The last 5 years it's been more and more common to release a product barely worth playing, very buggy, and then judge by the sales if it's worth putting the effort into to make the game actually work.

Games mainly released by EA are guilty of this practice to the point of near flat out lying about the games, which, even if they are flat out lies, get shrugged off as hype.

Peter Molyneux is the absolute worst at this, with Will Wright a very, very distant 2nd place. Molyneux flat out lies about content, heads his company that makes barely playable games, then if they sell well, then ship patches and eventually expansion packs to attempt to deliver the game you were promised in the first place. (See Black and White, Black and White 2, Fable)


At what point did this become acceptable? Or even tolerable?

PC gaming is still vastly superior to console gaming by leaps and bounds, but with systems like the 360 closing in on the power of maybe the top end PC's 3 years ago, the PC power is no longer dozens of times better graphically. Console games are delayed nonstop, get released when they work enough to be considered worth the time spent making them. They don't get bumrushed out the door, and those that do die a quick death once word of mouth gets out.

Up until recently it wasn't possible to add on/patch console games, and now that it's starting to be, I hope we don't see the same thing repeated on consoles.


I want to hear your thoughts on this, is it acceptable to release a game on PC that isn't ready, to where you have to download a patch on day 1 of release to even have a game where it's playable, or should the bigger corporations back the hell off the developers and stop forcing them to release bad products?

I see it as a threat to gaming, because several games released in the last years could of been epic, if not for nonstop bugs or missing content, and those studios now have reputations for being shit producers and will always sell horrid numbers of copies now unless they release the next freaking Counter-Strike.



I have posted this in General, then moved it to Video Games, in an effort to foster more discussion on this topic and more activity in this subforum. It's a nested forum of a subforum, I find people weekly that've never noticed it before, lol

 

I think the big corporations need to back off. When Starcraft 2 comes out, and I gain 200 pounds from doing nothing but playing it, I want to play my game without a hassle. Having to dl patches is annoying, unless it is a hack patch.

Rushed games are doomed to be utter failure. I don't mind waiting for a game to be released. There are plenty of others that can keep me entertained while I wait. I look at the Final Fantasy series; they take years and years to make the game and they always have awesome quality and have little to none glitches, when they are released they are always worth the wait.

As for PC vs Console...I am a console fan. I hate playing games on my laptop and hate using my home computer so I don't play many PC games.

O_O There is only one solution...we must band together and create our own video game design company that screams "fuck you" at the big companies!!!

They need to stay out of our ventrilo!

 

It seems ridiculous to release a game, only to release a patch the next day. Just hold on to the game until it is done and tested.

Another example: Knights of the Old Republic II. LucasArts pressured Obsidian to release the game early, which resulted in a good deal of the game being cut. Very disappointing.

As to the console vs PC argument, I like most PC games more than console games, especially RPG and RTS games. It seems easier with a keyboard and mouse than with around 10 buttons and 2 sticks.

 

This has been one of the most irritating this to me, lately. I could sort of see if you were a member of a select group of home gamers who were running RCs and Betas of a game. That I would vaguely agree with.

But a fully market ready, beta tested game, in a box, open to the general public? Thats just bad form. If you're going to release a game, wait till its playable and enjoyable, and if it needs patches later, fine.

And like Jangel mentioned. Companies rush games so much some have huge content cutes.

Its a fucking travesty to gaming. And it needs to stop.

 

God don't get me started on KOTOR2. That game was so raped of content, that it's taken years for the recovery and rebuilding team at team Gizka so far and they're maybe HALF done. HOURS of voice shit is on the disc and not used.


Even my new favorite game, Hellgate, will require a day 0 patch. We Beta'd the hell out of it, but EA was ironfisting them into a Halloween 07 release date... which is FUCKING STUPID, considering Halo 3 just came out, CRYSIS is coming out, Witcher just came out, the first two of those are major, the 2nd, Crysis is the spiritual sequel to Farcry. That game is going to demolish the pc gaming world.

EA refused to budge, so Hellgate ships on Halloween, with a few annoying issues such as a memory leak bug, stuck in the world bug. The EA rep claims it'll be fixed in the release day patch... but why the fuck should we have to download a patch when a delay would of been better?

 

You're exiled from current gaming then Xiph, the new game patches are hundreds of megs in size. BF2142's complete update patch is like 1 gig. You're living in the stone age with dialup anyhow, but still, it is getting out of hand

 

Personally, I think that they shouldn't release games that are technically in beta stage, which is basically what they're doing, IMO. If I start up the game, and find more than one bug in the first 10 minutes, then they should have delayed it a bit, of course, finding one bug in the first 10 minutes is a bad sign.

 

Patching a game on the first day is not acceptable, however patching in general is a good thing. I still play Warcraft 3 TfT online and those patches dont come out very often but when they do they balance the games which is how I think patches should be. So overall I guess I think that a patch every month or two is ok but patching it every 3 or 4 days is not ok.

 

Things like Diablo or TfT I'd exempt from patches, as those are usually obscure bugfixes or balancing.

It's even gotten so bad that they release crap like SECUROM protection on the disc rendering a certain brand of a dvd drive unusable with a game, or you having to uninstall burning softward to install and play a game for fear of piratez!1!!

Then the game doesn't work anyway, rofl.

I really wonder, if anyone REALLY in house Q and A's anymore, or if they just pay a few folks to use their names, or make up names, because it's gotten stupid

 

This practice is really bugging me. Of course, making games is far from cheap, but the way things are handled nowadays isn't acceptable.

One example for a shoddy game is Gothic 3. Hardly playable at the start, now the community has to patch the thing itself because developer and publisher have split. I only started playing it when it was already patched, so it didn't hurt me. But having to wait months after the purchase to play it decently would sure bug the hell out of me.

 

I think nowadays that the level of leeway for developers has been completely destroyed. It's not about making an awesome game anymore, it's about purely sales, big corporations cutting costs and maximizing profits.

Back in the way of Doom, Wolfenstein3D and Duke Nukem there wasn't any patches, it was completely as is and perfect. Sure they still had a few issues like game crashes etc, but nothing like the incompatibility for new hardware we see today.

Heck even the Video Cards now days are shit for one reason. You have to wait for the company to release stable drivers for the hardware after the initial release. You won't have game stability or advanced options until a stable version comes out and allows you to use your Video Card's features.

I haven't bought an actual game in a fucking long time. You know why? The $100 or so that they demand nowdays is completely retarded. Having disk images of games also increases speed as you don't have the 16x limitation for data transfer on DVD's.

Until we get back into the ages where a Patch meant balancing issues and refined gameplay and new maps etc then the days of first patch fixes wide spread compatibility and issues will remain.

The giant corporations only wanting $$$ need to fuck off honestly. The strange reality is that the ideas and initial development of the games is done by mostly second, third and fourth year uni students doing software design or something. The giant corporations do shit except for paying salaries and advertising. The developer does all the hard work which includes anything related to the hype of a game. Lets face it, advertising does shit for games, only word of mouth of features and level of game play will make a title sell nowdays.

 

The only time patchs are acceptable and even good is in Games like World of Warcraft and Guildwars.

In games like that it improves the playing experience. I played WoW for about 6 months pretty hardcore and the patchs are what keeps it interesting. After you have done the primary stuff which does take quite a long time you kind of get stick in raiding.

patchs add new content and items and quests which are constantly being made new. In fact if you brought the game now it is probably about 8 times the size it was when it came out. Sure they fix bugs and stuff but that is to be expected in a game the size of that.

But in normal games it can be damn annoying if the patch is just to help the game do what it should do anyway. But if it is giving you more content for free I say bring the patchs on.

 

I agree with all of you, but another reason of nowadays being more patches than ten years ago is, that today the players have a bigger diversity of hardware (and software). Today no 2 computer systems are the same. They may for example have the same mainboard, but one of them has a different processor or software configuration and BOOM, the game doesn't work.

It is simply not possible for the developers to make a game, that works on every system or even 70% of them right from the start. Even if they don't have any pressure from their publishers. Of course there are betas, but even then, they don't get data on every system configuration possible. Therefore it is inevitable that some players will have problems right from the beginning. And only when they send their error messages and other data to the developers can they make a patch.

Naturally that doesn't excuse the billions of bugs many games experience on release date. So as I said, I agree that the publishers should back of a bit, give the developers more time and let them make the best possible game, without bugs that make playing impossible for everyone.

 

I have little knowledge on computer hardware's software, but shouldn't they all be designed to do the same thing? I mean, different connections are one thing, but hardware that doesn't actually work together just sounds stupid to me, much less having the hardware invalidate software..

 

I don't know much about it myself, but there are problems with different configurations. Sure they are designed to do the same thing, but different graphic cards need different drivers, etc. Every system is more or less unique and it is simply impossible to foresee every system related problem. It's a bit difficult to understand and even more to explain, but it's what I read in a gaming magazine at any rate.

Another thing: Sure the developers test their games, but 10000 players (combined) spend more time on a game than a team of testers in a month. They will often find problems in the first few days, that the testers didn't notice.
And the games today are far more complex and complicated than 10 years ago. So it is next to impossible to make a bug-free game right from the start.

It won't be of much use to the not German-speakers here, but here is link to an article about this topic.

 

I can see issues on both sides of it. On the one hand, yes, it is annoying as hell, and it leads to very significant cuts. On the other hand, this allows games to be released on time, without delays for minor bug fixes. As a result, yes, you do have to wait 10-20 minutes (for most people) for a patch, but that is better than waiting 10-20 days for them to make a new build of the game with the bug fixes and test them. Players and commercial release will always be the best for of bug-finding and fixing. Always.

Additionally, if they do things like this, it is easier for them to deliver expansions, and they won't stop all work on a game as soon as it is released. People will be more likely to download the minor patches and then give a good response than they would to buy the game again and give a good response.

 

Yes, they should not delay the game for some minor bugs, but if you can't play a game 2 months after release because there are several really bad bugs or storyline/logic bugs then they should rather delay the whole game half a year if necessary.

If there is already a patch on release date, it indicates, that the developers know there are several bugs, but still release it. And that's something I don't think should be done.

IMO some games would be far more succesful if they would've been delayed some more months to give the developers the time to get rid of some of the major bugs. They could have released a demo instead.

 

Agreed. Minor bugs and a 10-20 minute patch is no big deal. But if it is something like the KoTOR2 disaster, then they should just delay the damned release date until it's finished. Seriously, what moron would think they would lose buyers for a game they spent some extra time on developing? If anything, they would have gotten more people buying it!