Precisely. It's pretty clear from any perspective that the industry has lost touch with its customers and this only bolsters that perception.

So, this guy wants all games to be polished to perfection like George Broussard's stewardship of Duke Nukem Forever?

lolz

Some of my favorite games are buggy POS. Gives them character. ;)

Nobody can find every bug in a game, especially if it's big game but developers can find and solve the more noticeable bugs that lots of people will encounter. Click every item, every dialogue option and combination, shoot every destroyable object, and play though the entire game.

I think one way to increase consumer moral is to support games over a long period of time and not screw them other with next years game. Also, stop charging dlc will help greatly. In the short term, your not going to get the immediate reward for your work, but over time it will pay off and increase the amount of consumers.

No, he wants AAA games released that don't actually contain game-breaking bugs. Personally, I have no problem with minor bugs, glitches, and exploits. But there's no excuse for a show-stopper in a AAA title. Silverite Mines bug in Dragon Age:Awakening comes to mind.

Dargon Age: Awakening is the only game in the last couple of years (that I've played) where I'd agree that bugs were a significant enough problem. And yes, I played Alpha Protocol. The game had its share of problems, but bugs weren't one of them.

And this is partially the reason why the only developer/publishers I buy games from on or near release are Blizzard and Valve. Their track records for not releasing a game until it is absolutely ready is very good.

And other companies wonder how those two seemingly own money printers...

Dragon Age Awakening had a lot of bugs but let us not forget the patch 1.3 that basecly crippled the entire game, sad that it takes Bioware a long time to release patches.

Fallout 3 only got the GOTY when it was 9 Euro new, to this they I feel that I was riped of since the game needed third party mods to actually be a little fun.

I knew what I was getting into with FNV but still for some reason I hope to see another Mask of the Betrayer, Planeescape from Obsidian.

You're not really saying much there...
Yeah but I've encountered so much cut content and stupid gameplay the games weren't worth 5 bucks, let alone what they charge. And there are definite bugs that break games, especially if you pick up expansions at the same time as the game. Fallout 3 and getting camped by Deathclaws at level 5 comes to mind... Important NPC camps wiped out my mobs added into the expac... There's many more, and I know I'm picking on Fallout 3 here but they're hardly the only offenders.

I do think he has a point, but I think you do too when you say his writing is horrible. How can that guy review games? He spent 3 pages saying a half page worth of stuff.
You've clearly not played much WOW. Blizzard's track record used to be good, it's been years since that was the case.

I can't say for Valve, I refuse to play Steam games. Half Life was awesome though. Blue Shift was too short and had a few wonky bugs I thought.
Shush, all of Epic's problems stem from PC gamers and pirates!!! Cliffy B. told me so!
Yeah, but let me give you an example, they release Fallout 2 with a save system (in an RPG where you were meant to hit quicksave A LOT) took 3-4 minutes to save or load. When they finally released a patch weeks or possibly a month later we were told "oh yeah, existing saves will not work with this patch". That's what he's talking about. Sure I can laugh when stuff glitches out on The Force Unleashed because I can still play the game and the bug doesn't make it inherently "un-fun". Some of these bugs do, however, make the game un-fun. Then there's Kane and Lynch, lol, it's like Daikatana.

If this is the case then perhaps game developers need to reign in the scope of their projects to a level they can handle. Producing a less complex but more polished product will result in a better reception than being so ambitious that much of the game development ends up being half-assed.

On the contrary, despite all the whining, gamers put up with a remarkable amount of shit. If you saw companies in other consumer product areas pulling the kind of shit that game companies pull on a regular basis you'd have large numbers of people returning products demanding refunds/replacements. Most other consumer products are either released only when they're in an acceptable state, or killed if they're not going to get to an acceptable state soon enough to justify the cost. The hit to company reputation from releasing a shoddy product just isn't worth it. Yet in the games industry releasing a product before it's ready seems to be a standard practice. When it comes to their spending habits gamers don't have an entitlement complex; rather, they're just barely starting to wake up to the fact they're constantly being asked to buy shoddy products.

This all reminds me of the first time I really heard a lot of people complaining about bugs in a console game, well games. It was when the Dreamcast released and the Midway games all had something that were gamebreaking for some and unnoticed by others.

The thing is, Midway (like them or not) actually told people to go back and get a refund on the games and had them pulled from shelf. Then they fixed the bugs, reprinted the games and released them at a reduced price (you could tell the reprints because they had a blurb on them that said "Hot! New!").

Now sure, they didn't give anyone anything for their trouble (other than a refund) but they took responsibility for their fuck up and fixed it. I know the publishers now just release a patch in a day or so, but it seems to me that if they admit they released a faulty product then they should allow refunds. Remember, it's the publishers that fought to have the states pass laws that stopped letting people getting refunds, the same people theyh are now saying are doing nothing but harming games by wanting to keep kids from getting M rated games. Notice everything they go to politicians for is always about helping their sales and nothing for us, the customers?

You realize that by your logic that all your fancy hospital equipment is bound to have bugs, same with fighter jets, armed drones, nuclear power plants... I mean it's all so much more complex, right?

I write software, our tools are better and we can automate operations in seconds that we never did before because machines are so much faster. As well, computers can do a ridiculous amount of grunt work inspecting our code. Look how some software is certified, no games don't need to be to this level, no one's lives depend on them but there's no reason to excuse sloppy coding on complexity, it's a straw man.

Thing is, these are games, meant purely for entertainment. I like gaming, but games are not doing anything important.

You make software, you're not making games with huge open worlds and 3D engine, so the possibilities are far lesser. It's much easier to make bug-free products in this case.

I actually probably play too much WoW... But apart from 4.0.1, which was in my opinion released too early, they haven't had any major missteps with it. Also, many of the bugs that do show up in WoW are the type of thing that would be almost impossible to catch in an internal testing environment or even on a beta server.

As for Blue Shift, I am under the impression it was developed by fans of half-life as a mod and Valve decided to buy the rights to it from them and publish it. Much like Counter Strike.

You are misinformed. I understand why you feel the way you, really I do. It is, however, not correct, especially without knowing what different types of software may do, I'd imagine it would be hard to have a handle on this. "Huge open 3D worlds" aren't as complex as you think, these guys aren't doing it the same way they were doing it in 1996 just as I'm not writing software the same way. It is easier now, we use different techniques and toolsets that would have boggled all our minds just a few years ago. There are intensely rare, hard to root out bugs in all software, but don't make the mistake of thinking all the bugs you see in games are of this variety, they aren't.
3.0 was a disaster. C'Thun was a disaster (or intentional, depending on who you ask). Blizzard has released multiple updates that fundamentally broke their top end content in all of their versions of WOW. They've broken battlegrounds and queues multiple times. 3.0 is when I stopped for the last time, I won't be back. Their quality was crap way before I quit, YMMV.


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Okay, I'm necroing this thread, and for good reason (at least in my mind)!

I have just sunk two campaigns worth of hours into Fable 3. First off I'd like to say, they nearly have Fable 3 as polished as they claimed Fable would be, featurewise. So good, they're getting there. I'm not sure I like the tedious relationship quests (especially since they are essentially the same) but I know I didn't like being able to do a few dances in the middle of Bowerstone in Fable 2 and magically the whole town loved me.

The suckass part is that this game is buggy as hell. I mean it, two patches in and you still get game freezes.

Thankfully I think they've fixed Jasper not talking to you anymore. My dog still gets lost, rarely plays fetch, and once decided to levitate 20-30 feet above the ground for around an hour or so (making him useless).

I think the map no longer refuses to interact with some players, but I'm not sure, never had that one myself.

The relationship quests often include digging crap up in a random location for people, well guess what? You can lose that golden trail easily by accidentally accepting a gift from someone, getting another quest, or it just bugs out and disappears or always points the direction you are coming from no matter which way you turn (one of the beginning areas, Mistpeak Valley is especially bad in this regard, which sucks because a lot of relationship quests take you there - it also sucks because it's actually a great area and unusually big).

All in all, the problem with this whole thing is that Fable 3 is a really good game (well for people who like that sort of gameplay, I do). But it is marred horribly by these defects and there's no real excuse for having launched when basic stuff like pathing and quest directions don't work (I'm not usually a fan of the golden trail idea, but when you have a dozen quests that consist of "go dig up this random, hidden item, in this big-ass area, and no I won't give you any more info than that" it's kind of a requirement).