The Future: Spend $60 for an unfinished game.

[DJ91990]

I have a great question for all of you gamers.

Do you think that when you throw away $60.00 on a game, that you are getting what you pay for?
Ever seance 2005, it seems that more and more video game publishers have decided that proper quality assurance and debugging is a waste of money and that if they hype a game up enough, the stupid consumer will buy the game regardless of how incomplete or broken the game is!

What ever happened to the days of when video games where done right the first time, and game-breaking bugs rarely existed? I know what happened! The friggen automatic updates happened! Not even Nintendo is safe from this now as they have fixed their major bugs via software tittle updates! Remember the Skyward Sword's Wii-Shop update that would "fix" the game breaking bug? Did you know that the first DLC for Mario Kart 7 is nothing more than an update to "fix" the shortcuts in multiplayer? I don't know about you; but in my opinion, I think that a great game is defined not by graphics and story, but design and gameplay. If the main mission objective of crating a game is to make it look pretty and release it quickly for the holiday season, then there is something wrong with you!

What do I mean by Full-Release beta tests? This is what I mean; when you release a game, it should work. I am sick and tired of buying a new game and there needs to be some stupid system update that fixes the security holes of a system and patches fifty-million bugs that exist in the game. THE DEBUGGING TEAM SHOULD HAVE SMASHED ALL OF THE MAJOR BUGS BEFORE THE GAME WAS EVEN RELEASED! Even when the Wii was first released; Zelda: Twilight Princess; a game that was HELD BACK 3 YEARS OR SO TO "Improve the game" (Bull****) HAS A GAME BREAKING BUG IN IT! You mean to tell me that in those three years you have been holding the game back, just so you can tack on the gimmicky Wii controls!? Three years Twilight Princess was in development and there still was a game-breaking bug in it! Imagine if Super Mario 64 had a game-breaking bug when the Nintendo 64 came out! I bet you Sega would still be in the gaming race, and Sega and Sony would be the two dominant gaming companies.

I know that there are games out there that are open beta. But those games are a constant work in progress. Games like Minecraft, and MMORPGS that are constantly expanding and evolving are not the problem here. The problem is when I buy a game for sixty frigging dollars, IT BETTER NOT HAVE ONE DAMN BUG THAT MAKES ME START ALL OVER AGAIN! This is a call out to all you major developers out there! Either stop with the BS and stop releasing broken games for $60.00, or reduce the price of your broken games to $15.00 because that's what they are worth!

I should also note that recent games that Nintendo has released that have either game-breaking bugs; or major bugs are as follows:
Zelda: Skyward Sword - Game Breaking bug with the Goron
Pokemon Black 2 - Able to re-battle Pokemon Breeder Trainer Class, Sangi Ranch Grass Glitch
Pokemon White 2 - Able to re-battle Pokemon Breeder Trainer Class, Sangi Ranch Grass Glitch

Don't even get me started on what broken crap Sony and Microsoft has recently released.

I know that beta testing is a tedious job and that it can take hours to replicate a bug and even more hours to correct a bug. But this does not excuse you for being lazy and allowing a game to be released and bought by your consumers, which make you money, and be broken. Gamers are only going to take so much until they finally snap. The warning signs are there; piracy is on the rise. One of the main reasons people pirate games is because they think lowly of the quality of your games. If you released good quality games, then people would be more obliged to actually buy them.

Final thoughts; Capcom has a rotten attitude, EA is the devil's advocate, and all commercially released video games should be free of major bugs before the game is released.

 

[pokefloote]

The Pokemon breeder re-battle "glitch" wasn't really a glitch after all. Everyone (including myself) jumped at the chance to announce that gamefreak made another mistake, but it's not a bug this time.

There was also a game breaking glitch in Super Paper Mario for the wii that made it impossible to progress past a certain point. My unlucky sister fell into that one, and felt it wasn't worth the effort to play through all those hours again for something that Nintendo overlooked.

 

[Thesolcity]

You want more content, you get more bugs. We're pushing the limits of the current gen, and moving on to the next. As with any new engine/software, the devs aren't going to be perfect and it may take them a couple tries hence game and app "updates". It also doesn't help devs have their superiors breathing down their neck who don't care about anything but meeting deadlines and making profits as if it happened by magic.

EDIT: The Skyward Sword glitch didn't happen unless you did it on purpose, and even then a fix for that was released.

 

[DJ91990]

@pokefloote
How is the Pokemon Breeder Re-battle glitch not a glitch at all? I could see if you had to talk to the Pokemon Breeders to re-battle them and their Pokemon had higher levels (Much like the VS Seeker rematches in Fire Red and Leaf Green) but they don't. Some Pokemon Breeders are positioned in a way that you can't avoid fighting them. It sure seems like a bug to me. The lazy script coders forgot to use the setflag command to prevent the player from grinding the same trainer over and over.

@Thesolcity
Honestly, I could deal with shorter games that are $40-$50 that had little to no major bugs vs epic games with many major bugs. Pushing the limits of a generation of console is not the cause, it the fact that the working conditions of the gaming developer is too hostile. Why do you think that many of the great minds in gaming have either become a president of their own company, or left the game development scene altogether?

The Skyward Sword glitch was a glitch. The glitch occurs in a point in the game when the game give you the option to choose one of three events. Any player could have picked any option at any time. One could stumble upon the glitch on accident, causing them to restart their game save, and the entire experience would be ruined. I assume that you think the trigger of the Lake Hylia Cannon glitch in Twilight Princess was also a glitch only done on purpose. Once again, any player could have saved and quit their game at that point in time and caused the glitch, thus forcing them to restart their entire game, and ruining their entire gaming experience.

Now with major Japanese game development corporation outsourcing (most likely to cheep-chinese development) I expect even more of these bugs to appear.

 

[Thesolcity]

How is the Pokemon Breeder Re-battle glitch not a glitch at all? I could see if you had to talk to the Pokemon Breeders to re-battle them and their Pokemon had higher levels (Much like the VS Seeker rematches in Fire Red and Leaf Green) but they don't. Some Pokemon Breeders are positioned in a way that you can't avoid fighting them. It sure seems like a bug to me. The lazy script coders forgot to use the setflag command to prevent the player from grinding the same trainer over and over.

JP Pokemon games are full of bugs and they're patched before they reach stateside. This isn't new.

 

[Maz7006]

JP Pokemon games are full of bugs and they're patched before they reach stateside. This isn't new.

what he said ^

Who remembers the glitch that allows you to catch Shaymin and Darkrai from Diamond and Pearl JP ?

- you just use surf on one of the elite four doors, and your in the "mystery zone", walk a couple of steps, and then go underground and back up and voila you sort of dig out up into the area those Pokemon were in.

 

[Hells Malice]

As games get more complicated (to make, not to play), there grows a larger chance for bugs to exist. In the NES era there were probably a few things that could go wrong in a game. Nowadays there's probably significantly and exponentially more problems that can occur.
Now, games get away with too much these days thanks to patches, but i'm still fine with patches that do squash things that could easily be overlooked by a small group of testers. The reason MMOs and the like DO do alpha and beta tests, are to gather a very large number of people to run across as many bugs and problems as possible before release. Large numbers are neccessary, but gathering that kind of testing mass is a pain in the ass.

I'm fine with obscure "game breaking glitches". Like the ones you named. Ones I really never noticed and would have to had actively sought out to actually run into.
But some games are just a clunky, broken mess and there's just no excuse for a game that doesn't work. The most recent example that comes to mind, is Fray. The game basically just didn't work, had no features and a host of other problems. For a game that cost money, it was inexcusable. Mortal Online (an MMO with a freakin' open beta no less) launched probably an entire YEAR too early. It had NO content. Nothing worked, everything was glitchy/broken/laggy. It was the biggest disaster i'd ever seen. It was like playing a proof-of-concept build of the game, and it was an entire year before it even started resembling something playable. Though frankly it's still a mess...and it's been like 3 years or something.
Things like THAT, where it's beyond just a simple quickfix patch for some kind of problem, is what needs to stop. But it really doesn't happen THAT often even still.

 

[FAST6191]

Now.... did I imagine the vast collection of v1.1, v1.2, v1.3 and beyond titles ( http://www.zeldawiki.org/The_Legend_of_Zelda:_Ocarina_of_Time#Cartridge_Versions ) and rom hacking fixes to games even for games released prior to 2000? Many of those were not exactly what one might deem small bugs either.
Going a bit more esoteric between engine sales, half of what valve has done and sequels barely deserving of the term to say nothing of mods (look up the mount and blade series) yeah. This is not necessarily a bad thing (indeed I would probably have a hard time arguing it is) and looking at the development languages involved it almost certainly is (ASM and a bit of C aka the PS1 and backwards if you are lucky is hard but C# and scripting is quite nice).

I can not say I agree with the model but it does seem to be moving in line with the rest of software development too. I have not quite seen it on consoles and mainstream PC but the microprice games on phones and PC seem to thrive on a ship the barely functional thing/"minimum saleable product" and update it for the next year or three.

As for the games are bigger today argument I am not sure I buy it so much. Sure now you might buy in a pixel artist, a background texture artist, an animator, a 3d modeller, a level designer...... where several of those might have been one person in years past but the argument was bigger and beyond better level streaming abilities and not doing something cute like saying Elite (although procedurally generated content is not a cop out as far as I am concerned) I am hard pushed to say games are orders of magnitude bigger. For examples morrowind was 2002 and Might and Magic VII was 99 so ignoring their being more flat than might be ideal and assuming good streaming could happen neither of those would have world maps of a size and variety that modern games would be entirely ashamed to have and in terms of hours able to be put in for the 2d games it is about on par. I could probably do the same for a lot of first/third persion shooting/platforming/actiony and driving titles.

Edit- can't believe this has to be in an edit. Harvest moon.

 

[Deleted-236924]

Sangi Ranch grass glitch?

 

[Guild McCommunist]

I like how nowadays we complain about games being "unfinished" but back in the day if a game was fundamentally broken or flawed, well too fucking bad, you can't "patch" it. Or they just rereleased the same game multiple times with "expansions" so you were forced to rebuy it. At least nowadays you can, I dunno, buy Arcade Edition for SSFIV without buying the game again.

At least nowadays you can patch games to fix major issues or balance them.

EDIT: I forgot to point out your obnoxious tags. It's "Bethesda", not "Bithesta", and why did you exactly tag Microsoft and Sony? I can't remember many games from them that were glitch filled. It's not like they had glitches that make a game impossible to progress.

Oh wait...

Don't even get me started on what broken crap Sony and Microsoft has recently released.

Please do since I can't even remember a game from either of them that has been "broken crap".

Yeah, Bethesda is pretty messy though, and if their engine is full of such issues, they should just redesign it. Every game from Oblivion to Fallout 3 to Skyrim has been plagued with glitches. But otherwise, I can't remember a lot from other companies unless the game was just poorly designed.

 

[Gahars]

Plus, it's worth remembering that video games are complicated beasts; the bigger and the larger the games are, the higher the odds are that bugs will sneak in. At least now developers have the tools to fix their mistakes at no charge to the consumer.

In a perfect world, sure, designers could catch and fix every bug before shipping their games out. The problem is, we don't live in a perfect world.

 

[Taleweaver]

Do you think that when you throw away $60.00 on a game, that you are getting what you pay for?

The answer to this question is BY DEFINITION a 'no'. If I got out my buck out of a game, the money wasn't thrown away in the first place.



Nice rant, otherwise. But lemme tell you something else that grew exponentially since 2005: social networking. "Thanks to" discussion fora, I can hear about game breaking bugs, glitches and bad endings of console games I don't even own!
There were game breaking bugs back in the days as well. You just didn't hear about it before the game was even released on your continent (for reference: I only recently heard there was a pretty though bug in the first Turtles game for the NES...I had a friend who HAD THAT GAME and never mentioned it).
I also had a few PC games where I always used 2 or even 3 different savegame slots to prevent corruption. Which did happen (okay, maybe one or two times, but enough for countermeasures).

I know that beta testing is a tedious job and that it can take hours to replicate a bug and even more hours to correct a bug. But this does not excuse you for being lazy and allowing a game to be released and bought by your consumers, which make you money, and be broken.

Not only that: it takes an UNDEFINED amount of hours to trace bugs that you don't even know exist in the first place. Like it or not, but there is simply no way you can have a testing team that tests even closely as thorough as the general audience. So with patching a possibility...why NOT use it?

My cynical answer to your rant: if you want a game that's as bug-free as it gets: wait a year before buying it. Then immediately get all the patches.
The most ironical part: that 60 bucks game WILL ACTUALLY COST 15 BY THEN!!!

 

[chains_of_androm]

As long as the devs follow up with the bugs and fix them in a timely manner, I can forgive them for bugs/glitches. In BF3 there are game breaking bugs, and it took EA months for major fixes, while I appreciate the fixes, they are taking too long. Diablo 3 had a lot of bugs as well, but a lot of it has been fixed, and the game hasn't been out too long.

 

[retKHAAAN]

This is a call out to all you major developers out there!

If ever there was a place to call out all the major developers, it would undoubtedly be GBAtemp... Those pussies haven't even responded to your post yet...

 

[Ace Overclocked]

Complaining about a single BW glitch?
Go play Red and Blue and we'll talk, even GSC are full of glitches.
Earlier pokemon games had much more glitches, some of which were game breaking...
Also if you get a fix via a patch why do you complain? The developpers compensated for it for FREE.

 

[AceWarhead]

It's hard for developers to find bugs/glitches in a game
That's where the consumer comes in. They find a bug/glitch, report it, and then the developers patch it.
No big deal. You'd rather that we don't get patches (for free, too, I add) and just have a broken game?

 

[Daemauroa]

I think you are exaggerating this. sure some games are buggy as hell but that isn't a problem off this time.

 

[Schezo92]

Thought this was gonna be a DLC rant, was disappointed

Also glitches have always been around... the internet just makes them more pronounced.

 

[YayMii]

The Pokemon Breeders stop rebattling you once you get to certain points in the game, so that's not a glitch. And the Sangi Ranch glitch isn't that big (lol oh no a grass patch doesn't shake, that means my game is broken forever).

I also heard someone mention Bethesda. FYI, their games have been buggy and broken since the early 90s. It has nothing to do with the status of the games industry of today. In fact, the first Elder Scrolls game was so broken that barely anyone made it out of the first dungeon without giving up or looking for help (You can tell something's wrong when the lead designer of TES3 has to start over more than 20 times to even make it out of the starting area).

Anyways, you are exaggerating. Bugs have been in games regardless of age. Super Mario 64 is perhaps the buggiest Mario game I've played, Ocarina of Time has a couple of bugs that prevent you from progressing, and Mario Kart 64 has a few unintended shortcuts which allowed you to skip 3/4 of the map (some were so obvious that I found them when I was 6 years old).
The only difference between then and now is that bugs are more publicized by the internet, and are able to be fixed.

I'm disappointed that this wasn't talking about on-disc DLC.

 

[Pyrofyr]

Very accurate OP, the problem is a simple one indeed, lack of care and ability to get away with it. I'm gonna be honest, half the kids I see my age buy games like this and they only buy it cause it's popular and it's 'gaming culture', we've been victimized by the same shit that befell movies and what you see today in such things as twilight, people who don't care, because if they did they'd know it's shit, people who just watch it because it is. People who line up for something because others are lining up for it, people who don't understand what gaming is and what it is to actually be a gamer or to enjoy video games.

These people are easy to seduce, these people don't care about quality, we dealt with quality for so long because they thought they needed it, and to some extent they did, but they fixed that problem, they fixed it easy.
1)Majority exclusive titles - most hyped
2)Get people talking about all the options, it no longer becomes a question of whether you play the PS3 blockbuster title or the 360 or the Wii, you gotta know about all of 'em.
3)Make people feel bad if they weren't in the loop, make it feel like they lost something forever.

Take a good look at FF7, anyone who didn't play it when it first came out whether they liked it or not probably knew about the aeris dies shit within a week, I enver enjoyed FF7 and I knew I know. This crushes people these kinds of things, and with the internet it's unavoidable, by the time a game has been out a week or two most people consider spoilers fair game, so you have to play games fast and get in on it, the sooner the better, day 0 the best.

When you couple this with looking at what people will put up with in MMOs/indie titles they soon realize that even as huge commercial identities, they can get away with this. They can get away with DLC, IAP, buggy games, incomplete games, shitty games, overpriced games, and the reason why is simple:
Most of the idiots will try it, they'll try it right away, they can't wait that week so they'll try it. That's why sales past day1 don't matter, and anything past the first week isn't even counted, because by then ain't nobody going to buy the pile of shit game it is, players already wrecked it and found the shitty bugs a week or so in, anything special about it ruined storywise (As if they have story to start with!) and everyone moves on to the next game of the week or month or whatever.

It's a shame, but it's what people do, there's not much we can do as the vocal minority other than be vocal about it, be vocal about how people are being thrown under the rug and gaming is getting swept away with them, how these people are funding the downfall by using only their mouthes, and never their wallets. The absolute worst is when I see some white knight online who swears some nonsense like "It's a new game, how could you know it'llbe good or not if you haven't played it" and will then swear up and down it'll be good and that 'you don't know' or 'you're just a pessimist', I love running into those guys just to say I met someone that fucking stupid, someone who is so purely idiotic that they believe you can know something is good beforehand but not bad. It's a shame cause 80% of the shit thrown out as AAA titles is garbage, shovelware, shit to throw to the dogs.

I don't think I've played a game I would actually call great in over 3 years, good in at least 1. I've played decent games, those are good ones that lack gameplay, story and other features only so they can show up in a sequel, games that have gameplay that doesn't hook you or is unnecessary,t here are many examples of why they aren't great, but they just aren't. If anyone would like to point me to a great game within the last year or so please do, because I would love to play it.
(Oh and as to Dark Souls/Demon's Souls, don't have a ps3 cause most of the games are shit, but I'll try it out when it hits PC)