Fallout 4 - The Trend of Broken Games

I'll agree on this 100%.
Since it's so simple and inferior hardware, you need no creativity to code on consoles. No need for coding talent = low cost on human resources as 5 year old kid and 99 year old granny can make "games" on consoles = CEOs bless consolegames.

You're exaggerating. Just a bit, but still exaggerating. :)

pibbur who never exaggerates, thousands and thousands of people can confirm that. And who just learned how to spell the word.
 
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A bit offtopic…
If you finished ME1 in 17 hours, you missed resources for ME2 which is not that bad, but you also missed war assets for ME3 which *is* bad.
This doesn't mean the game or it's sequels are broken, in fact it's IMO a great way to persuade players into exploration, not just run through the main story and ignore sidecontent.
The quoted extract reads Mass Effect two. Absolutely possible to complete that one in 17 hours, without missing much or anything actually.

We get buggy releases because some players can't wait to get their hands on new games, and corporate exec. types are greedy. That isn't going to change any time soon. But we can train them to properly patch games by delaying our purchases en masse.
Corporate execs no matter how greedy they are, did not invent monetization of alpha and beta releases. The crowfunding movement did that.
The execs are going to follow now: crowfunding supporters were too keen to praise the feature, they can not explain to the execs that it should not be done. That train has left the station.

What was that?

Pibbur who can't remember a day when he saw anything like cloning, but then again there's a lot of things pibbur doesn't remember.

Never seen that guy near Whiterun that kept cloning? You had to trigger a quest for that NPC to move near the stables just outside the city. Then it kept cloning and cloning.
 
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Never seen that guy near Whiterun that kept cloning? You had to trigger a quest for that NPC to move near the stables just outside the city. Then it kept cloning and cloning.

Thanks for explaining.

I never saw that. I think I would remember if I did. I probably never triggered that partcular quest. Or if I did, for some reasoin it never triggered the cloning.

pibbur who realizes there are severel clones of himself on the watch, but never more than one at a time.
 
Yeah, I remember that bug real well: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=209320115

The thing is - we have a tendency to remember good stuff and forget bad stuff. Old games most certainly WERE buggy! Many bugs were at least as blatant is Mr. Letrush there. How about Ultima 2's bug where every pirate ship you captured cloned off another pirate ship? Or further back - the Superman Atari 2600 game where you could pause the game, let the screens cycle in pause mode back to the bridge screen, and see the bridge instantly repair itself??

Those bugs couldn't be fixed, either.
 
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True. And there wasn't any Internet either so you had to just hope and wait that maybe next month's issue of a gaming magazine would ship with a patch on the CD included.
Generally speaking I would say that at least in the AAA space, the quality of games has actually much improved over the 1990s. The main reason in my view is the higher price of admission. In the 1990s when game budgets were only a fraction (a few hundred K) of what they are today, it was far less risky to release utter shite.
Nowadays we're talking at least $5 million on the very low end of the non-indie publisher-made games spectrum. Barely any publisher will risk that kind of capital on total crap.
There are a few notable exceptions, of course, but generally I'm sure it's safe to say that the (digital) shelves are filled with way better quality (quality strictly in the sense of the quality of the underlying code) games than around Y2K or before.
 
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I've been playing games since 1998 or 1999, I think. And I do remember the good old days when we had to wait weeks, if not months for a patch to be released in say PC Gamer. On a CD. I also remember the days back ion 1999 or 2000 where I had to have a co-worker of mine help me download a patch to Baldur's Gate. It filled 6 5.25 discs or 5 3.5 discs. At least today, we get a day one patch and can download the patch almost instantly....and others patches to games as well...
 
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The article is just not talking about bugs. It's about games being released incomplete and broken. Look at Ubisoft for an example on what he means.

They cant even patch a game the right way, and all because they released Assassin's Creed Unity as a broken mess on release. It had four huge patches already.

Anyway I long ago accepted games need to be patched ten times now. It's also quite sad when I think that most of us are fine with this nowadays.
 
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Skyrim was playable out of the box...the bugs were not major...
 
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Skyrim was playable out of the box…the bugs were not major…
Oh it had bugs it's well documented on the Games Wiki page. Anyway the built-in game console let me correct them with a few inputted command lines.

Link - http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Skyrim:Glitches

Anyway a big thank you should go to the un-official patch mod makers as they did most of the work to make the game even more playable.:thumbsup:

Link - http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/searchresults/?src_cat=84

Skyrim though isn't the problem its the broken new releases of the last few months, and it looks like developers just don't care anymore for Q&A testers.
 
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Skyrim though isn't the problem its the broken new releases of the last few months, and it looks like developers just don't care anymore for Q&A testers.

That's a silly remark. Of course developers care. Even the publishers care. Just think about the massive PR nightmare Ubisoft has had to deal with. That hurts in the pockets.
 
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That's a silly remark. Of course developers care. Even the publishers care. Just think about the massive PR nightmare Ubisoft has had to deal with. That hurts in the pockets.
I refer you to my latest news-bit for more information. Seems I'm not the only one who thinks this is true, and the article even has a few good responses from developers.

Publishers that don't respect QA don't respect their customers either

Link - http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2014-12-19-buggy-games-deserve-much-harsher-treatment

So no it's not silly after all.;)
 
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One point missed as the title was read too quickly and so was the article.

Video games are games and might be broken games.
Video games are also pieces of software and thus, might be broken pieces of software.

Those are two different things. Reading the title, the article, the comments, it is hard to determine whether people consider one or the other.

Board games are also games and thus might be broken games in similar ways video games might be. But board games cant be broken pieces of software.

Board gaming went through a period when players prefered to spend money on gaming material instead of games themselves.
The current trend is that players want nice card decks, good looking minis, cool tokens, beautiful artwork, deluxe paper manuals, high quality tiles etc...
Games have turned into a pretext to provide all that gaming material.

Video games, even when they are perfect pieces of software, can still be broken games. Going to be interesting to see if a similar to board games trend is going to appear, with players focusing on the piece of software side while dismissing the gaming side.



I've been playing games since 1998 or 1999, I think.
It was already over. The industry knew the internet was going to be introduced and with it, the pipeline to deliver patches over patches. Preparatory groundwork.
 
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