Battlefield 1943: If It’s Broke, Fix It!

(This feature can also be read on InfoAddict.)

Battlefield 1943 blew the doors off the XBLA Marketplace, selling a mammoth 600,000 copies in just three days to become the fastest selling arcade game in the platform’s history. It’s a well-deserved success for a truly awesome game that finds me returning night after night for my fix.

Unfortunately, not all is well in the world of Battlefield as a few glaring problems are increasingly annoying the shit out of me. Worse, EA/DICE aren’t copping to any issues and are acting like too many other game companies by simply burying their head in the sand while they count your money.

So what needs fixing? Here goes…

Fix the Squad System

I play Battlefield 1943 every night with my brother as a two-man squad. At the end of nearly every round, our squad is disbanded and we find ourselves on opposite sides. We can only reform our squad if there happens to be an available slot on either side, which is seldom the case.

That means we have to exit the round, go back to the main menu, reform our squad and search for yet another game, only to repeat that process over and over and over.

It’s frustrating, ridiculous and it needs to be addressed.

This situation most likely occurs because the auto-balancing system is trumping the squad party, which is not the way it should work.

Fix the Squad System Part II

DICE made a huge error in making squads an option and not mandatory. Joining a squad is a benefit to every player as it gives you up to three more options on where to spawn after a death. Without a squad, you are stuck spawning on the carrier or a captured flag. When you’re in a squad, you can spawn next to any squad member, affording you access to current skirmishes and flag attacks that happen to be underway.

Battlefield 1943 should force players into a squad from the get-go. No option to go solo. The entire game is based upon squad play, yet for some reason DICE lets people go lone-wolf, which is pretty stupid.

Obviously, players could solve this problem by joining a squad, but considering your average player is a complete moron, I’d rather not sit around waiting for the community to solve an issue that shouldn’t be an issue. I back my “moron” claim because more often than not, when I click Join an Open Squad….I don’t actually join an active squad because THERE ARE NO SQUADS TO JOIN. That means there are 11 people on my team acting like a solo-tard.

Fix the Matchmaking

Not as prevalent as the relentless Squad Disbanding bug but no less annoying is Battlefield 1943’s weak matchmaking service that find me entering a round with only a handful of players on the server. Playing 4 versus 4 is not uncommon, nor is it any fun.

Battlefield 1943 is meant to be played 12 versus 12. Period. 10 versus 10 should be the threshold before the server is restarted and repopulated. Why games that are populated with only 8 total people are allowed to exist is beyond me. It makes for a thoroughly boring experience, forcing the player to bail on the round and return to the main menu, hoping the next round will actually be populated with players.

This wouldn’t be so bad if nearly empty games were injected with players to fill the server, but that rarely happens, indicating there is a bug in DICE’s system that needs to be addressed.