While there are always counter-arguments justifying the rise of such trends, that doesn't make them any less irritating. What do you think is most annoying of the bunch?
* Early access games sold at full retail prices, or even exuberant ones.
Remember the goold old times when you could buy a PC game and play it over the weekend and enjoy that humble satisfaction? Nowadays it seems every other PC game is an alpha product where developers invite you to continue funding their projects. All that is fine and well, but if you happen to like a game and it gets abandoned halfway through you'll never get full return on your purchase (which ≠ crowdfunding) I guess nobody has bothered to make a list of unfinished early-access games yet since it's a relatively new phenomenon.
And I was going to rag on the L4D-cum-Minecraft zombie copypastas that plague Steam and other digital shops but let's leave that for another day
Lazy port jobs that lead to frame-dependent PC games.
With consoles, the game speed being frame-dependent is no issue due to the standardized hardware configuration. They can test it on a single system and confirm whether it's optimized enough for release. With PCs, hardware configuration is so varied that they usually fail to account for a lot of things, resulting in some PCs still dipping below the actual speed - which would be fine if the game was frame independent as it would only skip frames to maintain playable speed, but frame dependent games just push out all the frames anyway so you get slow-motion gameplay.
OTOH, recent games that were guilty of this was the ports of Naruto Shippuden: Ultimate Ninja Storm 3 Full Burst, Injustice: Gods Among Us, and Mortal Kombat: Komplete Edition, which is why the games were being criticized as unoptimized or requiring a really high end system, even though there are people with low end rigs that can run them well.
Here's another one: Countless small-budget MP games that die within a few weeks after release. And since nobody bothers to program AI worth a damn, the games essentially become scrap code.
Pulsar_t wrote:Early Access is starting to bite players now haha. Is there a place where they name and shame EA titles that have been abandoned?
Only one I know of thats been formally Ditched is Towns (which I got on sale so ha ha joke's on me =\)
As for "trends that annoy me", Early Access as a whole, people porting over their tiny flash games and charging $10-15 for them, store-exclusive preorder bonuses.
MrPopo wrote:The life lesson here is jobs will come and go, but Earthbound will always be there for you.
Early access is awful. It made a whole lot more problems than it fixed that's for sure.
It doesn't annoy me that much, but one thing I don't like is the fact that DirectX is still the leading graphics api for PC games. Valve has pushed really hard in trying to get multiOS support but it doesn't really seem to be that much better than before and as far as I'm aware, OpenGL is still lagging tremendously behind in features (at least in OS X).
Also not particularly happy about PC games starting to come out at $60 instead of the $50 point they used to. I guess that's partially offset by the crazy number of sales these days.
