I’ve been singing the praises of the XBox360 for some time now. Between Call of Duty 3, Gears Of War, and Madden, I’ve seen the best that the console has to offer for graphics and gameplay. Hooked up to a 1080p LCD TV, this setup looks beautiful. I even began to believe that maybe Microsoft could actually make a good product.
Playing with these games on XBox Live, however, has reminded my why I hate Microsoft products. Madden was relatively smooth and I have few complaints there. It’s a simple online experience, after all, just 1 versus 1 and basic voice communication. Gears and COD3 have been a nightmare by comparison.
The fact that both games suffer from similar troubles makes be believe that the issue is Live, not the games per se. Both games would’ve benefited from a lot more testing of their online experience, no doubt, but the biggest issues have come up with creating or joining games. All of this functionality relies on XBox Live, and in both cases it sucks.
Gears has specific issues finding and joining games. Every time you attempt to join a game that’s close to full, you have at least a 50% chance of getting an error back from the game. The error is cryptic (connection to host lost), but I think it’s the result of what should be an expected and handled error, the game filled up before you got in. It happens often enough that it takes several attempts to actually launch a game.
There are also several gameplay bugs that are pretty annoying. Chainsaw someone and try to move at the same time and you’ll get frozen to the spot until someone kills you. Join a ranked or player match last and sometimes your voice communications won’t work (you’ll be able to hear everyone else, but they won’t be able to hear you). Join a player match after other people who have been through one round already and you won’t be able to hear or talk to them. Those are the most egregious bugs I’ve seen in a console game.
COD3 is even worse. The game requires the most specific router setup possible with either UPnP on and configured correctly on the router (not the case on my newish Linksys router) or port forwarding configured for the “XBox Live” ports (88 UDP and 3074 UDP & TCP incidentally). Without the proper network setup, it’s more or less impossible to join player matches and very difficult to join ranked matches. The game is pretty much unplayable online in this state.
After spending some time investigating all of this, I was able to get online. It got better, but still was and is a horrible experience. It takes upwards of 10 minutes to successfully join a ranked game (after about 2-5 tries). Joining player matches has the same problem as Gears. Overall, the experience is painful to the point that people who otherwise love the game are complaining about it.
Then there are the gameplay bugs. Often times, joining a game in the Abbaye map will put you in an impossible position. I’ve been stuck so that map is offset (I think I’m at one point on the map, but everyone else sees me at a different point), or I get dropped through the floor of the map and continue free falling while everyone is playing miles above me. While it’s cool to be stuck in this weird, cloud filled globe, I want to play the goddamn game. Especially after waiting 10 minutes and trying over and over again to join it in the first place!
The kicker in all of this is that both of these games have been patched once already!
While consoles have generally focused on the single-player or single-console experience, all of the next gen consoles are emphasizing their connected functionality. XBox 360, for example, allows you to download videos, movies, etc. onto your XBox via XBox Live. The online experience is part of the next gen feature set. That’s why I’m just amazed at how bad these games are so far. If Microsoft wants to keep their momentum, they need to fix these things. PS3s seem to be available everywhere now and Christmas is past, so they should be battling on equal footing. The online experiences need to be better if they expect people to use even more services from Xbox Live.