How do we define a "rushed" video game.

[Someone Depressing]

If it's a movie-licensensed video-game that was released after the film, probably. Movie-based games don't have enough time to get everything done because they have to release it while the movie's still popular.

On the other hand, a video-game thats release was to promote the movie, or vice-versa, ie Sweet Home, a Japanese survival-horror video game, and little-known prequel to Resident Evil, was released in the same month as its movie. They both sold pretty well.

Or, if it uses the same engine from a previous, much more successful game, or even rips some things from it. Ofcourse, there are exceptions of this: Majora's Mask, Fallout: New Vegas, ect.

Or, if it's an EA game with tons of DLC, ie, every fucking game in the Sims series excluding the console and handheld versions, like Bustin' Out or The Urbz. Chances are, that DLC is what should've been in the main-game, but due to EA being lazy bastards who charge extra for things that should've been in the game to begin with, chances are, their games are rushed, and they want an extra £20 from me so I can get killed by a mummy.

 

[Smooth Operator]

Well we can define simply as an unfinished game, but how unfinished it actually is only the developers know, and they would not ever tell you what shenanigans went down.

In the example of DA1 and DA2, yes they might have been announced within the same time frame but DA1 was conceptually put together 9 years before release and made by people who have been doing these WRPGs for over a decade, DA2 however was on an actual 2 year(or less) timer with a team that from what I've seen has only known JRPGs, but again Bioware would not ever tell us anything about this.
So we got meager content, extreme map recycling, undetailed worlds, undetailed people, random encounters, massive story jumps, and characters had barely any lines... maybe we can define a rushed game simply as "Dragon Age 2", unfinished on all levels.

 

[The Wykydtron]

I suppose everyone can just point at DA2 and go "yep thar be your definition!" I think i'll go with that. Nothing in that game felt complete.

You know what, I hardly even noticed the recycled maps (due to personal retardation presumably) and even when I finally noticed them I didn't really mind. The thing that really annoyed me was the supposedly trival things that were missing like item descriptions.

It was always "Ring: +2 to assholeism" not "Super Awesome Special Beam Cannon Ring of Winnage: +9 to awesomeness"

You get the idea.

I actually liked the story, characters, overall theme the game was going for and ending. Too bad they kicked it out the door as soon as possible.

After reading some of this maybe ME3 was kinda rushed. At least when it comes to "scan planet to win" sidequests. Though I was too busy watching my Galactic Awesomeness metre go up and up to care.

How many squad members were in ME3 compared to ME2? It feels like less... Though there was too much dialogue between party members both on missions and on the ship for it to be rushed all the way.

 

[Dastardly]

how do we define rushed?

"Rushed" is a qualifier we use in pretty specific circumstances.

If I start a development house, and we crank out our first game and it's awful, it'll just be called "awful." If we make a few great games, and then make something awful, there's an issue: People expected better, given our past history, and this seems to be of much lower quality.

When that happens, we tend to find reasons that reconcile this new information with our past belief. Why was this game bad and the others great? Well, it could be:

1. The studio has changed, and the best folks aren't there anymore
2. The studio ran out of ideas, and are just floundering
3. The studio is bad at this particular type of game
4. That either time or money ran up short, and they had to rush the product out.

Options 1 - 3, if we believe them, mean that we can no longer look for good things from that studio. That makes us feel that our previous goodwill was wasted. So instead, we go with Option 4. It puts some blame on the developer, but it also diffuses some of the blame to publishers, fans, or other outside influences, which means we can still hold out hope of our "favorite" making a comeback.

-----------

That said, other times we're given more information that indicates last-minute changes/rewrites, unreasonable deadlines, shrinking budgets, and other actual indications that a game's development was actually rushed.

 

[Sight Unseen]

A few things that I judge whether a game seems rushed or not. Having just beaten RAGE yesterday, I'm going to be using it as an example a lot, since I feel like it was a bit rushed.

1. Having the game just sort of fall apart at the ending A game with a good plot, or at least a promising story, that just falls flat on its face in the latter part of the game. This makes it seem like they spent too much time on the middle of the game and ran out of time to add a satisfying ending. In RAGE:

Spoiler

the story wasn't phenomenal, it was very cliched, but it was still interesting, but the game literally just ended with no resolution to the story. They left you stranded in the enemy base, and the enemy wasn't defeated. I would have thought it was a sequel-bait, but it didn't even end on a cliffhanger... It just... stopped. There wasn't even a final boss fight.

2. Re-using art assets that really didn't need to be re-used. Re-using character models a lot, or re-using the same level designs repeatedly (especially if there aren't many to start with) makes a game seem rushed to me. In RAGE, almost all of the side quests involved you going back through the same dungeons that you went through in the main quest, sometimes backwards but usually not. They just re-populated the dungeons with new baddies, but didn't bother to add new drops or loot back, so it made these segments all seem really lackluster since you hardly got a worthwhile reward

3. Half implemented systems Cases where games seem to have some promising systems but only half execute on them. In RAGE, both the crafting and racing segments seem to fall into this, with not enough recipes for crafting or variety in the races

EDIT: 4. Lack of Bug Testing/ QC Games with rampant bugs, texture pop-in, poor optimization, etc. In RAGE, even though I think they have fixed a lot of things since launch, because I never experienced a lot of the issues that people at launch complained of, there is still considerable texture pop-ins, occasional lag spikes and freezes, and some other bugs that probably could have been fixed.

While none of these things necessarily require a game to be rushed, I think that they're generally good criteria to decide whether I think a game MAY have been rushed or not.

 

[StriderShinryu]

Lack of obvious quality control is a large clue. New Vegas was rushed, as a result, it's buggy even by the already buggy standards Gamebryo games operate on.

I think this ia a big one.

Rushed is so often used to describe games that simply don't meet up with expectations or are in some way unsatisfying.. but that's not really any proof of something having been rushed. It's very possible that things were simply designed in a specific way that you don't happen to like. There's also the reality that, even in games given huge budgets and super lengthy development times, there always has to be stuff that gets cut out. It's simply not feasible to have any game in development long enough to put in every single little thing that someone on the development team wants. This can often lead, once again, to things you happen to like not making it into the final game. It's a design decision, and maybe a poor one, but it's not proof something was rushed.

I do find, however, that as the above poster states, when something is truly rushed it often shows up on the technical level. When something is obviously buggy or has quality control issues you can't overlook, then it's a near sure thing that either the in development testing wasn't given enough attention or it was but the developers weren't given enough time to fix the bugs that they did find.

Oh, and since everyone is bringing up Dragon Age 2, yeah that game was rushed. The developers themselves actually came out publically and said it was. EA has since said that they are not going to rush the next game in the series. Being rushed through development generally isn't something a developer actually admits to, and it's not something a publisher would ever admit to if it weren't true, so I'd say it's a pretty safe bet to put DA2 down as having been rushed.

 

[Owyn_Merrilin]

If it's a movie-licensensed video-game that was released after the film, probably. Movie-based games don't have enough time to get everything done because they have to release it while the movie's still popular.

On the other hand, a video-game thats release was to promote the movie, or vice-versa, ie Sweet Home, a Japanese survival-horror video game, and little-known prequel to Resident Evil, was released in the same month as its movie. They both sold pretty well.

Or, if it uses the same engine from a previous, much more successful game, or even rips some things from it. Ofcourse, there are exceptions of this: Majora's Mask, Fallout: New Vegas, ect.

Or, if it's an EA game with tons of DLC, ie, every fucking game in the Sims series excluding the console and handheld versions, like Bustin' Out or The Urbz. Chances are, that DLC is what should've been in the main-game, but due to EA being lazy bastards who charge extra for things that should've been in the game to begin with, chances are, their games are rushed, and they want an extra £20 from me so I can get killed by a mummy.

Wait...

Sweet home is a prequel to Resident Evil? Have you got a source on that? If so, that's awesome. The only thing I'd heard about it prior to this is that it was a survival horror game on the NES that pioneered a lot of the stuff that was later done by Alone in the Dark and Resident Evil.