Negatempest said:
Honestly, I am still trying to figure out where you are coming from. Are you saying 3rd party are as good as they have ever been?
Third party in general? Good and better than they've ever been. 3rd party AAA specifically? Bigger and better than they've ever been before. In a world where I can easily play games like The Stanley Parable, Bastion, Double Fine's exhaustive list of awesome titles (or are they considered a AAA company? I certainly consider them one of the best if that's all that's required) and then go and play Hitman, GTA, COD, and Borderlands? This is a good time to be alive and be a gamer. It's easy to look back on our golden age when everything was new and fresh and think that those were the best times.
In fact, those may legitimately be so. But the age of new and exciting experiences were more born out of rapidly advancing technologies and the lack of existing libraries (either out of fewer games being made or out of difficulties in emulation until now). It's not a credit to the game that it was early though. The games of today can often have much better writing and development than anything we had in the past. There were some developers who really stood out in storylines back then, but those guys are still around and have been given new life through sites like kickstarter.
Even the list of first party games has never been better. Though I think Nintendo may have taken a little nap at the wheel for the last hundred miles.
Looking at the games objectively, I am much happier with modern games. Have you ever really gone back and played those games at any length? Even games as recent as FFVII can be hard to play again. Fallout 1, which I loved the first time I played, is almost unplayable to me now. Fallout 3 though? Entirely playable.
Things are only looking better as the major consoles have opened up for indie development
My point of Sony and Microsoft making their own games over drooling over 3rd party is that 3rd party are not as good as they used to be.
I categorically deny that. Nostalgia is a mind clouder if ever there was one.
If anything has changed to the disadvantage of us oldschool gamers, it's perhaps that gaming has become so popular that we are no longer the largest demographic that gaming companies cater to specifically. As with movie fans of any particular genre, we have to wait our turn. This is inevitable in any such industry.
Since they are nowhere near as good as they used to be, they are not the sink or swim supporters of consoles from the past. 3rd party is very much eating it's own tail and expecting to get bigger. If 3rd party was as fantastic as before I would not be posting this. But their own failure to make a 100% complete game is just sad and depressing. For example, when you get a buggy game. Do you come up with your own excuses for why it may be buggy? I used to come up with excuses for them. After the 3rd party developers have had nearly a decade of experience with a console you'd think that bugs wouldn't be as rampant...right? Compared to a PC where each individual having the same hardware is unlikely at best. So PC bugs very understandable, always different hardware. Console excuse? For the same hardware for nearly a decade?
So your argument is that all 3rd party games don't work?
From what I've seen, it's only a handful of companies that have trouble with this. Bethesda and EA easily come to mind. Bethesda I at least understand somewhat because of the size/scope of their worlds but EA's failure usually sprouts out of their insistance on treating real customers like criminals. And, while I am generally ok with most of Bethesda's mistakes for the reason I mentioned, I QA'd the PS3 version from home and IMMEDIATELY noticed that Dungeons weren't resetting along with any other assets in the world. I even caught the nirnroot bloom stacking issue right away. There's no way Bethesda wasn't aware of that well before launch.
But there's a few things here.
1. No software that has ever been made is entirely without bugs. I've worked on software dev cycles before, primarily as a QA engineer. We often have large lists of tests to perform with every build as well as some time set aside to just explore and break the product. Even then, things fall through the cracks and clients use the product in ways we simply didn't anticipate. The more complex the software, and video games are as complex as it gets, then the more liklihood that something will slip through. Perhaps even something I tested for in a previous build that wasn't a problem then but was introduced by a build meant to fix another problem that I did find. But then I never retest that one thing I tested on a whim.
The sheer number of issues makes it pretty much impossible to fix everything or to even know every issue. The job of a product manager isn't to release the game when it's perfect. It's to release it when there are no significant bugs that ruin the game. Good enough. That's the way it has to work. The problem comes when they fail to catch major bugs or release anyways, that is their fault then.
2. Most of the major titles I listed went off without a hitch. Any patches were small things fixing regular issues that consoles used to not be able to fix, ever. Does anyone remember that FF gameboy game that had a critical glitch at the end of the game that prevented finishing it? I can never remember which game it was other than the cartridge image was red. Games absolutely did release broken and bugged back then. Bungie released a game that would crash your computer if you tried to uninstall it. So I'm sorry, but your perception of things is off. The only difference today is that things can be fixed afterwards which does lead to premature releases and that media is far more readily avaiable and does focus on broken games because that IS news and a game working as expected is not.
3. This isn't a criticism of the games themselves unless. Major problems are usually fixed in a week to even a few days (most of the time, the first patch takes care of them and so the big problem is never seen). So, while frustrating it isn't the norm and isn't anything against the game itself once fixed.
