Just an observation, but all of your complaints are technical rather than gameplay-based. Since you didn't mention them, we must assume that you found the storyline and gameplay to live up to your expectations. The reason you don't hear people complaining en masse is because, to most of us, the storyline and gameplay ARE the game; what version of DirectX it uses, what mechanisms the multiplayer uses to organise servers, and what hardware it runs best on are secondary concerns to be addressed in the post-release patching phase. Give the developers a chance to catch their breath, and have some consideration for how hard some of their tasks are, and how intense the time restraints placed upon them are, before condemning them for prioritizing the primary concerns over the secondary.
With you on that one i thought the game was good i even got all the collectibles and emails on my second run
These issue's shouldn't exist. The odd game or two sure, but every game that's released recently is hopeless devoid of a bug-free release. I'm tired of buying a game for £29.99 and having 'technical issues'. Why is it when I installed everything up until 2006/2007 it worked, first time, no patches (Unless its tiny tweaks, say unit strengths due to being OP) no questions asked, right? I think gamers are allowed to gripe about that.
Exactly... I'm tired of buying games - Medal of Honour - Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 - Call of Duty: Black Ops - Crysis 2 - BFBC2 All of these games needed insane patches to work correctly. I'm sorry but that's not good enough! I know I'm having a whine about it... but the thing is, most employment demands 100% excellence first time round when you do something, right? Not a half-arsed attempt because you know you can correct it further down the line.
I can see why it looks so unfair from our end, the consumer end, but I think we're ignoring a simple, unavoidable fact about modern games: they're getting more and more complicated. As the engines, tools and technologies behind games get bigger, more complex and compound, it seems reasonable (to my mind) that the task of making them all sing in sweet harmony and produce a smooth, bug-free game is going to be way more demanding. The way I see it, developers now have an either/or choice: huge development time, or technologically incomplete game. BC2 was a good example, having a fast development/update cycle but tons of issues on release. Sure, it sucked for early customers (like me) who paid £30 for a non-working game. But does it really matter? It was working within a month. The lesson here is that these problems are inevitable to some degree, and the smart thing would have been for me to buy it a month later, rather than jumping on an untested, just-released bandwagon and then complaining when it didn't move. The further implications of this are actually quite nice. If more gamers were scrutinous and waited for word-of-mouth and review feedback before buying, instead of pre-ordering and so on, developers wouldn't be able to rely on hype momentum to sell their game. It wouldn't sell on advertising, image and legacy, like MW2; it would sell on quality of product, like MW1. Developers would have to release better-working, higher-quality games instead of exploiting anticipation. Think about it. Why do developers release unfinished, broken games? Why can they? Answer: because gamers are willing to unhesitatingly buy new games without waiting for feedback. It's our fault, as usual.
While I agree to some extent, I personally think has more to do with their accounting, management and shareholders wanting to hit a deadline and begin to see a return on their investment.
^^ This! Also, in the 'old days' it was virtually impossible to get a patch out for a game without having to resort to mail order (in the very early days) and then relying on magazines to put a patch on a disk. The ease in which the internet allows patches to be delivered has created some complacency in the industry.
Crysis 2 ran superbly on my system, maximum settings at maximum res. Didn't notice any glitches of any kind, but i was concentrating on not dying. My one complaint, is regarding the storyline, but it's not just limited to C2, it's to a hell of a lot of modern games. It's too Short, 7h15mins to complete, and i wasn't rushing through it, Died and had to redo plenty enough, and still only took 7 hours. Sam
If i buy a car, i want it to work from the time i turn the key, not wait for a part to be released to get the car running. See where i'm going with this? I am happy waiting for a game if i know it will work first time. But releasing a broken product? No excuse. You have the time and resources to make it work, so do it.
Well boiled elephant really has a point here, games are indeed getting more and more complicated, not only graphically but also in almost every aspect, coupled with shorter deadlines, (which you actually have to meet) more development costs, and the need to debug such a complicated monster, patches are getting more and more necessary. Conversely some games do need a bit more in terms of QC (GSC Gameworld i'm looking at you), but even then the fact that they can release games consistently without too many delays isn't too bad. And most COD games have patches for MP balancing rather than single player patching, actually most games just patch the MP anyhow.
First part i agree with, Second part i don't. When i watched a vid on Youtube regarding Halo, Bungie said they ran out of time with development for Halo 2 due to the strict and unmovable release date set by Microsoft. Given Crytek is part of Electronic Arts, it's fair to assume EA gave Crytek a limit for the development. Had Crytek been developing for 1 platform, not 3, they probably would have released a far more polished title than what we have now. Now that Crysis 2 has been released, EA's attention would swing to Crysis 3, while Crytek's attention is still on 2. Sam
why do people always compare things to cars? Not many games are released in "broken" or "unplayable" states these days in all honesty. It's just that these days when something has a small issue people will say it's the worst thing ever etc etc. The only games i can think of in recent memory that were released unplayable based on system requirements are Black ops (which got patched) and Stalker clear sky.
While I agree that the complexity of games is increasing, making them harder to bugtest e.t.c, The amount of support for various engines and middleware (and their inter-compatibility) has also increased dramatically, hell just look at the UDK forums. I suppose it's one benefit to just about everything being built on the unreal engine.
This is true. Why should PC games be equal in quality and graphically to the xbox 360 and PS3? I don't like playing games that are designed to run on hardware that is 5 years old.
The original post here is one of the most fatalistic ones I have read in quite a while. Does Crysis 2 have issues? Certainly. To call it the worst game release of all time is a laughable overreaction. Anyways, I don't have much to chime in on the subject of the game's issues that you guys haven't said, but I think OP represents a growing problem of expectations vs reality in the video game industry. Many gamers demand absolute perfection in their games and blow even the slightest issues out of proportion. This isn't to say that we all wouldn't like our games to be flawless, but the inability to deal with inevitable bugs and imperfections is troubling.
Because games on our platform sell less as far as official sales figures go (until someone decides to release digital download stats). You're pretty much asking a dev to spend more money on the version that will sell less overall.
Lowest common denominator. Why push the envelope when the majority of the envelope isn't too hard to achieve? Sad, but that's how PC games were back then too, when the PS2/Xbox graphics had reigned. Of course graphics isn't the only thing that matters.
