What's with game developer's rushing to deliver new content all the time? It makes me a little sick. As much as I love to see a new game out I want to play, at the same time, I want the developers to take their time and deliver a game that is good, interesting, unique and free of most bugs.
These days you see a lot of developers who find something that works, or sells well, so they rush to deliver another product of similar nature, or the game had promise, but features got lost in the rush, or the game has some sort of horrible bugs that make it unplayable. Or the game is remarkably short, like 4 or 5 hours worth of gameplay.
I really wish developers would just start taking their time and deliver really good, breath taking software that demands the money I spend on it. As it is right now, I haven't actually "bought" a game in almost 3 years, I've either rented them, burrowed them or downloaded them.
ID:278196
 Oct 10 2009, 3:23 pm
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Oct 10 2009, 4:09 pm
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Garthor
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Because the people developing the game and the people paying for the development of the game are, generally, not the same people.
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The more recent broadband capability of gaming consoles has opened the door up for developers of console games to use patches and DLC with ease. A feature once limited to very few console games and most PC games.
This has caused them to worry less about the lesser-found bugs and other gameplay issues right away, because now they can patch them later on using a download. This can be seen as both good and bad, the good is that it allows for bugs to be fixed without resorting to releasing an entirely new version of the game for sale to the public. The bad is that is has indeed made developers lazier in regards to making sure things are more polished before releasing the product. | |
Ham Doctor wrote:
What's with game developer's rushing to deliver new content all the time? It makes me a little sick. As much as I love to see a new game out I want to play, at the same time, I want the developers to take their time and deliver a game that is good, interesting, unique and free of most bugs. Along with what Garthor was saying, the people funding game development are typically not the same people developing, and to them it is more important games get launched around specific dates or under specific budgets. The more time you have developers working on a game, the more time you have to pay them for developing that game. Sales tend to do better around holidays (Christmas is a big one, as is Black Friday) or other days; for movie-based games, often development is rushed so that the game is launched the same day as the movie premiere. This strategy has been shown to be most profitable. Someone that just watched a movie is more likely to leave the theater wanting to buy a game based on the movie than, say, someone who saw the movie months ago. Also, it's easy to become caught in a loop and start adding features for the sake of adding features. Things like "Oh it would be cool if we could do this!" spawn countless feature ideas and it's easy for the game to become bloated and with a lot of features that really don't complement each other. For this reason and many others, any features going to be made available in a game release are typically determined before any code is actually written---early on in the pre-production phase---and are followed as strictly as possible while making as few adjustments to them as can be managed. Incidentally, game design "documents" typically refer to books of information indicating the specific features and gameplay elements that will be available. | |
Kuraudo wrote:
Also, it's easy to become caught in a loop and start adding features for the sake of adding features. Things like "Oh it would be cool if we could do this!" spawn countless feature ideas and it's easy for the game to become bloated and with a lot of features that really don't complement each other. See: SS13. AKA: Feature Creep: the Game. | |
I loved Zelda 64, people with the Golden Cart are still very lucky people. They're were quite a few glitches with earlier carts that made the game quite fun (swordless link?)
I find it extremely fascinating with the stuff they actually left in the game (airwings from starfox, debug rooms, Blue Fairy, etc.) Anyone know of other games that have awesome "hidden content" like this? | |
I'd have to bring up Morrowind. Not only was the game itself fun the way it was ment to be played, there was a large number of glitches and abusable features that allowed you to have sooo much more fun with it too. Whats maybe a little bad about this though is this game was far from rushed, they worked quite awhile and very hard on the game only to miss a few obvious and quite large bugs that completely changed how the game was played.
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Ham Doctor wrote:
What's with game developer's rushing to deliver new content all the time? It makes me a little sick. As much as I love to see a new game out I want to play, at the same time, I want the developers to take their time and deliver a game that is good, interesting, unique and free of most bugs. I feel the same way. I had followed Warhammer Online for about a year, then when it was finally released it turned out to be plagued with bugs and techinal problems, just garbage. I believe the subscriber database dropped from around 700,000 at launch to 300,000 a month later. I guess I'll stick with my WoW for the time being. | |
Oh, I love World of Warcraft. But I've been playing far too long, for too many years and it just got tiring. And would you believe I never even got to level 80? Or 70 or 60? The highest I've gotten was around level 45.
With the new catalisim expansion coming out, I may play again, I may even reactivate my account when all the cool game events start happening. But until then, I think I'll pass. | |
That, and consumers are wholly to blame. Already your average joe is torrenting games he had no intention of buying. This is not a bad thing. It's a good thing. This is the consumer's method of protest. The retailers, publishers, etc. need to get 1) a fair pricing scheme, 2) an honest review period (demos that accurately represent the game), and 3) a better method of shipping games... I.E. STEAM! Or torrenting is just going to get bigger and bigger.
The major studios are interpreting this as theft of their product, deduction of possible sales from "cheap" people. In actuality, I pay for games I enjoy. I've torrented, then purchased many times. I've also torrented, been disgusted, and deleted a game many times. If I enjoy the game I steal, I will reward the developer by purchasing a legitimate copy. I however, do not support developers that in my opinion, make bad games. What the developers need to realize, is that they are massively overcharging for most of their software. I'm sure that torrenting actually detracts from their sales much less than they claim it does. I know tons of people will argue this point with me, but I know dozens of people who think like I do, and dozens of software pirates that would pay a fair price for what they steal. Some games just aren't worth what the developers sell them for, and some games don't entertain me for more than a single hour. | |
Good stand to have, but while there are dozens of people like you, there are also dozens of people that simply believe they deserve it for free with never any intent to buy the software.
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Ham Doctor wrote:
Good stand to have, but while there are dozens of people like you, there are also dozens of people that simply believe they deserve it for free with never any intent to buy the software. I have torrented only one game before. Spore. I had every intention of buying it too, but my computer died. Unfortunately, Spore is one of those games that had a few awesome hours of game-play and lacked everything that it needed for replay value. Spore needed some game-play DLC, rather than new parts, to keep the game's game-play value. This is why my friends stopped playing it. Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts was on the opposite end of the spectrum. The community for BK:N&B wanted nothing more than new parts for DLC and it was something that Rare was unwilling to deliver. The lack of new parts has, unfortunately, driven the community away from the game. | |
This is the exact conversation we are having on 1up right now in the "microsoft permabanning people for playing pirated games before release" post under the news section.
I posted pretty much exactly what you posted ter - because its honest. Hell I don't even download anymore because I need a new pc before I can even play the games I do own. (PC died - using subpar crap until I can get a new one) NONE of the games look interesting to me and as someone who was raised with gaming the thought of simply quitting it all together is kind of scarey. Its pretty much all I know and now its being taken over by the movie industry so they can turn it into a "profit machine" just like the movie industry. Think about it, the movies they release are really just absolute trash, however they expect people to go out and see it and then buy the hard copy. Well only idiots go to the movies, because the movies have been crap for the past decade, excluding one or two. This is what gaming is becoming. You can already see them releasing trash just to get money and it works! Look at EA. They make possibly the worst trash on the market and yet they have a lot of money (That they don't deserve). Torrents are a form of Boycott, our money is a Reward that the developers have to Earn through good product, not already Deserve just because they are materialistic greedy heretics vacuuming all cash up in sight to spew it out on crappy products - its a vicious cycle. What I find funniest is that our currency isn't even backed by value. The Majority of people don't care and are working their lives away while their country falls. | |
UmbrousSoul wrote:
This is what gaming is becoming. You can already see them releasing trash just to get money and it works!                  | |
Wait a second. I've played Bat Man, Punch-Out, Ghostbusters (360) and enjoyed all of those games. In Ghost Buster's case, it was in development for a long time and ended up changing companies a few times and I believe was even canceled once. Most games don't recover from stuff like that and I was happy to see it was one of the few that did.
I've also heard really good things about Brutal Legend and Uncharted 2 from Penny Arcade and I usually trust those guys. | |
OK first of all, quality is in the eye of the beholder. While I am disappointed with a few developers and directors alike, there has still been, some quality releases, at least in my opinion that I enjoyed.
You can sit there and bitch about EA all you want, but I really enjoyed Spore and The Sims 3. Spore was a little short for my taste, but I didn't feel like I wasted any money on it when I bought it. People keep complaining about the rising costs of gaming. Gaming is a expensive hobby. Always has been. I remember when my Mother put Super Mario Bros. 3 on lay-a-way at Kmart when it first launched because it was like $75.00 or $80.00, if you don't like the current trend in prices then you should just stop while you are ahead. You kind of people can sit there and talk about "Boycotting" all you want. But if you download their product and then continually use their product, then that product must have been good enough for you to A.) Want to use and B.) continue to use. Your just looking for excuses not to pay for a product. If you can't pay for it, you don't deserve it. You really, really want to know why I even started this thread to begin with? I saw how they just announced Fable 3. The original Fable took years to finally and Fable 2 took a fair share of time to release too. And while Fable and Fable 2 were relatively short, I felt it was well worth the money I spent on it. It saddens me roughly a year later they are already announcing Fable 3. It says to me they are going to rush the third game and try to release it in 2010. And I'd rather they take their time on the product. | |
3) a better method of shipping games... I.E. STEAM! Oh ye gods no. Steam annoys me to no end. They've got half of the equation right - and I'll admit to buying a bunch of games on it after Portal/TF2 sucked me in - but it's got a whole bunch of flaws in it that really need to be rectified before it's viable as a standard method of shipping games, and doesn't make me want to punch out a Valve employee. Steam needs: - A functioning offline mode. What's that, you say, it already has one? Have you ever tried to use it? Breaks all the time. Last time I tried using it I couldn't boot Steam - when I tried to run it, it would pop up the "Can't connect, wanna go offline?" dialog box, I'd click "Go offline", and then it would complain it couldn't connect. - Not force you to update games to play them. That is incredibly annoying when you're on a slow connection. I understand why they do it - it allows them to push through security fixes and means that people reporting bugs are always on the latest version - but it's also downloading MB of stuff without asking me and preventing me using the internet at all unless I pause the update - which prevents me from playing the game. Perhaps a setting in some 'advanced' options panel that is, by default, 'always download updates', and can be switched to 'prompt' or 'only when I ask for them'. Presumably games like TF2 wouldn't let you connect to a server unless you're running the same version as them. - Pursuant to the above, it should generally function on slow connections. I'm on 256kbps ADSL (It's not my fault), and it takes on the order of five minutes for Steam to start up because of whatever network crap it's doing in the background (If it's something other than network crap, it's even worse - this is not a slow PC). Games take about 10 seconds to start. A helluva lot of Steam's design decisions seem to be predicated on this idea that everyone using it has fast internet. - It should be well written. Steam has crashed and froze on me a number of times for no obvious reason, and neither my hardware nor software environment is particularly strange or fancy. I've had a number of GUI oddities that probably fall into the realm of bugs - double-clicking doing odd things, pausing a download and then doing something else unconnected restarting the download, downloads stopping for no obvious reason, etc. I can't use the store page within the Steam client for some reason - if I try to purchase anything in it, I get error'd out, so I have to use www.steampowered.com to buy games via Steam. - To be honest, I'm a little wary of the DRM present in Steam-like applications, too. What happens if the central authentication server goes down? What happens if it goes out of business? Do we really want the majority of our gaming releases to be beholden by one company? Valve hasn't done anything to really warrant suspicion at the present date (That I know of), but it's a concern nonetheless. I'm sure I'll think of something else after finishing the post, but the upshot is that, as far as I'm concerned, Steam does a few things very well - masses of games at your fingertips for somewhat less than it would cost in a store, the community features - but it does a lot of other things awfully. | |
Your last concern about Valve going out of business and not being able to access your games is a valid one to be sure. In the past, digital download services have went off online and suspended their service. I have seen three results from it:
1.) The company allows people to contact them and they send them physical versions of the games for free. They don't go out of their way to just send it to you though, you have to call them and request the software. 2.) The company releases a patch that allows people to use the software offline even if the service has been suspended forever. 3.) They don't do anything and you loose your software forever. | |
You have zero right to the games. If you don't think they'll be worth it don't buy them until they've dropped to a price you think they are worth it at. If they never do then just don't bother with the game. Just because you feel that games have been bad gives you no right to steal them and only gives the big publishers more fuel to push for nastier DRM and more legal power.
I will reward the developer by purchasing a legitimate copy. It is truly disgusting to see exactly how full of themselves and how low people can be when they don't have the crutch of enforceable law to make them do the right thing. | |