Afraid I can’t speak for the issues you’re having, but I can answer this. Crunch. It’s almost always crunch, even when publishers tell you they “don’t do crunch”. There’s a huge pressure to get things out by a release date, whether that’s pressure from “fans” and the media or pressure from investors/execs. Whether the product is actually ready by that point or not, come hell or high water it will ship by that point. Plenty of games do release in a working state and don’t need gargantuan day 1 patches. Or even gargantuan patches on day 365. Sure there may be bugs and issues that weren’t spotted, but the game won’t be a horribly broken mess with obvious glitches or serious performance issues. But those games don’t tend to be the high-profile big budget games with dozens or hundreds of staff and costs into the tens or hundreds of millions. Of all the “big” games I’ve played lately, only one didn’t have major or frequent game-breaking issues at launch (that I experienced): Cyberpunk 2077: Yeah I think we all remember how “well” that launch went, even with a high-spec PC you’d get jank worthy of Bethesda’s finest. Even now with their “final patch” I still see weird glitches. Last night I had NPC vehicles randomly exploding and at one point I spotted two smiling NPCs happily sat in a burnt-out wreck that was still engulfed in fire. Starfield: First time in many long years that I’ve hit a game breaking bug that got written into my save file. The less said about the performance the better. Baldur’s Gate 3: I personally didn’t encounter any major bugs or glitches, although there were plenty of reports of rare/infrequent game-breaking issues at launch.
I don't follow trailers and hype and tbh haven't been disappointed yet. No Man's Sky, Cyberpunk, Arkham Knight, all really good games. Still playing Starfield though I feel once the missions are over, the exploring won't last as long once I've been through every base / building copy + paste template.
This was me (although I find NMS super boring), and I really enjoyed it, but you're right asiding from the cities, its all a bit cookie cutter!
My point was that a lot of these games shouldn’t have gone out when they did. Not because they didn’t live up to the hype or the trailers, but because of the conditions people had to go through to meet an arbitrary and unrealistic deadline. I had more here, but honestly crunch and what it does to people is a little too close to home for casual discussion.
AAA games back then where certainly more polished at launch, for example take Halo 3 and Halo Infinite... one was a complete game while the other was an empty husk of a tech demo with a promise of potential future content. Even when AAA games where bad back then the worst was usually some jank or boredom. Take the infamously bad Aliens: Colonial Marines as an example, even that game despite getting universally panned by both critics and gamers launched feature complete and functioned as a game, I'm not saying it was good... but even a game that bad still met certain minimum criteria. These days however the gap between the good and bad AAA games has widened from a valley to a grand canyon. On one hand you got games like Baldurs Gate 3, Spider-Man 2, Tears of the Kingdom, Lies of P etc, but at the same time we had several AAA games fail on such a colossal scale that they should have never even left the drawing board like Forspoken, Redfall, Saints Row Reboot and so on.
If you call "having the enemy AI literally disabled by a typo nobody caught" feature-complete and functional as a game, then... sure.
Absolutely. It's nothing to do with so-called "crunch" or any other similar symptom - which is what that is - a symptom. Of either poor planning (aiming for too much in too short a space of time) or overreach (aiming for too much full stop, or feature creep), to name two possibles. Throw in lack of ambition ("this is good enough" - although arguably, this is possibly more a case of personal opinion than a measure of standard); laziness (since the market/investors will (however begrudgingly) accept a product launch regardless of final state); or poor quality control ("we overlooked this but released anyway because due date" or "we had no robust QC in place") and the reasons for heavily-criticised releases become a bit more understandable. You'd think that by now the bigger houses have a rough idea of how long/how much it takes to release a title to a certain standard. Plus with all the lessons (supposedly) learnt since the apparent shift to this new release model, maybe also some better insight into potential pitfalls. And that said, I'm admittedly not fully clear on what real-world impact delayed release has, beyond the regurgitated "impact to share price because investors get sad and sell" headlines (which is the short-sighted "indigestion" investment view anyway), because as an end-purchaser, especially one who might have to wait for patches, I couldn't give several shiits if you release tomorrow or next month as long as it works and I enjoy it when it lands. But you're absolutely right - a crap story and unengaging, derivative gameplay (Starfield - I'll just throw that grenade out there) is not the same as systemically unplayable (Payday 3 - apparently, but not from personal experience as I swerved it once I heard the stories) and one is, as mentioned above, more of a personal judgement than an objective one, where only the latter should preclude release. And a missing racetrack from a game about racing on a track would come under the latter. Incidentally, @Cerberus90 - I think you're correct; I'm running Forza on the Xbox and haven't seen any bugs yet, so must be an issue with the PC version. Is tech evolving and changing what's possible though, or does the new standard become just that (after a bit of bedding in, of course) and excuses for ray tracing not working in three years' time become unacceptable? I remember people queuing round the block for Halo 2. Can't see them doing that these days (although digital storefronts don't help with this analogy, I'm sure there are some equivalent numbers). And maybe this is another aspect to the problem - acceptance from both sides of DLC/updates/games as a service nowadays. Which does feed back indirectly to laziness in a way. Sorry - wall of text and no idea where that came from! Just thinking though, Game Pass can't be good for this situation (1500 words - discuss) as the cost/risk is shared amongst titles, giving no incentive to developers to release properly finished products. Halo Infinite was always going on GP. As a purchaser paying a sub anyway, it costs me ~£17 divided by all the games I play that month, so if it's crap, I'll just not play it and I've lost a couple of quid rather than fifty (or the numerous other titles just got less than a quid more expensive). As a developer, I've released on date and if no-one plays it I'm getting paid by Microsoft anyway and can patch it afterwards. In summary, you can't send the chicken Kiev out to the diner at the table before it's cooked through properly, then bring the microwave out whilst they sit and wait. And then watch them push the chicken around a bit in isolation on the plate before bringing some chips and veg out a month later. So why is it acceptable with games that sometimes cost more than dinner?
If you want to put it more succinctly then you can sum it up in two words: because money. The people who really make the money in the games industry don’t give one wet turd about anything but money. To those people it was perfectly fine to release Aliens: Colonial Marines - whether it was utter garbage or the most perfect game ever made, it was still going to sell. And sell it most certainly did: it sold 1.3 million copies in the first ~6 weeks. When a “big” game does make a loss, dev studios get shut down, sold, or a ton of people get fired. (Although people often get fired (or have their contracts terminated, which is effectively the same thing) when games are successful because that makes the earnings report look better.)
The enemy AI was just at the same lvl as in regular games rather than at the lvl they hyped it up to be. And talking of which, enemy AI is one of the things that have advanced the least in the last 2 or so decades of gaming... other than F.E.A.R there has been basically nothing that advanced the idea of enemy AI in games. Instead of improving enemy AI modern gaming has just given us ridiculously padded enemy health bars.
I remember when Half Life 2 came out. Went to Game, bought it, went home, installed it. Played it from start to end, zero bugs.
Hard disagree. What about the adaptive enemies in Phantom Pain? If you mostly do headshots, they start wearing helmets. Mostly sneak around in the dark? Night-vision goggles. And so on. And how about the nemesis system in whatever that Lord of the Rings game was? That was pretty neat, and enemies had traits like being scared of fire or enraged at the sight of something.
I think those games and the nemesis system were thoroughly underrated, hopefully they'll do a third. Started the first with low expectations but loved them both.
That was a really cool system, made for unique experience. And now it’ll stay unique because WB Games slapped a patent on it, ensuring that no one else can implement a similar system.
We have bad selective memories when talking about old games and bugs. From PS2 GTA's flying cars and cars with no tyres to platformers where the character just disappeared into the void or got stuck and you had to wait for a time out death. There's a name for it, I forget. Like when people say things were built better because they only see the buildings that partially survived centuries of time.
The enemies in Deathloop are literal lemmings. Half Life enemies used to flush you out, regroup etc .. And this was 1998
Sounds like you mean survivorship bias. Because yeah, you forget all the issues games released with in the past because they were rarely fixed. Famously, the original Pac Man was effectively unbeatable because of an integer overflow. Level 256 was a garbled mess that couldn’t be “completed”. An 8-bit integer was used to store the level value, but the maximum possible value for an 8-bit integer is 255.
There was a room in Jet Set Willy - Matt Smith's Manic Miner follow-up - which would kill you as soon as you entered it. The publisher claimed it was filled with "poison gas" and hinted that there was some way to survive... ...before being forced to admit it was a bug and to issue a patch. And that was no small thing back then: games were distributed physically on slow-to-duplicate and expensive cassette tapes across half a dozen different platforms. So, the "patch" was to write to a bunch of mags and get 'em to publish some POKEs to correct the bug manually... each time you loaded the game. We don't know how good we've got it these days!
I knew there was an 8-bit home micro game with an infamous bug, but I couldn’t remember it this morning - Pac-Man was all that came to mind!
