Are developers' standards slipping?

[Frotality]

like ive said all this time, games were better when developers didnt have the patch excuse and had to ship the game as good as it could be right then and there.

but really, it isnt the devs fault, or even the publishers fault; its YOUR fault. YOUR fault for continuing to buy games regardless of lazy playtesting and obviously being rushed, YOUR fault for not giving the developers any excuse to finish and test the game because youll buy it anyway, and YOUR fault that publishers will rush games because they know theyll sell just as well game-breaking bugs or not.

in addition to that, ravenously improving graphics technology is being pushed WAY too fervently, and the rest of gaming technology cant keep up; the time and money it takes to render anything in a modern game is ridiculous; the techs need to take a chill pill and bring game engines and AI up to the level of the graphics; things are more than pretty enough, lets work on the gameplay part now, eh? its alot harder and more expensive to make a game now; combined with deadlines and the above reasons, there is only so much that is humanly possible outside of resorting to Valve time...

 

[LogicNProportion]

I don't think its as much as the developers' fault, as it is the publishers.

Games requiring more time and money is starting to choke out standards. I'm sure the developers would love to keep working on their games to make them as perfect as perfectly possible.........it's just that they have their bosses jabbing at them with a hot iron so their newest $60 piece of crap can print some money.

 

[Zaik]

Sort of.

Fallout: NV was just because it's Obsidian. They've got a track record of track record of this crap. There's never really been any QA here at all.

Black Ops: This is less caused by falling standards and more caused by Activision whipping them into churning out sequels so fast and that they don't even have to be good because a ton of people will buy it anyway.

Red Dead Redemption: Dunno about this one, between it and GTA4 i'm inclined to believe the developer is going bad in general.


Anyway, this will keep happening until people stop buying broken unfinished games. I'm just as guilty of it as everyone else, but still, don't buy broke shit and they'll eventually get the message.

 

[veloper]

I was right to hold of buying Vegas then. I suppose I'll get it when finally fan-patched (on PC ofcourse), which I guess will be when it's on sale for about 10,-

 

[Smooth Operator]

Ya things are going down hill for sure, but there are quite a few contributing factors.
- high performance tech (in the old days people had to squeeze out every last byte and hertz to even show you a decent picture, now they flop a couple of engines together and glue them with some scripting, and it's good to publish)
- patch support (as soon as developers get the option of patching it latter they get sloppy and lazy, so now you got half of even the biggest game titles coming out barely holding together until the first patch, can you imagine what a disaster that would be on the old cartridges)
- money hunger (publishers are pushing for more and more games to sell, but fine tuning takes time, so they will just take what they have at the end of the year and sell it, coming out with a half baked pile of poop)
Actually the last one is the biggest issue, the publishers just don't care if something is made well, it only needs to sell big time.

The only company I still have respect for is Valve, they have sofar always come out with quality stuff.

 

[KissofKetchup]

I personally don't really have that big a problem with this because I tend to get games a little while after their release when most bugs have been ironed out.

However, I can't blame the devs totally on this one though. As games are getting more and more complex with more and more lines of code, there are bound to be plenty of bugs. I still say that Bethesda really needs to majorly overhaul their engine for the next game they make.