I’m sorry EA but your game update process stinks.

I am not a hardcore gamer but I own a Playstation3 and have been playing Battlefield Bad Company 2 (BFBC2) a bit since I got it for my birthday and there have been two recent updates to the game. Now I like the idea of games getting updates via downloadable content. You can buy a game and if there are changes that are needed (service packs if you will) then they can be distributed over the games console network. Great. Sometimes it fixes problems, sometimes you get new features (sometimes that needs to be paid for) but in general DLC is good stuff.

You can also get demo versions of games to download and try out, before you buy it or waste your money on it, depending on your opinion of any demo. Brilliant. the downloads can be set to ‘download in background’ and essentially forgotten for a while. If the console is in use online then the download is paused but restarts and the console will turn itself off when the download is complete. Ideal, no waiting for a download to finish so you can turn of the console to save electricity etc etc.

I forget the date but it must have been in the last 2-3 weeks there was an update to BFBC2 that was about 245MB, quite a size and it took a long time to download as we only have broadband that reaches 512kbps. The key problems are that the game wont go online until the update is installed and this download cant take place in the background so it stops me using the PS3 entirely while it is taking place. Still, it was the first one for a long time so I let it run and found something else to do for a while – probably looking at ASK SSC and seeing if I could help out any SQL DBA’s with problems. Sometime later I go back to the PS3 and we are off, shooting virtual enemies and putting that imaginary world in a better state.

Yesterday I went to have another play and I cant believe it, another update. Well, its soon after the last one so I figure its going to be a small update to sort an issue in the previous update. Oh no, this one is 483MB which my PS3 quickly tells me will take 368 minutes to download, that’s over 6 hours. Great. I have to leave the console on all night to get the download.

This is ridiculous, would anyone accept a computer update if you couldn’t use the internet until it was installed?

Come on EA, roll these updates together and let them download in the background so you can install them to the game from the hard-drive or allow a PC to download the content onto a USB stick and update that way. The games are good, the update process is rotten.