With just weeks left before the release of EA DICE’s hotly anticipated Battlefield: Bad Company 2, Electronic Arts dropped a bombshell and announced anyone who pre-orders the game for PC between today and Feb. 25, can get Battlfield: 2142 at no charge.
The news comes from the Battlefield: Bad Company 2 Twitter page and though I can’t see it yet (12:50 p.m.), the promised freebie is said to exist at the game’s pre-order page, right here.
The deal is only good for North America and can only be downloaded from the EA Store. I’ve heard EA’s store can be a pain. This true? Or is it worth it for the free game?
The EA Store (if you want to even call it that) IS a pain… and a HUGE one at that. I didn’t realize the game was going to be available on Steam at first, so I originally pre-ordered BC2 through the EA Store and it was a nightmare. I can’t even accurately describe everything that I had to go through because it was just too damn confusing. It seems like there are multiple, completely separate portals that you have to go through just to login to the site. Once I found out that the game was on Steam I tried to cancel my pre-order on the EA site and that’s when the “fun” really began. Suffice it to say that there is no way you can just “cancel” an order on your own by clicking a button or anything… oh no, that would be FAR to easy. Instead, I had to look through their “FAQ” (which is a sick joke in it’s own right) and finally found an entry relating to canceling orders. The answer was basically “YES, you can cancel your pre-order!” Wait, that’s it? “YEAH, you can TOTALLY cancel your pre-order stupid!” But how? “You’re a stupid aren’t you?! You just cancel it! LOL!” Seriously, there was no indication whatsoever as to how to go about actually canceling an order, although I was SOOO relieved to know that it was “possible.” Without anything else to go on I figured that the only thing I could do would be to submit a help ticket to customer support. Unfortunately when you try to do such a thing, you have to select the game you want to submit a ticket for from a drop down menu, and surprise surprise, BC2 isn’t even listed in that menu. I ended up just using one of the other Battlefield PC games since I didn’t know what else to do and explained what I needed done in the text field. My order still showed up as “active” and I didn’t have any indication that anything was done until two WEEKS later when I finally got an email saying that it was finally canceled. At this point I can only HOPE that this was applied correctly and I won’t see a charge on my credit card come March.