"AAA" launches
Not a single thread about how COD, Halo MCC, Assassins Creed Untiy shipping with broken features ?
Maybe this is an art forum, but what does it say when ever major Fall release launches with broke games? Maybe we're an older crowd. It's mostly online MP, but what's driving this? I can't remember a 2 week launch period with this many problems.
What's the solution ? Open betas? Single player launches with rolling MP?
Megaton of great art here. Is it just launch week server load? Were Xbone/PS4 hacked??
Maybe this is an art forum, but what does it say when ever major Fall release launches with broke games? Maybe we're an older crowd. It's mostly online MP, but what's driving this? I can't remember a 2 week launch period with this many problems.
What's the solution ? Open betas? Single player launches with rolling MP?
Megaton of great art here. Is it just launch week server load? Were Xbone/PS4 hacked??
Replies
honestly, the buyers should not subsidise a development, unless they know it before. If a game isn't ready to get shipped, maybe one should not ship it. obviously depends on the kind of bugs which are still open. And often times there are some bugs the QA and developers never found. But some of the games which have been released should have been pushed back.
The 'ship now, patch later' mentality has been around for a while now, but I do feel that it has gotten SIGNIFICANTLY worse in the past year or two, likely because next-generation consoles have changed the way patching is handled to make it easier. We're not seeing small issues that affect a minority of users any more, we're seeing big glaring issues that often affect everyone, and we're seeing months of patching after release.
If your product needs regular patching after release, or has to ship with half the content missing and patch it in later it is not finished. Delay that game, because you're not doing it, or the players any favours - it's not like it doesn't cost money to fix a game post-release.
Now think back at your "good-old-game" in the MS DOS days that never needed a patch. There was MS DOS, maybe an engine (e.g. Scumm) and the game on top.
yeah this, often unforseen things happen, like 3rd or firstparty driver or softwareupdates that can rip new holes into your code.
as a pc gamer i am glad i even get PC ports
honestly today is not even that bad, try playing gothic 3 without patches and enjoy your good old times.
Obligatory:
http://kotaku.com/new-video-games-shouldnt-be-so-broken-1658570535
Obligatory 2:
Yeah, this is the root cause in many cases. Personally, I don't get why consumers just accept it and carry on.
If you bought a book that had a load of pages missing, you'd take it back.
You'd never accept a car without brakes.
If you ordered a pepperoni pizza, you wouldn't accept opening the box to find a plain pizza, then being told the pepperoni will arrive two hours after you received it.
All of those things are 'functional', but they have fundamental issues and you wouldn't accept them - so why is it reasonable to accept games in a broken state? People love the hell out of Fallout 3 as an example, but the game was (and still is) so utterly broken out of the box that it's barely playable?
Feck me, that's the scariest thing I've seen in a long time!
"Madame, that's a lovely hat you're wearing..."
*Faceless woman let's out a blood curdling scream*
Also I will throw in with the statement that yea the amount of bugs and bullshit engineers deal with is beyond monumental, art is tough but the struggle I've seen those guys go through at every studio and project I have been on has always been quite the ordeal.
Obviously no one wants to launch a barely playable game. So I suspect the reason this keeps happening is because at some point near the end of the development cycle, someone determines that they're likely to lose more money by delaying the game than by shipping it broken.
So it ships broken.
If people weren't so readily willing to shovel out their money on faith alone then there'd be a lot more pressure on them to have smooth launches.
not to go all "gamergate" or whatever, but... the games industry review system is broken at best, and outright corrupt at worst. with publishers telling reviewers that they can't release a review until x time after the game is launched, threatening to pull financial support if demands aren't met or if a game receives what the publisher considers "and unfair review"...
Besides it's not as though credible reviewers don't exist. TotalBiscuit hammered AC:U when he played it and he's easily the most popular videogame critic at this point.
But if you don't trust any reviewer then just look at what other consumers say, the ACU thread on this very forum is page after page of shit about how messed up the game is.
You make it sound as though there's no way to find out a game is screwed up without buying it because 'the system' keeps the truth from getting out. Review embargos and threats of punishing reviewers can keep an aggregate score on Metacritic propped up but that's about all it can do. Peoples opinions get out, and they get out quickly.
Yes, to be honest, I think the entire review thing is a scam to a large degree. It's all back slapping fueled by press junkets, pizza, and free games/hotel rooms. There's very little integrity left at all.
If you get your ass kissed, great review. If you don't, mediocre review. Has little to do with the game itself.
This is one way to get real reviews. Until he cashes in, and then you have to find the next one rising from the ashes.
The best reviewers are your friends. Everyone has early adopter friends who will buy anything and everything ... wait until they spend THEIR money and get an honest review out of them over lunch.
It seems that if you want information regarding a game nowadays you check with streamers or other consumers, and if you want poorly written, intellectually bankrupt "critique" or PR regurgitation you go to review sites, although streamers can also be guilty of the latter (Shadow of Mordor controversy).
Embargo'd reviews are another good indicator that you're about to waste your money. If reviews are blocked, it's because they're bad and the company doesn't want you to see them until AFTER you buy the game. Otherwise, there's no point to blocking them.
As for this...
The AC:Unity thread has pages and pages of people raging about bugs and glitches.
DEMOS !
You mates remeber the days when we actually had "demos" of the games we were thinking about buying ? Back then even the net wasn't that fast and we got demos from game magazine DVDs or CDs.
So we have über internet these days, what stops the companies from putting up a 1-2 GB .exe on a server and distrubute it ???
If your face rig system is broken it will likely to show up on your demo too.
Another Obligatory just I found
[ame="
Its all about business. People that are paying your checks expect your product to release at a certain time to fall in line with there profit margins and keep there investors happy. If you slip that date, stock prices can fall and investors can become unhappy hurting the chances of future investment.
Its actually finding the middle ground between what is an acceptable amount of bugs and what is not. Previous AC games were in the acceptable realm, AC Unity was not. The more open world your game is going to be, the more bugs it will have. But that means the more open world your game is, the more time you need to plan for bug fixing.
Skyrim was a game that was fundamentally broken on the PS3. It was still hailed as a great game and won so many GOTY awards and people bought it up in droves.
Demos take an incredible amount of resources to create. It isn't a bandwidth issue, it is a resource issue. And after all those resources spent, demos may actually end up discouraging sales.
At the end of the day, if the market accepts the current state of games as they are launched, then that is the way it will be.
Also note, that most of the 'major' problems with many launch games won't even be noticed by your mainstream gamer. The vocal minority of people complaining on the internet hardly represent the actual consumer.
If everything is no good why don't we all just ignore them altogether? They will eventually get their stuff together or disappear.
The reason fellows put these things out with no good code is because they know that foolhardy consumers buy them. This needs to stop, and we all need to get the word out.
Also I found these articles,
http://www.technobuffalo.com/2014/11/18/nintendo-thinks-rival-consoles-and-the-aaa-market-are-boring/
http://www.gamnesia.com/news/miyamoto-the-industry-has-a-long-way-to-go-needs-more-creativity#.VG0F6CghM36
turns out I am not the only one who doesn't like these sort of games.
I mean if the game doesn't have much to offer in the first place, and the demo needs to show a decent amount to be worth it...how much can you cut? They aren't wrong you know.
Since piracy also has been gaining traction on consoles, more people have been opting on testing from there, or if a PC version of the game is out, test there before making a choice, and frankly it makes sense, some games have a serious sense of letting go at the end or having mid game bugs.
Embargo's existed before games, as early as the 2000's in the Movie industry, a (as some of you guys put it) VOCAL MINORITY raised a fuss about it, but enough of a fuss by proxy was generated that it started gaining mainstream attention, and before you know it, what used to be a sure sell of a movie without a preview became a death sentence and still is today to certain extent, unless the movie turns out to be good, in which case, it's usually an anomaly, I think only 2 movies so far seemed to fit this criteria, and none of them belonged to Micheal Bay.
There is also the issue to publisher/review sites themselves are simply an extension of a studio. A certain popular site out there for example, has one of their chief editorial staff members who had a child with senior member at a game studio, and it seems awfully convenient on these 2 companies seem to be so mushy together all the time when it comes to articles in favor one of these companies.
Then of course, there is another issue, programmers. I mean no offense guys, but why should half of them work in Game Dev? Some of them can get at junior position, right out of Uni, get a half passed private/Gov't job, in which they can sit in a sever office room all day long, while playing Dota and just occasionally running a script or setting up Skype for a meeting, while taking in a cool 30-50K a year. Seniors are rolling well later on.
However, I don't care about any of this because frankly, I have to deal with complex adult crap that not even my parents had to deal with at my age, but there is something that is bothering me, and frankly, any other opinion I might put out would be burning bridges, but hey, whatever.
Developers have made it clear they are running a business, right? A buisness that needs LOADS of money to stay afloat, right?
If your product is broken, and people don't buy it at the start, this means they will wait for a discount, right? I heavy discount, usually at least a 50% or more, to get the same number or greater number of sales are the original figure when the game came out (this seems to be standard according to Steam sales).
How much of a hit, on discounts can a company take before going red? I mean c'mon now, you guys can't honestly have it 2 ways, you say for us to wait out and go for a discount, but at the same time lament that people wait for a discount.
So instead we have to wait for a patch as the middle ground, but certain games stop getting support 6 MONTHS after it's out and still broken, even AMD has a longer support effort for older games then some of your peeps have in your Dev studio, and usually heavy discounts come around the 9 month mark, so what do I do now?
But then some chime in to say you're staying afloat due to the number of volumes pushed of the game "down the line", so does this mean the labor force itself was cheaper then warranted at the initial level or not? Yes, I know about 'curd market', where you introduce something at an expensive price point then lower it slowly down the line so you end up selling more, but it throws you original 'say' into world of it's own, because the company just 'made it out of the red in the quarterly".
This is my issue, it feels like half of the big studios are running on fumes at this point and have maybe 10 years at most on them (don't even get me started on the talent hiring process, when your HR peeps want to become accountants, you know something went wrong) and instead of going back to basics in making games into games, and not a moving movie on your screen with some triggers and a 70 million Advert budget, everyone is trying to ditch it out and go full Valve (ei: create a Steam like platform and generate money to make games).
What exactly is the end game here and what is the current logic to reaching there?
that might work with more open ended games like Rust or DayZ etc but what about big hit titles like The Last of Us or Batman Arkham Asylum? Those games would need to be bug free with all story content playing back perfectly right from day one. Unless they are done in episodic form and the user can play chapters of the story as the dev makes them. Kind of like how tv shows like LOST are done these days, although that means script writers adding filler to keep the audience captive for longer
But but...
Without AAA games, what are we artists working toward for ?
If game dev only gonna stick to low end graphic, we would all be wasting our awesome ZB sculpt for 2k tris models.
Also if they have so many bugs, wouldn't be of lesser quality than they claim they actually are?
Technically those sports games are "AAA" and I honestly don't think anyone aspires to that.
and honestly, why would a character artist not want to work on say a boxing game? there is rarely any other genre with such lose technical limits and so much you can learn about anatomy while working on one.
Can you give me an example of an 'Actual fun game with bright colors and interesting music' ? I'd like to know where you are coming from.
Binding of Isaac: Rebirth!
Oh, wait. That game has too much meat.
Sports games probably offer decent job security. Not my cup of tea, but if I had a family to take care of I wouldn't turn my nose up at it.
Also to me, AAA always referred to budget, first and foremost. Hence why games like the original rendition of APB were considered AAA, due to it's notoriously high budget, despite the...erm...issues.
yeah because mario "insert any subgenre of game here" 15 is the most innovative thing ever
People in the industry be like:
It's not that one wouldn't want to work at a place that does this sort of thing, I mean if the job popped up and you got accepted, you'd take it sure thing. What I am saying is that I don't think anyone grows up aspiring to work on said things, or if that would be someone's end goal.
Hazardous
Mario Galaxy or perhaps Katamari, Prinny games, patapon, rayman, any kirby title or that ni no kuni.
Looking back on many things that I was inspired by, most of them were sprite titles or
Ravenslayer
What of the galaxy? No one had ever seen anything like that one before.
You can't condemn AAA then turn around and say that you want to see more titles like Mario, it's confusing your argument. Stick to not wanting to play meat-games, it makes more sense (even if I think it's a little silly).
Mario is about as meat as it gets.
[ame="
especially all that nasty overtime and airplane food...
ayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy
Though, what AAA lacks in lunch options and the stability of their meals, I feel they make up for in name brand snacks and variety of beverages. Plus, at AAA salary usually allows employees to purchase their own lunch - which i normally do (usually a salad if you're curious, but sometimes tacos, sandwiches, or soup.) No one is forcing you to eat the AAA lunch, you could go to a food truck or even a local shop to get what you want. Sure, the lunch I'm experiencing might be a little rough, it might not be the smoothest lunch - shit, there may even be a few bugs depending on how clean the kitchen is. In that case, though, it's more of a human resources and ops thing than a QA thing - heh. In the end, sure, no one likes a buggy lunch - indie or AAA - but it's still free and a nice gesture. I'd rather a buggy lunch than no lunch at all.
*looks off into the horizon*
Well don't get down because of the ants. You open up your lunch bag and it just happens. Your beautiful gourmet lunch, which until this morning could have been on the cover of Bon App