By Sam Coles:
With the latest slew of games having problems with their launches such as
Assassin’s Creed Unity and Halo the Master Chief Collection, the question that
I propose is that are we paying for unfinished products? Do the developers
these days have a “fix it later” attitude towards development?
The problem that I have is that a lot of gamers don’t seem to have a problem
because it will be fixed later and they have a go at critics because they
analyse the game in its current state at launch. For example the latest game to
have problems was Halo MCC and Gamespot gave it 6 out of 10 due to the fact
that the multiplayer servers are not working properly. The community however
did not like this because the campaigns are good and all that, but do not
acknowledge the fact that the game is in an unpolished state even though they
had a day one patch that was a massive 15GB.
It even becomes a problem after the launch of a game like the latest one to
be hit by a game breaking bug was Alien Isolation on the PS4, I bought this
game about a few weeks ago and when I put it in the system it did a usual patch
for the game, this is expected. What is not expected is that there is certain
mission where the game will crash and you can no longer progress in the game,
and it was the patch that broke the game. Excuse for thinking in an old
fashioned manner, but aren’t patches meant to fix games and not make them
worse? Give them their due they did respond very quickly to their consumers and
they are trying to roll out another patch to fix the problem, let’s hope it is
soon because I’ve enjoyed of what I’ve played so far.
Now we have the big one from Ubisoft Assassin’s Creed Unity the game has
been having frame rate problems across all three platforms although
surprisingly it has been performing the best on the Xbox One, this is another
unacceptable case especially when in some cases the frame rates drop down to
15FPS that is unplayable and it should not be happening in professional triple
A gaming. According to fans of the series there is a very simple fix to the
problem all you have to do is disconnect the game from the internet and it will
start to play at a smooth frame rate, so what Ubisoft are making you do is play
a singleplayer game online didn’t they not learn from Blizzard and Diablo III
that you’ll still get latency issues even if you’re playing solo. When I’m
playing a singleplayer game I don’t want to be connected to a server and have
my character gliding along like he or she is on roller skates.
People say that we didn’t have the luxury of updates and patches and games
were more glitched and buggy, but they were nowhere near as unfinished and
unpolished states compared to more recent releases I get that the games are
getting bigger and more complex to make, but if it’s not finished delay the
game.
However this is not the first time in the gaming industry that this has
happened let’s take a journey back to the early 80’s with the world of Atari.
In 1983 the video game industry crashed due to lack of quality control because
anyone with the know how could produce a game on the Atari 2600 and due to this
there were a bloated amount of games and back then there weren’t really any
reviews to go by because the video game journalist industry was non existent at
that point. The only way you could find out that a game was good was word of
mouth. The major game that caused the crash was the famous game E.T. but games
like PAC-MAN for the 2600 was another game because it was ungodly mess and
completely not finished with flickering ghosts and ear grating noises.
Although at the point of this published editorial the games are more stable
than they were at release, but what I’m saying is that it is unacceptable to
take a dump on your consumers by releasing a bug infested and unfinished mess
that you like to call a video game. If you don’t want to lose you customers
then give them the best product that you can deliver and if it doesn’t work
delay for another six months.
The point I’m trying to put across in this short editorial is that don’t let
another video game crash happen because if you keep up with this behaviour
triple A publishers then you’ll run this industry into the ground and who knows
maybe Nintendo will save it again.
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