Last week, EA released Battlefield 1, the highly anticipated next installment in the Battlefield series. It might seem weird that is the fifteenth game in the franchise but has the number “1” in the title. It’s probably due to the World War I setting.
Anyways, the game came out last week. At our studio, we have a store for employees where we can purchase EA at a discount. The Xbox One and PlayStation 4 versions of Battlefield 1 were available early last week. The PC version of the game was not available because of a delay in shipping. Now that might seem like a reasonable thing to deal with until you discover what exactly is shipped with the PC version of the game. A reasonable person might think that the PC version contains a plastic case, a small sheet of info, and most importantly the disc or discs. That’s where a reasonable person would be wrong.
It started last year but EA stopped pressing discs for virtually all the PC versions of their games. At first, they kept the familiar plastic case. Inside the case was a code that you would enter online which would entitle you to whatever game you bought. I hated this development because I’d have to go home and then download gigs upon gigs of data to play the game. I’m old school and I like installing my games from disc.
Anyways, back to the shipment of the PC version of Battlefield 1. We were waiting for just the codes, not a physical disc or anything. Like how stupid is that? We were going to have to take these codes and enter them online anyways, so why don’t they just send the codes via the Internet?
Well, the stupid codes finally arrived today at 3pm. Everyone lined up at the store to receive a card, slightly bigger than a credit card. On the back was an area you could scratch off, which hid the redemption code for the game. A lot of people I knew took the card back to their desk, scratched off the area, redeemed the game online and then threw the card in the garbage.
We waited almost an entire week, enduring the shipment delay so that we could physically get a card that contained an online code that we immediately redeemed online anyways. It really boggles my mind how stupid that is.
In the future, all of this should be done online. We should be able to pay for the code online and get it immediately. Let’s just skip the stupid part of printing out those useless cards. I am definitely going e-mail the store tomorrow.