of those games. L.A. Noire is a very slow paced game whereas NFS:The Run is a fast paced racing game. PCs these days are more than powerful enough to handle Frostbite 2 with more than 30fps and this is unacceptable from EA and Black Box.

Some patches are complete and have rolled out, other patches are incoming soon, and others are still being worked on. Support for Battlefield 3 and Modern Warfare 3 is far from scarce and we should be getting all of our bugs ironed out in no time. I’ll be outlining the patches that have rolled out as well as planned patches for both of these games in the sections below.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3

A few days after release and Infinity Ward has already rolled out a patch for Playstation 3 and Xbox 360. If you get on the game now, you’ll see a prompt to download the latest patch. The patch is very small (4MB) and shouldn’t take very long to download at all. This patch fixes any “Out of Memory 14” errors that some PS3 players may have seen. For the Xbox360, the patch fixes any problems with video uploads on standard definition TVs as well as improves the matchmaking system. If you’re having trouble playing with friends today on the Xbox, wait until everyone is running the patched version of the game.

Future patches for the game include a hotfix for the “wall breaching the tanker on Outpost” issue as well as issues involving cross-country matchmaking. Infinity Ward says the matchmaking issue is more prevalent in smaller countries and they are trying to find a solution.

Battlefield 3

The Battlefield 3 issues seem a little more gameplay involved than the Modern Warfare 3 issues. Balance and bugs seem to be the issues DICE is dealing with. This whole patch is still under construction and subject to change. The first issue they are addressing are mortars. Anyone who has played BF3 has realized that the mortars are a very annoying item if you’re playing against them. People basically sit in their spawn and spam the front lines racking up kills like it’s their job. DICE has been throwing around ideas for a fix and they really liked the idea of the solution lying within the MAV. The MAV is the Recon’s Micro Air Vehicle and DICE is planning on making it the anti-mortar vehicle. Gameplay Designer Alan Kertz said “Seriously considering MAVs as a counter to Mortars. ECM jammers could destroy the Mortar with a few hits. Looking for feedback.”

Another bug that was recently discovered was the “all-vehicle IRNV sights” or infrared sights. The basics behind this bug are pretty simple. Hold a gun equipped with IR sights, look down the scope as you hit E to enter a vehicle, observe as the sights for the vehicle are now IR. Kertz responded to this bug by saying “I’ll put it on the fix list, I know exactly what this is.” You can see a video of it in action below the article.

Finally, two more issues have been brought up to DICE. Players are randomly spawning with no gun and people are wanting a colorblind mode. These are soon going to be fixed/added to the game in the near future.

If you were one of the players to pre-order Battlefield 3 and play it during the first week you experienced the instability and jitteriness of EA’s first server setup. Many people let EA know how they felt about this instability any way they possibly could saying things like, “Why didn’t you guys have more servers? Why weren’t you ready?”. EA explained that the problems, mostly dealing with playing with friends as well as server disconnects, couldn’t have been anticipated perfectly. The gaming company says they did their best to anticipate and plan accordingly, but it seems that they had some kinks in the line they needed to iron out.

“Though the first day of launch was somewhat volatile, we are happy to report that server support stabilized to roughly 98.9% through our launch weekend and has not dropped since. That said, we will not rest until we’re at 100%. We are committed to supporting the game as a software service, and listening to consumer feedback every day,” Soderlund said. “We are making daily updates and improvements to ensure an optimal online experience for all. Regardless of the cause or platform, our team at DICE and our Online teams are working together, standing by to identify the issues and addressing them as they arise. Every big multiplayer game experiences some instability at launch. The good news is, we’re listening, responding and improving the service every day.”

This kind of problem takes time to work out and there is no easy quick fix. Tons of money has to be thrown into the fix and no company will throw money into something without doing some research. This research takes a little bit of time.

“There are a number of different factors impacting server connectivity. It isn’t just about buying more servers. Capacity isn’t the only factor. Server architecture, data centers, data transfer — it all makes for an extraordinarily complex system that becomes increasingly intricate as we grow from supporting 1M players to 3M players to 5M players and beyond. That is why we continue to invest in servers, infrastructure and people to support the game,” Soderlund said. “We are dedicated to constantly improving connectivity.”

Soderlund and the rest of the folks over at EA and DICE are pledging that this game has their hearts and their heads. They will continue to put the love into this game that it deserves. They are here for the long run. Since players had to deal with such an unstable launch, EA is considering giving players a little gift.

“We are always looking at ways to generate customer satisfaction and we’re definitely considering a gift to thank players for their patience and dedication, but our #1 road to their happiness is to get everyone playing smoothly and ensure 100% stability,” Soderlund said. “We are gamers too and we understand that no gift will match the experience of getting in the game and playing with friends.”

The numbers came in from DICE headquarters on October 29^th giving us a view on how sales of their newest game has gone. According to the data, sales on the Xbox 360 have almost doubled the sales on Playstation 3. The Xbox 360 number was 2,249,092 and the PS3 number was 1,486,067. Both of these numbers are very impressive.

I’m not sure why these numbers are so different from each other. About the same amount of people own each system (Xbox360 – 57.6 million, PS3 – 55.5 million (as of September 30^th, 2011)), so this couldn’t factor into the reasoning of the differing sales numbers. We’ll just have to see if the numbers even out in time.

The PC sales numbers are also in. As of October 29^th, PC sales hadn’t overcome the 500,000 mark with a figure of 487,181. This number seems substantially low, but I think it’s because they don’t figure in the amount of digital copies sold around the world. These numbers only include physical retail copies. If my theory is wrong, this number may be low due to the substantial computer requirements needed to play this game. Some PC gamers may be holding out on buying the game until they can upgrade their rig. All in all, each of these numbers is very surprising.

A lot of Battlefield 3 players have been pretty upset by the fact that in order to play the game on their PC, they must install EA’s Origin client. After all, most people already use Steam, and don’t feel like loading down their computer with yet another piece of software that does little more than simply allow you to play a game. And since the game is only available on Origin, you have no choice but to download it. Or do you?

A group by the name of Razor1911 has released a piece of software that will allow you to completely bypass Origin altogether. That’s right, after unpacking the files found here, you’ll need only move the Battlefield .exe file to the folder, and double-click. The game will fire up immediately, without so much as opening Origin.

This does leave us with a few questions. The first being whether or not EA has the capability to find out if you are running Origin, and penalize you for bypassing it. Another is whether being forced to use Origin is any worse than being forced to use Steam for various games. Personally, I don’t like being forced to use any extra software that isn’t truly necessary. Valve has just done a good enough job with Steam that given the choice, I’d prefer to use it, rather than not. And that’s exactly what EA needs to do if they want people to get on board with Origin. Make it useful and unobtrusive enough that people actually want to use it. At least now, thanks to Razor1911, you have a choice.

As Battlefield 3 has been out for a week now, some players have been experiencing problems with playing the online multiplayer with the game. There have been issues with dropped matches, poor connection between players, and ongoing server issues. EA is now stepping up, saying that these issues have been addressed, and both on the PC and PS3 connections are stabilizing.

EA spoke with Kotaku on the matter, saying, “We are happy to report that PS3 and PC players experienced server stability all weekend, and Xbox 360 servers are at 95 percent and climbing. There were a number of different factors that impacted server connectivity across the platforms. Regardless of the cause or platform, our online teams are standing by to identify the issues and address them as they arise. We will not rest until we’re at one hundred percent.”

Once the online playability has been completely remedied, EA will announce, and we will update. Of course, the down time does become annoying but it will be handled soon. Another thing, EA doesn’t plan to compensate any players who have been experiencing any of these issues. “No gift will match the experience of getting in the game and playing with friends,” said EA. That must obviously mean that they are putting in overtime to work on the server issues.

DICE’s newest release is still very very young, but already very very vulnerable to people trying to cut corners any way they can.  Luckily, this recent glitch has been accidentally discovered by someone who does not want to release it to the public for the sake of the game.  This guy stumbled upon a glitch that makes him invulnerable to almost any attack and was able to successfully recreate the glitch in another game.

There’s no news of how this is done (and I wouldn’t include instructions in my writing anyways) and it will remain that way unless DICE fixes it.  He has contacted the game developer and let them in on the game’s threatening glitch, but he says if they fail to come up with a fix in a decent amount of time he will release the glitch to the public and force DICE to fix it.  I think that is the right decision by this guy and I commend him for it.

The glitch is pretty insane as you can see in the video below.  He says, “The only way you can die from this glitch is if you get shot by a shotgun, other than that you become immortal, you can survive any other type of bullet, explosive, and melee.  There will be no tutorial released to keep the game safe, however it has been reported to the developers, for a patch.”  Hopefully this is a one time fluke and nothing like this pops up in the future!