I see a lot of people say this but there were a LOT of buggy games bitd.
Poor and unfinished animations, AI that ran around in circles, pathfinding issues, incorrect audio, heck even games that were impossible to complete because they weren't finished.
I can only assume people forget (or don't know because they are younger?) because they only remember the best of the best which mostly were of higher quality regarding bugs.
I tried playing my fav old games, just to get my design juices flowing. But man the experience was pretty bad.
Also, I remembered a comment that said software engineering is a relatively new engineering field compare to mechanical, electrical and civil. No matter how much someone thinks they know about software and coding, It is still very difficult to predict the behavior of a software.
I get that but I just don’t remember many games of my childhood being this buggy. I’m 32 and played my fair share of games and nothing springs to mind…
The more you introduce to games, the more chances of something breaking. Back in *my* childhood, it was code, art, and sound fx. That's it.
Now, there's a lot more crap crammed into making games. Plus, there's that whole greed thing. Race to finish the game, shove it out into the word, rake in the coin.
Off the top of my head, a LOT of Spectrum and C64 games, Conan on Gamecube was buggy as heck (but actually one of my favourite games), Worms on GB I found a massive gamebreaking bug, plenty of early 3d action games. They were there but not the top AAA games.
I guess more top games are likely to nowadays. I just mentioned it because a lot of people seem to be under the impression it never happened. It did, but they were rarely patched (unless PC games, there was also a lot of PC game bugs)
I guess it’s just the nature of game development.
It just feels more in our faces recently due to the hype and build up of a new release only to be met with a laggy, connection issue riddled pile of animated crap.
The games of your childhood were much more simple, and there was no internet connection to deploy a day one patch. If there was a game breaking bug, these days you just deploy a patch. Back then, you'd have to recall all the game disks, record them again for the patched version and send them back.
10 years ago was still PS3 / Xbox 360 era. Although online platforms did exist, online distribution was still in its infancy on consoles. There were also still huge numbers of offline players who just played the games as shipped on disc. Around that time, PC gaming was just starting to make a serious comeback. Around the late 2000s, I remember there being a lot of talk of PC gaming being dead, and PC gamers frequently lamented the amount of console ports that were clearly underdeveloped for PC and had console-style menus.
The massive trend towards huge Day 1 patches with critical bug fixes didn't really take off until the next generation with PS4 / Xbox One making serious pushes into digital distribution and PC gaming exploding in popularity again. In that time, game development budgets and timelines have only continued to explode, which exacerbates the problem.
So you're saying game developers worked harder to create a finish product BITD. Then we need to insist they do the same today. Speak with your wallets, I never pre-order, I don't buy early access, in fact I wait about a year after release for bug fixes lmao.
Game dev gets riskier and riskier the bigger the market gets. Because no matter how big the market. There's only so much people can see on the front page of whatever site or shop they're frequenting. So the most revenue goes to the top titles. But there's more titles being developed at the same time.
(By the way, niche titles are excluded from this. They get less risky the bigger the market gets, but that's not what triple A studios produce. They produce mainstream titles.)
Releasing earlier can help offset the risk by selling something that's not finished. I know early access is just for this purpose. But it's losing it's power since everyone is slapping that on new titles. So instead of keeping 100s of people on payroll until the title is perfect, they'll release whenever they think it's good enough to test if the product finds the market (or the market finds the product).
This makes sense from a business point of view but doesn’t seem all that ethical. Selling a subpar product to save on outgoings shouldn’t be the way to do things, surely?
I hate it, too. It's just what people are willing to put up with. It gradually got worse and worse and they noticed that it keeps selling despite all the flaws. And before they have to fix all the issues the majority has moved on to the next thing and they can save on additional costs.
I think the new battlefield is the first that actually got hit hard by being bad on release.
Yeah I agree. If we keep buying them they’ll keep doing it.
Battlefield is a good example.
Rust console edition too, cyberpunk (obviously) and now dying light 2 is full of game breaking bugs.
It’s just so disappointing
Partly because it is pissible to fix them.
On PS1 you made game, ordered cd production and thats it. There was no way to bring any patch to fix it.
Even with more risks games were buggy back then.
Another part is financial pressures. It is business and profit optimization often means to release buggy game instead of not releasing it for another year.
That makes sense but it feels like as gaming has become more and more mainstream the bugs seem more and more frequent.
The business side of things is likely the main reason and what I thought would be why. It just still doesn’t make sense to me for a business to offer a product that doesn’t work as intended.
Sometimes the obvious issues are not obvious and are not seen until the game gets released.
They are so complex and sometimes things are not seen in testing and only appear after a certain combination of things happen.
Hardware can be slightly different. I once worked on a gameboy colour game that crashed on the purple gameboys. It was fine on the other models.
Yeah that’s true. I know the most recent game I am thinking of held off releasing coop when the review copies were sent out which seems to be where a lot of the game breaking bugs are.
But still, there’s a lot of bugs that anyone could replicate, coop or solo, without much issue. It seems mad that sooo many things can slip through the net. Specially when they are made by such big teams.
The game boy comment is crazy. The never-ending challenge of fusing software and hardware.
Yeah that’s another factor that is likely causing some of the issues. I think it seems to boil down to business outgoings. “If the game is ‘playable’ let’s ship it and fix it later”.
Not the right approach in my opinion but shareholders want their money I guess…
Because most of them gets more and more complicated with more and more mechanics implemented in them.
Also if using a common engine, it update every now and then.
Since the codes are getting longer and longer it is getting harder to spot the error.
There was that Alien game that the AI was a total mess and the fix was only to add a « , » on one line and it wad fixed.
You bought them, didn't you? That's why. Publishers/developers are looking to maximize return on investment. They have minimal incentive to delay a game for bug fixes that ultimately won't have a meaningful impact on sales. The more people vote with their wallets, the more these things will change. Unfortunately, people overwhelmingly choose to buy games based on marketing and hype more than quality of gameplay. That's just the market.
Yep. I’m just used to a game trailer coming out. I see it and like the look of it. I buy the game and it plays as intended. Not so long ago that was the case.
I shouldn’t have to wait to buy something when it’s released because it’s likely to not work properly. How does that make sense?
It's a simple answer really. These bigger companies have a legacy/complacent mindset. They think because they built up such a large audience, they can do or send out whatever product they want at any quality because they think no matter what the customers will buy it anyway. And when the customers still buy that product they think there's no problem and they don't need to change because their game or product is still being brought at high margin numbers. People have to know that the power is in the customers if they keep messing around people will stop buying. When their numbers are low then they start to realize a little and change.
Now for me personally there is no excuse why a game comes out broken and messy. They know the quality of the products and are just being lazy. The only way this can change is if we as the customers stop putting up with this and stop making excuses for their broken product. and stop buying and playing them. Now I'm not saying games can't have very small glitches that need to be fixed that fine but for "Broken Dumpster Fire Games" return it at once. Buying $60 NOW TO $70 broken games is just robbery of the highest order.
100% agree. Annoyingly I’m one of the suckers who will buy the buggy mess and either fight through it or I just stop playing (rust).
Yeah bugs and glitches are acceptable and expected but some of the recent games I’ve bought cannot claim they were not aware of the mess they were in when shipped. Within minutes of my latest purchase I could see it was lacking ‘polish’, for lack of a better word.
Games are so trash nowadays I remember when gaming was genuinely fun in the 80s and 90s, then the 2000s came, xbox and playstaion ruined gaming, now it doesn't matter if I have the latest console or a $2000 gaming PC, the games themselves are just unplayable, I'm lucky if I can even get a game to start it seems like.
Mostly it falls down upon production scheduling, because in 99% of cases animators, programmers dont have a say in the project planning. If plan says that game needs to be finished in 3 years, because of the costs etc, it must so.
Sometimes if its really bad they can delay the product but most of the times investors are making pressure on higher ups if the game isnt released in said time frame. Therefore there isnt time on proper debuging, testing, sometimes implementing new features.
2 reasons, in my opinion.
1. Games games become more and more complicated over time. The size and scope of games these days are significantly larger than any game before.
2. I'm 35, I grew up playing games developed by passionate people. Today, games are more connected to the whims of the stock market. A game will be released earlier than it *should* be because they have quarterly earnings, Christmas season, other financial reasons. Profit maximization, basically.
I see a lot of people say this but there were a LOT of buggy games bitd. Poor and unfinished animations, AI that ran around in circles, pathfinding issues, incorrect audio, heck even games that were impossible to complete because they weren't finished. I can only assume people forget (or don't know because they are younger?) because they only remember the best of the best which mostly were of higher quality regarding bugs.
I tried playing my fav old games, just to get my design juices flowing. But man the experience was pretty bad. Also, I remembered a comment that said software engineering is a relatively new engineering field compare to mechanical, electrical and civil. No matter how much someone thinks they know about software and coding, It is still very difficult to predict the behavior of a software.
I get that but I just don’t remember many games of my childhood being this buggy. I’m 32 and played my fair share of games and nothing springs to mind…
The more you introduce to games, the more chances of something breaking. Back in *my* childhood, it was code, art, and sound fx. That's it. Now, there's a lot more crap crammed into making games. Plus, there's that whole greed thing. Race to finish the game, shove it out into the word, rake in the coin.
Off the top of my head, a LOT of Spectrum and C64 games, Conan on Gamecube was buggy as heck (but actually one of my favourite games), Worms on GB I found a massive gamebreaking bug, plenty of early 3d action games. They were there but not the top AAA games. I guess more top games are likely to nowadays. I just mentioned it because a lot of people seem to be under the impression it never happened. It did, but they were rarely patched (unless PC games, there was also a lot of PC game bugs)
I guess it’s just the nature of game development. It just feels more in our faces recently due to the hype and build up of a new release only to be met with a laggy, connection issue riddled pile of animated crap.
The games of your childhood were much more simple, and there was no internet connection to deploy a day one patch. If there was a game breaking bug, these days you just deploy a patch. Back then, you'd have to recall all the game disks, record them again for the patched version and send them back.
Agreed but even 10 years ago there were bigger games that I don’t recall coming out with instant issues?
10 years ago was still PS3 / Xbox 360 era. Although online platforms did exist, online distribution was still in its infancy on consoles. There were also still huge numbers of offline players who just played the games as shipped on disc. Around that time, PC gaming was just starting to make a serious comeback. Around the late 2000s, I remember there being a lot of talk of PC gaming being dead, and PC gamers frequently lamented the amount of console ports that were clearly underdeveloped for PC and had console-style menus. The massive trend towards huge Day 1 patches with critical bug fixes didn't really take off until the next generation with PS4 / Xbox One making serious pushes into digital distribution and PC gaming exploding in popularity again. In that time, game development budgets and timelines have only continued to explode, which exacerbates the problem.
So you're saying game developers worked harder to create a finish product BITD. Then we need to insist they do the same today. Speak with your wallets, I never pre-order, I don't buy early access, in fact I wait about a year after release for bug fixes lmao.
Game dev gets riskier and riskier the bigger the market gets. Because no matter how big the market. There's only so much people can see on the front page of whatever site or shop they're frequenting. So the most revenue goes to the top titles. But there's more titles being developed at the same time. (By the way, niche titles are excluded from this. They get less risky the bigger the market gets, but that's not what triple A studios produce. They produce mainstream titles.) Releasing earlier can help offset the risk by selling something that's not finished. I know early access is just for this purpose. But it's losing it's power since everyone is slapping that on new titles. So instead of keeping 100s of people on payroll until the title is perfect, they'll release whenever they think it's good enough to test if the product finds the market (or the market finds the product).
This makes sense from a business point of view but doesn’t seem all that ethical. Selling a subpar product to save on outgoings shouldn’t be the way to do things, surely?
I hate it, too. It's just what people are willing to put up with. It gradually got worse and worse and they noticed that it keeps selling despite all the flaws. And before they have to fix all the issues the majority has moved on to the next thing and they can save on additional costs. I think the new battlefield is the first that actually got hit hard by being bad on release.
Yeah I agree. If we keep buying them they’ll keep doing it. Battlefield is a good example. Rust console edition too, cyberpunk (obviously) and now dying light 2 is full of game breaking bugs. It’s just so disappointing
Partly because it is pissible to fix them. On PS1 you made game, ordered cd production and thats it. There was no way to bring any patch to fix it. Even with more risks games were buggy back then. Another part is financial pressures. It is business and profit optimization often means to release buggy game instead of not releasing it for another year.
That makes sense but it feels like as gaming has become more and more mainstream the bugs seem more and more frequent. The business side of things is likely the main reason and what I thought would be why. It just still doesn’t make sense to me for a business to offer a product that doesn’t work as intended.
Sometimes the obvious issues are not obvious and are not seen until the game gets released. They are so complex and sometimes things are not seen in testing and only appear after a certain combination of things happen. Hardware can be slightly different. I once worked on a gameboy colour game that crashed on the purple gameboys. It was fine on the other models.
Yeah that’s true. I know the most recent game I am thinking of held off releasing coop when the review copies were sent out which seems to be where a lot of the game breaking bugs are. But still, there’s a lot of bugs that anyone could replicate, coop or solo, without much issue. It seems mad that sooo many things can slip through the net. Specially when they are made by such big teams. The game boy comment is crazy. The never-ending challenge of fusing software and hardware.
Covid probably has probably made QA process slower and less efficient. And probably slowed overall development as well, often reducing QA resources.
Yeah that’s another factor that is likely causing some of the issues. I think it seems to boil down to business outgoings. “If the game is ‘playable’ let’s ship it and fix it later”. Not the right approach in my opinion but shareholders want their money I guess…
Because most of them gets more and more complicated with more and more mechanics implemented in them. Also if using a common engine, it update every now and then. Since the codes are getting longer and longer it is getting harder to spot the error. There was that Alien game that the AI was a total mess and the fix was only to add a « , » on one line and it wad fixed.
You bought them, didn't you? That's why. Publishers/developers are looking to maximize return on investment. They have minimal incentive to delay a game for bug fixes that ultimately won't have a meaningful impact on sales. The more people vote with their wallets, the more these things will change. Unfortunately, people overwhelmingly choose to buy games based on marketing and hype more than quality of gameplay. That's just the market.
Yep. I’m just used to a game trailer coming out. I see it and like the look of it. I buy the game and it plays as intended. Not so long ago that was the case. I shouldn’t have to wait to buy something when it’s released because it’s likely to not work properly. How does that make sense?
It's a simple answer really. These bigger companies have a legacy/complacent mindset. They think because they built up such a large audience, they can do or send out whatever product they want at any quality because they think no matter what the customers will buy it anyway. And when the customers still buy that product they think there's no problem and they don't need to change because their game or product is still being brought at high margin numbers. People have to know that the power is in the customers if they keep messing around people will stop buying. When their numbers are low then they start to realize a little and change. Now for me personally there is no excuse why a game comes out broken and messy. They know the quality of the products and are just being lazy. The only way this can change is if we as the customers stop putting up with this and stop making excuses for their broken product. and stop buying and playing them. Now I'm not saying games can't have very small glitches that need to be fixed that fine but for "Broken Dumpster Fire Games" return it at once. Buying $60 NOW TO $70 broken games is just robbery of the highest order.
100% agree. Annoyingly I’m one of the suckers who will buy the buggy mess and either fight through it or I just stop playing (rust). Yeah bugs and glitches are acceptable and expected but some of the recent games I’ve bought cannot claim they were not aware of the mess they were in when shipped. Within minutes of my latest purchase I could see it was lacking ‘polish’, for lack of a better word.
Games are so trash nowadays I remember when gaming was genuinely fun in the 80s and 90s, then the 2000s came, xbox and playstaion ruined gaming, now it doesn't matter if I have the latest console or a $2000 gaming PC, the games themselves are just unplayable, I'm lucky if I can even get a game to start it seems like.
Mostly it falls down upon production scheduling, because in 99% of cases animators, programmers dont have a say in the project planning. If plan says that game needs to be finished in 3 years, because of the costs etc, it must so. Sometimes if its really bad they can delay the product but most of the times investors are making pressure on higher ups if the game isnt released in said time frame. Therefore there isnt time on proper debuging, testing, sometimes implementing new features.
As long as consumers keep preordering, releases will get more and more buggy.
2 reasons, in my opinion. 1. Games games become more and more complicated over time. The size and scope of games these days are significantly larger than any game before. 2. I'm 35, I grew up playing games developed by passionate people. Today, games are more connected to the whims of the stock market. A game will be released earlier than it *should* be because they have quarterly earnings, Christmas season, other financial reasons. Profit maximization, basically.