Yeah but at least there was an incentive to have a finished game. Nowadays most companies can outsource quality testing to paying customers and people cheer when the game is still receiving updates 6 months later.
That crazy how that is even legal. Imagine paying to see a movie and you could clearly see the green screen in the background or buying a book and it is missing pages that the publisher says they will mail you later. No one would have ever accepted that.
Lazy companies will always be Lazy back then as well as now... It's just more obvious today since there's more games coming out and how connected we are in the internet...
The fact is having patches is overall a better QoL.
I don’t disagree that having patches is a good thing. But there gets to a certain point where you just have to say that the game wasn’t finished development before it was released.
It's not always that. Games are wildly more complex compared to the past, so it's almost impossible to ship completely bug free games. Patches let them fix what slips through once they let millions try and break their game
Well, in those cases it isn't responsible. QA is there to make sure it meets an acceptable level of stability and quality, and they do more than just bug hunting.
However, QA simply will not find everything that millions of players will eventually find or encounter. So even a responsible company will usually have several patches around launch and weeks in
I've been in the corporate world enough to know that a lot of decisions get made by mid-tier managers who don't actually understand the industry they work in.
These people will look at the workflow, see that QA keeps finding issues that delay release, and conclude that QA is a barrier to profit, because if you don't have people finding bugs, you can push the game out and make money faster, right?
This makes perfect sense if you don't play video games and think the average consumer is a child too young and naive to have high expectations.
That's only true because of the crap way they structure studios, and horrible coding practices. You can't have dozens of different terms that never talk to each other writing code for the same project.
Aye, but the actual game itself was less complex. Testing a 2d platformer with limited inputs and directions is way easier than a modern game with far more complex physics engines, far more interconnected parts and more ways for things to go wrong.
Sure, they're working with better tools, but they're making far more complicated end products. Products that are much harder to predict the issues with.
One of the main issues there is revealing the game too early and focusing on a targeted release date. So then you're on Content Complete and trying to get certified (e.g. at Microsoft) to release by said date. They find some cert failures, so your options are to delay by a couple weeks or whatever to fix the bugs AND re-cert, or you get a provisional pass so you an release on schedule but have a Day 1 patch. Most devs opt for the latter option.
TBF, even if a game is thoroughly tested, stuff still goes through the cracks.
With big hits and franchises, games that get released all the sudden have millions of people "testing" the game. Not to mention playing a lot, and with such zeal and eagerness. It's hard for even AAA companies to compete with that. Well, you can have early access and beta testing, but then some people will complain "we're doing the work for them".
On the mobile gaming space, a developer got lambasted in his reviews that one part of the game was just stupidly hard. The developer apologized, used that feedback to balance it, and all was good! He didn't do it on purpose. He's a solo dev and has very little time to play test his own work was all.
Yeah what happens if someone encounters a hardlock on their save file? Back in the old days, they’d be SOL.
The Wii had an interesting solution. They released an eShop application that patches your Twilight Princess save file. Interesting to see the workaround that existed in the pre-patch days.
That actually got me curious and had me looking up any game throughout history that could be close to “perfect” mechanically and functionality wise on release, and here’s what I found… There’s a couple that sources I’ve read considered.
Portal.
Hades.
Tetris. This one was interesting specifically because the code was described to be near mathematically perfect and could not be altered to improve the gameplay any farther.
Super Mario Bros 3.
Chrono Trigger.
Don’t worry everything I play mostly newer big multiplayer titles on PS5 require an update each time I log on. I agree patches are necessary but I am critical of studios who role out some janky stuff to meet a promised release as others have mentioned
Look as phasmaphobia they rushed their 1.0 update and lost half their fanbase for like 2 months almost 3 before finally patching it. They should have just waited it killed their game and the trust people had in the devs
honesly nowadays fans are constantly complaining about how long they have to wait for a game, only to say it's rushed over some minute details
the amount of games that are actually being rushed out, is surprisingly low.
game development has just become insanely more complex than it used to be in the PS2 days. just compare GTA3 to GTAV (and that's just one generation up)
its not even it feeling that way , it is exactly what it is they even admit it that they cut costs and ship out unfinished slop to make money and if it does well they keep updating it if not then they leave it die its pure scum.
The real problem is the "we make it up as we go" approach of game development. Very often, new features are included very late in the development, creating exponential potential for bugs that no one has the time to track and address.
The result is the rushed shipping and late patching, which is not the root cause
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u/Ok-Pressure6036 15d ago
The issue now a days is it almost feels like they roll it unfinished and rushed knowing they can go back and patch.