Day 26 : Broken games now the norm?
Hello ladies and gentlemen and welcome to Day 26 of the daily blog challenge. Now I know modern computer games are far more complicated than the older ones and budgets and requirements are much higher than they ever were.
However it seems the trend is to release a game that is far from tested or sometimes not even finished. Then companies spend time putting out day one patches which are sometimes bigger than the original game.
Obviously lately everyone is aware of all the broken elements of CD Projeckt Red’s Cyberpunk 2077. Reports of bad optimisations for consoles, broken quests and much more.
Now given the hype behind such a game it was always going to be difficult to meet up to people’s expectation but you would at least think that someone like CDPR would get the base functionality of the game working.
However they are not the first or the last to do this.
Just look at the train wreck that was Fallout 76 by Bethesda. If ever you are looking for a broken, badly designed project it was just total carnage.
Everything about that game that could go wrong, did go wrong.
The crazy thing is up to Fallout 76. The Fallout series was quite a loved franchise with many fans.
The game may have been fixed up to a degree but it still seems many elements of the game is forever broken and even Bethesda have given up trying to fix various bugs and what you have is what you are going to get.
I think what’s worse with a lot of these games, they fix one series of bugs and introduce so many many more problems. Sometimes they patch one set and return an old set of bugs back in the game.
Now I admit I’m not a programmer and I am sure creating games of such magnitude takes an awful lot of work.
However what is a more concerning issue is they are working these programmers to death, and we here reports of constant crunch and damaging mental health of these poor programmers.
Only for them to have their games pushed to market by companies, sometimes even knowing a product is no where near finished.
At times it really feels as if the gaming industry has given up any form of caring for quality. Just shift units we can patch and fix the issues later.
I guess it was due to Hello Games No Man’s Sky such things became acceptable. Promise the moon, put out a substandard version of such. Then spend the next three years bolting on the features that were promised and a few extra twiddly bits on top.
If anyone remembers the sheer backlash of No Man’s Sky when it first came out. It was unreal.
This is another issue. Games publishers and marketers promising the greatest thing since sliced bread and then people being disappointed when they don’t deliver the golden calf.
I think Anthem by Bioware firmly fits into that category. Oh yes you have a very pretty and functional world but sadly it has the gameplay of about an afternoon’s worth of play.
Now I get that games can have bugs and yes they can be fixed. However the worrying trend is why bother we can just release a mess at a premium price, then spend time for the next year fixing it.
It seems to be a worrying trend and gives very little sign of getting any better any time soon.