THE ART OF THE PREMATURE RELEASE

[abaris]

 

Look at Dragon Age 2 as a good example. Terrible game comared to Origins. Why? It was rushed. It wasn't ready by about 3 years. Look at Skyrim. Well done, but a few bugs should have been out if they would forget their pride and just delay it by 1 month.

 

 

That's actually one game I was happy to have a demo cause otherwise I would have wasted good money on that piece of garbage.

 

Yes, it was rushed but they claimed till the bitter end, the design was a conscious decision. And that may well be, but it shines a spotlight on the general situation of the gaming industry. Small independant labels have been swallowed by the big fish and suits have taken over from the entrepreneurs. The new management only looks at the dollar signs and during the DAII release it has even been mentioned they're looking for the COD crowd. Releases are pressed out to maximise on the profit. Content and quality control come second. A simultaneous release on three of four platforms is a sure recipe for something buggy. At least one of them suffers, even if you put the lowest common denominator issue aside.

 

As far as rushed releases go, I would say, Skyrim is one of the better results when it comes to bugs. Skyrim has moments where it shines but it can't hide the fact of the lowest common denominator issue. And that is the action over content tendency of the game industry as a whole. They rightly assume they will sell enough copies with the crash/boom/bang factor. And that's not the problem of early releases but a very conscious assumption.

[ShadowscaleB1980]

there seems to be 'quantity, not quality' thing going on for most of the producers anymore.

 

Quantity has a quality all of it's own - Josef stalin

[Mshai]

THE ART OF THE PREMATURE RELEASE;

I had a problem with it when I was a teenager, then I got older and more experienced and I was ok. The sad part is that most of the Betty's people are around their 40s and they really should've know better. :confused:

[Nekrafilia]

This "trend" has been going on for nearly 20 years already. It's more of an entrenched business mindset these days. Get the product to 90%

The problem is: Games today are big. Before you had a game released, and it was as it was. Now, you need to patch it.

What happens when you got 500 000 pissed off customers that nags you to fix it? Yeah, no vecation for you.

How is no vecation after a hardcore month of overtime? Yeah, bad.

Who gains from this? Nobody.

 

There really is no reason to smoothen the issue. This trend is getting worse, and there is no logical explenation for it. Back on the N64 and PS2 you didn't update games. Today you do, and we got higher expectations. Why take a shortcut, than in the end gives you more work?

 

Agreed. Not much the ordinary "Joe Gameplayer" can do about it. Really though, as games become more complex so does the testing. If you've ever written software or been involved in the software development life cycle you'll know what a nightmare it can be to develop, test, fix, test, fix and so on. Testing becomes such a resource hungry and time consuming beast that at some point you have to release the product. While the game is not out it's not making money and without the cash they can't pay their employees and without employees there is no game.

 

In short, I'd rather see a game like Skyrim at it's level of bugs on release (and remember many of these bugs probably weren't evident to Beth due to the huge range of conditions (hardware/software that people run) that cannot be created in their test environments (added in the issue of mods used that haven't been created with the CK - how compatible are they really?)) and have the bugs fixed as quick as possible after release.

 

That's not to excuse releasing a totally crappy product and hope that it can be patched into a workable product. It's a fine line for some companies, especially when the bottom line (cash) is tight.

 

Personally, I think Beth have done an outstanding job. Software is not easy, believe me (24 years software development here) and it only becomes harder as the tools and hardware allow users to make ever more complex and difficult demands upon us.

[Nekrafilia]

there seems to be 'quantity, not quality' thing going on for most of the producers anymore.

 

Quantity has a quality all of it's own - Josef stalin

 

One death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic - Not Stalin

 

Yeah, Stalin turned mass murder (quantity) into a quality all of it's own :rolleyes:

[ShadowscaleB1980]

....games become more complex so does the testing. If you've ever written software or been involved in the software development life cycle you'll know what a nightmare it can be to develop, test, fix, test, fix and so on.

 

 

I agree. One of my former partners worked for a software developer and frankly half the time they were testing and re-testing. Games have not only gotten more complex, but the hardware we play them on is just as complicated and variable. I remember when DirectX came out, as a competitor to GL there were many people for and against it and only a few game manufacturers were willing to write for two different rendering APIs'. And then there is the texture format they agree upon to use, then there are CPU architectures and extensions they may wish to take advantage of. It can be hard to keep track of everything - and then there can be issues with upcoming hardware.

 

I'm impressed Bethesda has done so well with skyrim, it is stable it doesn't have the stuttering issues that oblivion had.

[Matth85]

That is the thing. Bethesda did a good job, but some of the bugs are painfully obvious. We all expect a small bug here and there, perhaps a missing texture from time to time. What we do not exect is unable to play the game due to a painfully obvious NPC is gone, or there is a error in the code which causes massive lagg (PS3). A month more, and that could have gone and we could have had the CK, since they didn't need to stress as much to reach the magical date.

 

 

I am not saying Bethesda did a bad job. God no! They did an awesome work, and I've had 0 glitches or bugs yself. However, some of the bug reports are way too obvious, and should have been caught. But due to the release date, they didn't have the time to do a final test to get these bugs.That is the core of the problems, and what alarms me the most. Settig a date a year in advance, and then be forced to release the game before you've had that last test that flushes out the worse bugs.

[ShadowscaleB1980]

remember that Skyrim is an open ended world, and it handles this in a manner that is vastly superior to Oblivion - where you have to do quest tasks in exactly the right order or things won't work. I have cleared out whole dungeons in oblivion that were magically restocked with baddies a few game hours later when I was given the quest that happened to bring me to the exact same dungeon. With Skyrim it's ok if you already cleared it out - you can say so, and the game will reward you.

 

Though there is inevitably going to be the issue with people playing in a sandbox in unexpected ways - which can cause unexpected problems that in retrospect may seem blindingly obvious, but ruin the experience for the player. All that can be done is produce a patch that eliminates the problem, or prevent people from executing actions in that particular order.

 

I seem to recall in Lord of the Rings J.R.R Tolkien wrote "Even the very wise cannot see all ends" - and that is what we are seeing here, Bethesda has done an excellent job of putting their game together but there are always going to be a few people who play differently and are going to see a few cracks in the gameplay.

Edited December 4, 2011 by shadow_scale9180

[Matth85]

and that is what we are seeing here, Bethesda has done an excellent job of putting their game together but there are always going to be a few people who play differently and are going to see a few cracks in the gameplay.

Which is not the biggest problems. What is the big problem, is game breaking bugs that is very obvious. The PS3 players had at best 6 fps. It would take the 5 second to find that out, but they didn't have time. A certain NPC in a certain quest could die, leading do me not being able to finish certain faction. Certain script didn't happen at certain time, leading to problems. Etc

Basically, a simply double check of the codes and a good playthrough of the game on each of the consoles, using a month extra, and it would be fixed.

 

Bugs like: Clipping inside the mountain, crashing once in a blue moon, a horse clipping inside a stone, a dragon skeleton falling down the sky, etc, etc are expected. That is up to us to find, and most of the time fix.

We can't fix broken hardcoded codes, however, and as of now we can't fix broken scripts in general. These issues should be fixed before release, and there is no excuse really. This was just because they wanted a "cool" release date.

 

A lot of extra work for Bethesda for a cool date, no?

 

This also goes for a lot of games. They release a few months too early, and there are so many painfully obvious bugs that wouldn't take more than a week to fix. If the industry wants money, why not release the product a month later and they can "chillax" a little, instead of too early and needing to rush out patches, toolkits and whatnot. What is worse is that doing it can ruin more for their workers than you think. Bethesda did this right before Thanksgiving and Christmas. Is it really smart to ruin 2 vecation for some guys because they decided 11.11.11 was cool?

 

It's just.. The customers doesn't gain on this, nor the company. They lose nothing by releasing a month later, but they gain less pressure from us. This is not MMOs, so we do not pay monthly. We pay once, and I'd pay even if I had to wait 5 more years for the game.

 

P.S. I talk about games in general, not just Bethesda. I just use them as an example. But they only had few gamebreaking bugs, so it isn't too much of a deal. THey did, however, give themself more work than they need.

 

Cheers,

Matth

[Sabatasso]

that list had nothing to do with the main quest being incomplete as you stated... or did you forget what you wrote?

 

I never really said that the main quest is incomplete, I said that you're halfway through the main quest before you realize that the game is still in alpha/beta stages. Meaning that when the novelty effect wears off, you realize just how bad some things are, and that you've already "spoiled" half of the game.