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Yet both of these are small qualms when compared to the ridiculous number of stability problems. Tom Senior’s game crashes to desktop every five minutes. Rich gets disconnected from every server after a round-and-a-half of play, without fail. Tim can’t connect to servers at all, most of the time. In over a week of playing and trying to play Battlefield 3 online, I’ve had all of these problems. There is a slight glitchiness to the singleplayer, including character models that occasionally fail to load, weapon models that vanish, and soldiers who run through walls, but the multiplayer simply does not work at all for some of the people, some of the time.

Given that this is the eleventh game in a series that started in 2002, a guaranteed huge seller, and a tentpole game for EA, why is it acceptable that it has had a clumsy, broken launch?

It’s not. For all its similarities to the previous games in the series, Battlefield 3’s multiplayer is still fresh and exciting. There’s no other game out there that can provide the same chaotic spectacle, or the feeling of lying in the grass with friends, watching a battle roll towards you from the horizon. Even as the singleplayer is everything I hate about games, the multiplayer is many of the things I love about them.