It seems that Battlefield 1943 developer DICE just can’t catch a break since the release of the latest installment in the franchise. It is understandable that neither DICE nor publisher Electronic Arts could have been ready for the positive reaction to the release of the title, and this has caused an unexpected spike in the number of gamers that purchased the title for both the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 platforms.

DICE did react quickly and worked around the clock to make more servers available to provide more server slots for game play. Still, even after DICE claimed that the problem was addressed, we continued to receive messages on Saturday night that no servers were available to play 1943. To make matters worse, the ability to get on the server with your friends appears to be somewhat broken and did not yield the results as expected, even after DICE said that they had addressed and fixed this issue.

If you do manage to make it on to a server, and you happen to be on the Xbox 360 platform you might then become a victim of the unexplained “screen freezing” issue that the company claims may be related to packet loss. We personally had this problem 4 or 5 separate times Saturday night on an Xbox 360 console that was in otherwise working condition on a very high speed broadband connection. From the tests that we ran, we could not detect any trace of packet loss on our end.

Despite the bumpy launch for the title, it is a pretty darn good and is a compelling remake of the original Battlefield 1942 with just enough things to make the game very playable. Still, if you can’t get onto a server to play it or if you do manage to get connected to play it only to be a victim of this “screen freezing” issue, this does not bode well for DICE and Electronic Arts unless they move very quickly to resolve these issues.

We must remember that one of the main reasons that many gamers are attracted to the console systems is the fact that the games are supposed to be more turnkey and lack many of the hardware configuration problems that lead to issues playing games on the PC. The problem is that is seems that many of the titles being released for the console system are falling into the same trap that we have seen on the PC for years, with developers having to release patch after patch to fix issues with the game and stabilize the code to make it work correctly. While we know that the studios want to make their release dates, it seems to us that their continued rushing of products out the door to make a release date is just doing more harm than good. If the title is buggy or there are no servers to play the game on, one has to ask why even bother trying to play it?

As far as the community reaching the goal of 43 million kills to unlock the Coral Sea map, it seems that in the first day alone over 5 million kills were made worldwide. It is estimated that at the rate that players are tearing up the battlefield that it should only take two to two and half weeks to reach the magic number of 43 million kills.