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I'm sick of people not understanding business realities and software development flow complaining about how those impact games.

I just feel like most of these gripes are explainable. Not everyone hates QTEs or other features that you don't like.

It is a bummer when games stop patching and there are known issues, but that is literally every game ever. You could sit and bug fix every game until the cows come home and there is still gonna be something you want to polish up.

Stark wrote:Not everyone hates QTEs or other features that you don't like.

Yeah, but I don't like them, that's what matters to me personally. So I still want to punch devs who use them in the face and crotch simultaneously.

MrPopo wrote:I'm sick of people not understanding business realities and software development flow complaining about how those impact games.

+1

You know, I can see that from both sides. Much of the issues we see with modern games come from issues that can sometimes be helped, and sometimes they can't. Releasing while still buggy can be from a financial standpoint, where the publisher is ready to get it out the door to not miss the holiday season, for example. When you get a chance for a "do-over", it's a lot easier to justify, and it helps the bottom line. Unless, of course, you burn your customers too many times and they stop buying your games.

There is, however, a reasonable amount of bugs that can slip into a game, just because the complexity of video games has increased drastically. There's so much coding-wise going on that it's just really hard to exhaustively test everything that could happen. That most of our games are functional at all is quite impressive. And sometimes, fixing a small piece of code leads to breaking even more. (That's also why a lot of the cheat/debug codes in older games stayed in, because removing it could potentially break things.)

I would like to note, as relating to QTEs, that they have existed in games far before Shenmue introduced them. Heck, games like Die Hard Trilogy had them, and if you really want to get technical, all of Dragon's Lair is a QTE.

dsheinem wrote:

MrPopo wrote:I'm sick of people not understanding business realities and software development flow complaining about how those impact games.

+1

-2

Stark wrote:It is a bummer when games stop patching and there are known issues, but that is literally every game ever. You could sit and bug fix every game until the cows come home and there is still gonna be something you want to polish up.

I guess I wasn't specific enough- the specific glitches I'm thinking of were high profile, well known glitches before the first patch even came out, and can be game breaking. If its something that can't be fixed, I'll just accept it, but I don't personally have any way to know that without a discussion from the devs themselves.

The first week of a game's release will have more man hours spent playing the game than the entire dev cycle for a AAA release.

I'm aware- my point is that a game breaking bug, if found and expounded on both through forums and news articles is found, shouldn't that bump it up on the list of "bugs that need to be stomped"? Small glitches aren't that big of a deal to me, its just big stuff being left like that can be a real head scratcher.

Forlorn Drifter wrote:I'm aware- my point is that a game breaking bug, if found and expounded on both through forums and news articles is found, shouldn't that bump it up on the list of "bugs that need to be stomped"? Small glitches aren't that big of a deal to me, its just big stuff being left like that can be a real head scratcher.

They do get bumped up. The problem is the fix is rarely easy. And then you've got the turn around time on patches for consoles thanks to the certification system.