Is bugs getting more common?

Started by Peder 🚀, Mon 24/05/2010 02:14:50

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Peder 🚀

Reading in the latest Red Dead Redemption thread I started thinking.
Is it starting to get more common that new games being released contains alot/some bugs?

To me it seems because its now so easy to just send out updates even on consoles that developers are pushed more to release an "unfinished" game. Almost as if they drop the testing and let the people buying the game do the testing the first months after release...

Also, anyone else here hate Activision and their slaving? lol (thinking about the recent firing of 2 top employes at Infinity Award. also how come they have such rights to fire someone? Do they own % of the companies under their belt?).

Mr Flibble

I think the "Day One" patch is becoming quite a common thing, but that's not anywhere near as bad as games that are just unfinished or broken and need unexpected patches to be released. The Day One patch being when the dev-team continues working on the game even after the CDs have been sent to print and so on, since worldwide distribution takes a month or more to organise. But that's time they can still use, fixing up the game.

I think there's a sort of sinusoidal thing going on, in terms of a trend. For instance back in the days of casette tapes, if you found a crucial bug it was no big deal to send a new master tape down to the duplicator. However, with the advent of cartridges, suddenly you only got one shot and had to make thousands at a time, so there's an increase in pressure to get it right. But now that it's so easy to patch even a console game (previously unthinkable) I think it's understandable that a tight budget will dump some testing time. I still think it's bad, but budgets are bitches.
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Anian

#2
Not only are the pressures to send something out greater plus to be timed in with marketing, but games are more complicated these days, there's simply more things that can go wrong - I mean from a floppy or even a cd to a 2 dvd or a blu-ray title, there is a lot of code, textures, models etc. that can be f-ed up.

Not sure how much time is devoted to testing games anymore either.

On Infinity ward issue, there's probably a lot of things we don't know so it's hard to tell what really happened. I think basically Activision (like so many others) became too greedy, they started making games (COD ones) with other studios etc. Probably some blackmail and added pressure came along to IW so now I think every body important went away into a new company (there's a youtube video where the credits from COD roll and they show who left IW, what you see is basically all "lead" people lead artist, lead programmer, head writer etc.).
Also for more info check Machinima's documentary series All your history, there's a 4 part video on Call of duty http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bsg18eDqgmA.

EA seems to be turning a new page on relationships with customers and studios, they were leading in being rude, but Ubisoft and Activision seem to be taking their place.
I don't want the world, I just want your half

Peder 🚀

Thanks for guiding me to that documentary! :).

Gravity

Well, there are a ton of great games coming/already out this year so the pressure is on for developers/publishers to get their games out at the right time so a few products with bugs are going to be common. To be fair, some of these games are pretty awesome even with the few problems they have and don't really hurt the overall experience. RDR is one of many good games out and coming out that have a few hiccups but given the scope of the game it's pretty understandable. Rockstar is one company I'll continue to get games from because of their history of putting out some impressive and polished titles. But it is a sad day indeed when you have to start downloading updates to console games to fix bugs. But not all that bad considering the older days when there was no way to fix console game bugs...

Layabout

I'd say it is becoming less of a problem. Why yes, there may be visible bugs, but the really terrible ones are fixed with 0-day patches. Before HDD's in consoles and broadband, if a game was broken, there was no real way to fix this easily for most consumers (shining example of this is QFG4). Now most games are patched often, which shows most developers are dedicated to a good product. Also, they are infinity more complicated than they used to be, allowing for more bugs to slip through.

The Activision/Infinity Ward is not something I will comment in depth on, as although I have read up on it, I don't and I think no-one really knows the full story bar Acti/IW devs. I know for a fact IW only had the rights to make modern/near future COD games. But to gain further insight, it might be worth checking out what happened to the IW fellows before they were with Activision.
I am Jean-Pierre.

xenogia

QFG4 lead to Cori Cole losing his job at Sierra even though it was PR peoples fault for releasing the game.

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