The single-player portion of Battlefield 3 was a major disappointment, but most of us bought the PC version for the multiplayer. That's going to be a harder beast to review, so we're slowing down to take our time and explore the maps, vehicles, and character classes. But we're running into a problem: the PC version of the game doesn't really work at the moment.

The console version is having its own difficulties, with the 360 servers going down temporarily last night, but the problems with the PC version seem to run through the entirety of the multiplayer portion of the game.

So what's going wrong?

Last night I had set aside five hours to play the game, and was able to connect to my first game after around an hour of trial and error. At some points the Battlelog system, the browser-based social networking portal and server browser DICE is using to launch Battlefield 3 games, simply showed me an error instead of giving me any information about available games. At other times the server list seemed unable to offer up-to-date information about the games being played. Servers that were listed as being empty were full. Servers listed as full were empty. Connections were often dropped, and despite my best efforts, I was unable to add anyone to my friends list.

The fact that Battlelog uses your Web browser actually helped in this regard; I was able to invite my friends to games by saving the server's address as a link and sending it via instant message to people I wanted to play with. They clicked on the link and were added to the server to play.

The system seems to be having problems dealing with the demand, and many games are experiencing at least some of these issues. I was able to stick with it and jump into a few games, but a five-hour session gave me only three hours of gameplay, and I experienced a lot of frustration and a few game crashes to even get to that point. Once you're on a stable server and playing the game, the last thing you want to do is leave; getting to the point where you're actually playing the damn thing is a exercise in rage-building frustration.

Is anyone surprised?

EA and DICE are dealing with a brand-new digital distribution system, a new back-end for the game's online play, and a brand-new engine. DICE titles have a reputation for being absolute train wrecks at launch. The chances of this launch going well were about zero, so many PC gamers seem to be sucking it up and making the best of it. We've been through this dance before with previous Battlefield games, and it always settles down.

The situation now is even a bit better than we experienced with past Battlefield releases. People are able to fight their way into games and, once there, the game runs well and there is a lot of fun to be had. The question is how long it will take before everything works as it's supposed to, and we're guessing we're at least a few days away from that point.

We're interested in hearing your experiences on the PC and console versions of the game, and we should have a review of the multiplayer portion of the game near the beginning of next week. Assuming we can play.