I've been noticing a disturbing trend among game developers lately. There has been a distinct tendency to release buggy games, and then announce DLC expansions that people can pay to add in. This, to me, is putting the cart before the proverbial horse. Before you ask consumers in a down economy to spring for extra content in your game, might it not be wise to make sure that the game you are releasing into the marketplace works right first? Two prominent examples that come to mind are Fallout 3 and Last Remnant. While I have not yet played Last Remnant yet (and probably won't due to its 6.5 rating due, primarily, to it being a buggy, broken game), I have played Fallout 3 for the PC extensively and can tell you flat out that the game needs patching badly. One example of a bug that I encountered in Fallout 3 is the case of the statue NPC. At one point during the main quest - DEEP into the main quest mind you - an NPC you talk with asks you to follow him. You need to do so to initiate the next stage of the quest in question. Sadly, when I talked with him, he wouldn't move. He would not walk to where he was supposed to go. This frustrated me. I had played the game for something like 50 hours at that point and felt like I was going to have to start over. Fortunately, at that time I hit upon a rather brilliant idea. I quickly googled a walkthrough of the game to find out where, exactly, this guy intended to lead me. As luck would have it, he wasn't planning on walking far. I figured he needed to be in a specific spot for the game's programming to have him queue up the next part of his dialog. So I put my character beside the statue NPC and...pushed...him a couple of rooms over until he was in the spot shown in the walkthrough's picture. Sure enough, that activated the guy to start blabbing the next piece of dialog he was supposed to impart on me to trigger the next quest. That having been said, I'm not sure how many other people wouldn't have been stymied by this sort of glitch and have had to start completely over. I got really lucky that my hairbrained approach worked. A game that buggy should be having their developer talking about a PATCH not new for-pay DLC. Similarly, for Last Remnant, Gamespot dings the game for, among other things, "When you first begin The Last Remnant, you'll participate in a battle within moments of inserting the game disc, and chances are that you'll be struck by a glaring issue: The frame rate is awful, and the texture pop-in is shockingly bad. It's an issue you'll never quite get used to, considering that it mars the entirety of the experience. What a shame, because this long and fascinating Japanese role-playing game has a way of getting under your skin." On the flip side, allow me to give a BIG shout out to The Witcher Enhanced Edition. Longtime readers of my blog will know that I considered either The Witcher or Mass Effect as the runaway, in fact only, decent choices for RPG of the year last year. I'm happy to report that the Enhanced Edition of Witcher isn't just a mild improvement on the game, it is a breathtaking insurgency of a patch that raises the bar for what post-release support for a game should entail. Not only does it fix the most glaring issues of the regular edition (some roughly done dialog/localization/translations and bad loading times) it ALSO adds additional content for free. The fact that the Enhanced Edition is absolutely free to anyone who bought the regular edition of the game is one of the most significant developer decisions made in years. CD Projekt has earned my unconditional support for the next game they put out. I will be preordering and buying sight unseen their next offering.