A Patch Will Fix It, It's all OK

*cheers*

Yeah, at least you can play up to 13 year old campaigns NO ONE with an XBone hasn't played before. Great excuse for the online not working. After all, Live is like the online equivalent of a threesome with Jessica Alba and Britney Spears after riding a unicorn through fields of bacon.

This is what setting a bar low looks like.

We are not talking soly exclusives on in this thread. From what iv seen PC was getting the screws before console owners. Also anyone saying "well the community fixes them" its still the same problem we are all talking about. Only difference is whos doing the fixing.

Good read, very entertaining, however....

If you can ignore the "hype it up, preorder it asap, buy it at midnight when it launches" mentality you can avoid wasting your money on broken games. Unfortunately gaming websites, magazines, and stores throw this in your face nonstop. And it can be especially hard when it's a game series you love like Halo or a team like Bungie.

Don't buy the hype

@Giancar: See, your claim is that we need to stop bitching and imagine if we were in the shoes of the developers, and their families. The problem I see with that is, the consumer more than likely have a job and a family to support of as well. But when they work, they prioritize their job, or face repercussions. We shouldn't have to worry about the personal lives of those that dedicate themselves to the product, but we should judge the product itself.

It's like saying a team of construction workers go to build a house. They promise that the house will be a glorious masterpiece and in stable condition once it's finished. They even give a deadline of when it'll be finished. The deadline nears and the house looks fantastic, but they are aware that the foundation isn't stable and it'll take a couple of more weeks to reinforce it properly. They are given two options, inform the contractor that the house is finished, or inform the contractor that there's a problem with the house and they need more time. Let's say they go with the first option, and the owner moves in. A week later the house is in shambles while the owner was at work. When he contacts the construction team about the issue, the workers confess that they were aware of its conditions but, wanted to meet the deadline. Should the person who paid complain about how the construction workers promised him everything will be fantastic and stable, or simply let it go because the workers probably had family back home that they needed to take care of and couldn't afford to delay the work a couple more weeks?

Obviously this is a more severe example but the concept is the same. Should we as the consumer complain about the product delivered when it was advertised to be a exceptional experience, or simply let it go in hopes of "promised" patches and show sympathy to the developers personal lives.

Except you're still paying $$$ for a product that still needs patches/updates. It's nice to see a community rally up and fix/mod games but if it takes people who aren't getting paid to put out a game that's when you know there's something wrong with the industry. Devs in general whther they make games for PC or consoles need to get their shit together.

I would be embarrassed and ashamed if people who don't even do what I do for a living or job and basically do my job for me.

This is the best topic I've seen in System Wars in years. I applaud you sir for making it and I hope the gaming community starts to take notice.

It's sticky worthy to be honest...

Good points

I don't know if you are serious or not but-

If I pay you money NOW for a product I expect it to work NOW. I don't give a shit if the Pope's son and all of his cousins worked on it it better fucking work.

"How can you take the work of hundreds of people and shit on it over something that will be fixed?"

Easy, because I work for my money and when I spend it I expect a working product, not something that might get fixed later. Game developers have become some of the whiniest bitches out there and they still have the balls to ship something broken and then expect you to pay full price for it. And don't get me started on shitty DLC practices.

Overall, I pay for my games and I love my hobby, but I'll be damned if I'm supposed to be happy that these clowns can't ship working products anymore.

**** that.

3 options:

1. People's sarcasm detector are broken today
2. I am too good at trolling ^_^
3. or I am too bad doing this >_>

You fit in number 3

Agreed, Champ. But there will always be day one buyers. Nobody knew of the problems extensiveness in Halo or Driveclub unless there were people trying to play the. Now that I own MCC and am loving it, I sure do expect fixes. Although I have gotten into matches in it, the game deserved its lower scores because many did not.

Number 3.

Kind of stopped when you mentioned developers.

Developers develop a game, passes through QA, QA tells devs what's wrong, devs, fix game, rinse and repeat. UNTIL evil multinational corporate business publisher man comes and says "WE HAVE TO SHIP GET IN ZEE CHOPPA" and a broken game gets released, and devs get yelled at for making a broken game even though they spent 4 years working shittty hours convinced that the game will be ok, until evil multinational corporate business publisher man says we gotta put nvidia gameworks in this shit and massive graphical overhauls so the E3 demo will bring in some pre orders, and there's no time to optimize this shit, doesn't matter, game will sell.

EDIT: At the same time, "supporting the devs" is a myth when it comes to triple A games most of the time. Maybe if a game sells well and scores well less employees will get fired, but they certainly won't get the royalties from each game sold. The best thing that could happen is an in house expansion.

I feel that if you want to improve the industry through criticism (basically the only way) you (and by you I mean people in general) should take in to account all of the factors, and be respectful, and helpful, rather than behaving like raging bulls in a comment section nobody will read.

wow so many angry buyers, try some yoga guys, it really does release the stress. muuusssaaaa say it with me, mmmuuuussssaaaaa

Too bad a patch won't fix your FACE : |

35 hours so far form a game that cost me $85 New Zealand dollars, one hell of a value right there. Yes games need to come out in working order, MCC does this with 90% of the game, only matchmaking is slow, hell people can still play it = not broken. If Hours of entertainment > what you paid for it, then there is zero to bitch about.

Meant to post a clapping gif earlier, but they've all been taken.

Right on though man. I won't even buy these shady on release type games, but to sit back and defend them is much worse. Like a told someone the other day, unless these companies are giving the games away for free, you shouldn't be making excuses for them.

It doesn't bother me when there are slight bugs that make your game experience quirky on launch day. But when there's shit like horrid performance out of the gate or game-breaking bugs, there's a problem. If I buy your game on launch, drop $60 on a pre-order and everything, I expect to have a finished product playable at 12 AM release day. And if it's not playable I expect an immediate patch the day after (AC Unity still hasn't been patched, to my knowledge).

Personally I never had problems with Skyrim on launch day. I unlocked it on Steam the second it was available and played for hours. The only bugs I encountered were giants flinging you up to Mars, but I consider that a feature (I still think it's in-game too). I realize my experience wasn't everyone's, but I still agree with the sentiment that paying for a game should make a customer feel like they're entitled to a finish product, even if they're technically not obligated to one. That's why I'm glad companies like Blizzard are offering 5 free days of game time for WoD's disaster of a launch: they technically don't have to, but they find it necessary for the sake of their company's image.

Let's ask what would old man say?

Old man: Wha..patches? Back in my day, our games never got patched. All the flickering pixels, crappy controls or poorly implemented designs never...ever went away. Once you plucked down your hard earned cash, that buggy bastard was yours to suffer with for life. NES was probably one of the worst for having games with various glitches and bugs like the double headed women in Renegade, the disappearing pixels in TMNT the arcade or the horrid controls in Skate or Die 2 and I'll never forgive Psygnosis for that Genesis bug in Shadow of the Beast that prevented me from continuing past the dragon...tried so many times ...it hurts Psygnosis!!!!!...*sniff**...it just still hurts....

Their name is on the box, they made the game, and if things go right, they get 100% of the credit and praise. Thus you must share the blame when shit goes wrong with your fucking game.

The excuses some people will make for people doing an unfinished job.

Thats the reason I stopped buying games at full price I think the last full price game I bought was either Ni No Kuni or Dark souls 2.

I'm going to consult my good friend common sense here by believing that if I'm going to pay $60-$70 for a game, I would at least like for it to actually work, let alone get my money's worth. Just wait for patches? Why should I? Who honestly buys a game with the hopes that it'll be playable down the road? It's supposed to be functional right then and there.

It is extremely repugnant to release games in unfinished states, but I'm agreeing with parkurtommo here. You're right that if things go right, the devs are the ones who get the credit. But QA is generally done on the publishers' end. If the publishers do a mediocre job of dealing with bugs and glitches, or a rushed job just to meet a deadline, how exactly is that the developer's fault?

Solid read champ. Totally agree. I about snapped last week when I started playing creed and the game glitched out like a shitty alpha made by baboons. Decided to pass on far cry because of it. You wanna free pass from me based on some glitches, at least have the common courtesy of doing it on new ip. All they fucking do is make assassins creed and the can't get it right.

And Destiny... Where I've tried my damnedest to defend against my better judgement. I'm convinced that if destiny maintains a healthy community and dlc comes out over a long period of time, they're gonna make the core game free to play and that's gonna piss me off. So tired of pissing my money away on unfinished products.

Last gen started this trend and this gen so far has increased it tenfold.

It's annoying and the best I can do is not buy those games.

I love S.T.A.L.K.E.R. but even I admit that the series released with a ton of issues and was not polished. Call of Pripyat at least wasn't too bad in that regard.

I just don't buy games at launch anymore. Wait a few months, the game will cost half as much, and it will run fine.

Damn good color in your writing TC!

Your point is valid too. How long must this go on before gamers reject this shit and demand a quality, finished product?

It could actually get worse than this.

Shit goes wrong with the game BECAUSE it gets released prematurely for purely financial reasons. Considering the devs are not typically concerned with shares and their boss' next Lambo, it's not their fault. They're doing their job as well as they can, which sometimes isn't enough, but if people were actually concerned with quality control and not how fast they can bring out a release date, we wouldn't have this problem. So I'll definitely shift the blame towards those responsible for such money/time-related choices, as opposed to the actual devs.

I wholeheartedly agree with you. Good thing I really am not concerned about "unfinished products" because nowadays I only buy older games. I do not buy new games anymore. The games I buy now are at least 2 years old. By the time they're at least 2 years old, that's when there are "patches" and "mods" that can fix and/or enhance the game.

See this I don't understand.

Why overreact like that? I understand it's hyperbole or something but do you really not have any empathy and understanding of WHY the game is in such a state? Do you understand how fragile the line between a polished game is and an unfinished game like Unity is? If the devs just had literally one more month of development time to deal with such issues that the QA would have detected through extensive use (it's important to realize that most unique glitches only occur when it's being tested extensively by hundreds of people), it would have been finished.

So I'll keep saying it; it's not who MADE the game, it's who made the damn choice to push it out in to consumers' hands without regard for polish. Basically, the publishers.

In this case Ubisoft developed and published the game.

I don't buy that. Ubisoft has recently acknowledged their game was not ready to be released and delayed it (Watch Dogs). Why could they not do the same thing with this game?

Eh, agree I suppose but TBH, way back in the day when Japan was the gaming capital of the world, they would get games 9 months to a year and a half before us in NA and the Japan version would ship with bugs but ya know what, back then I always thought, hell with the bugs, gimme the game cuz I'm tired of reading about how awesome the game is and I want it now not a year from now. :P

That's just one of the issues with the post-modern relativistic reasoning. Along with assuming the impossibility of objectivity. You are asking for objectivity here in two ways: consensus on an issue through discussion, pointing to factual flaws in the prevalent pov; and you condemn the act of relativizing the problem with a convenient context, a future context that is taken for granted today, subjectively, by the critic. Of course relying on day 1 patches is something to be criticised. I agree with you completely.

Because it's Assassin's Creed and we're in high season, delaying the game would probably cost them millions.

Do you honestly think ubisoft is just one conglomerate where devs run the show? There are Ubisoft Development teams, Ubisoft port teams, Ubisoft marketing teams, Ubisoft executives, all completely different roles and practically seperate.

In this case I mean the devs (actual people working on the game directly) and the executive decision-makers who are the equivalent of a publisher in terms of their priorities.

Yeah, its not that big of a deal. The amount of code and data for games nowadays is incredible. You cant expect the games to run as well as in the past out of the gate. The MCC alone was nearly 60gbs.

Probably only Nintendo. PC, at least ports of multiplat AAA games, are the same. Especially any released by Ubisoft.

@parkurtommo: I feel one part justified in my feeling of disappointment and one part a sucker for buying the game at launch...

Obviously I have great respect for the task developers set out to accomplish, especially since I can't do it myself yet enjoy it so much, but I'm not about to give a pass to anyone associated with a game that spent millions advertising it as the next big thing the way creed does yearly only to put out a product that is unfinished and underwhelming because they care more about their fiscal calander moreso than the loyalty of the fans getting in line at midnight to support their product.

Further, despite the reality that the game will be patched and the product will be competing over the coming weeks, where does that leave day one customers? Right now I've played twenty hours of creed and the frame rate has been horrible and at some points unplayable throughout. My lasting impression of the game will be that it's buggy...

Are you suggesting I instead approach it with a mentality that, "well I payed top dollar for this and it's in really rough shape, but golly gee those devs had a tough task! Go ubi!" hell no... Not me not ever.

My reaction to this and similar buggy games as we've been dealing with is not a hipster backlash, it's cause and effect.... Sell me something that isn't working the way it should, "BUT will down the road" and I'm gonna stop buying your product on day one because I want the best possible experience for my hard earned money.

Perfect example... @jg4xchamp: and I have lightly discussed our experience with fallout new Vegas... A game he played years after release and I played at launch. That game is a 7/10 to me. It was a glitched out buggy mess when it launched and it effected the games quality. To him, playing it after years of patches and updates, it's a better game than it is to me. Fast forward to today... The folks who get assassins creed Christmas morning will get a better assassins creed than I got because it (will hopefully) be patched by then. To me it'll be completed and shelved for eternity by then.

Bottom line, modern day gaming punishes you for the excitement of buying games the day they release.

I don't know how things work, so someone can fill me in on this. Do developers just make the game, and then publishers set a release date once it's known when the game will be ready? Or do developers have a predetermined deadline for when the game is supposed to be finished?

Because if it's the former, it seems like it's solely the publisher's fault for releasing the game before it's done. But if it's the latter, then it seems like it would also be the developer's fault for failing to meet the deadline.

That is ultimately irrelevant to the bottom line. They made the game, they had the ability to speak up, they knew what their deadline was, in theory they should have an idea of what they can or cannot do. I'm not saying there aren't scenarios where the devs get the raw end of the deal, it happens quite often. But, there is no reason they should be absolved of any blame, they deserve it as much as anyone else. You can't have the best of both worlds where you get all of the praise none of the blame. You have to accept the good with the bad.

But stuff like bugs are not really predictable and are hard to deal with when under such pressure, like I said they need to test the game through QA extensively to detect that kind of stuff. Things like bad gameplay mechanics, jerky animations, shitty textures are all in the responsibility of the devs, first hand. Those are the kinds of situations where you can blame the devs entirely. But not with QA and technical issues.

The only thing that is odd with AC Unity is the performance. The devs noticed it, they had to. But I guess due to the deadline they just didn't do anything about it. Then again, gamers would complain anyways, like with Watch Dogs. Downgrade the game to make the game playable on consoles = bad, keep the game unplayable = bad.