Open Letter to People Who Make Games

[Steve the Pocket]

My personal bug experience with Fable was aggravating, and in one case game-breaking, but it could be worked around. Not everyone I know who played the game was so lucky. The game saves automatically, and you only get one save slot. If the game happens to save you when your game is in a game-breaking bugged state...well, you're screwed. It's a gamble. As I said, that didn't happen to me personally - I was fortunate enough that I had only just started up the game when it broke that badly, so simply restarting was enough to solve the problem. I recommend you play it because, based on my personal experience, overall I find the good to outweigh the bad.

See, I prefer to think of it this way: Suppose I buy a movie on DVD, and there's a minor scratch on the disc that makes it skip at a certain point. And, somehow, every copy of that DVD also has the same scratch. (It's an analogy; work with me.) Even if the movie makes Metropolis look like Superman IV, I'm not going to say "the good outweighed the bad" and that people should buy it in spite of the problem; I'm going to qualify whatever review I give of the actual movie (after having rubbed the scratch out with that acid stuff) by saying "Don't buy it now at all; wait for the recall and second printing. But after that, definitely get it."

In other mediums we're expected to tolerate mediocrity. But only in video games are we expected to tolerate epic failure.

On similar lines, I would like to see multiple versions of a game get reviewed more often. As a PC player, it bugs me that all the glowing reviews of GTA IV were based on the console versions and I only found out that the PC version was damn near unplayable later on through Internet forums (luckily, I don't buy games on launch day anyway, so I hadn't bought it yet). Likewise, if I had a PS3 I would be pretty peeved if I bought The Orange Box only to find that the ninety-something score that The Orange Box has on Metacritic is based solely on the PC version and that my copy is an expensive Frisbee.

1. Microsoft should get out of the gaming industry. period!

2. Games for windows Live sucks

3. Steam sucks

4. DRM sucks

I am curious how this has any relevance here.

 

[rainbowunicorns]

.

I would also like to see several reviews for a game (preferably by the same reviewer).

If the game launches and has large bugs that make portions of it frustrating or unplayable, penalize it properly for those problems. If the problems are that bad, give it 1-2 stars for the portion that you could play and did enjoy.
Try back after a patch or two (or a set period of time), and see how many stars it now merits. Or allow publishers to submit one or two requests for a re-review when they think they have fixed enough bugs that a score based on the game they were trying to publish is possible.



Related to your Orange Box comment, Steve: Metacritic does have an entry for every platform on which a game is published, though the same reviews are often applied to all platforms instead of the one that was actually reviewed. However, in the case of the PS3 Metacritic score, it is much lower than that of the PC score.

 

[Susan Arendt]

My personal bug experience with Fable was aggravating, and in one case game-breaking, but it could be worked around. Not everyone I know who played the game was so lucky. The game saves automatically, and you only get one save slot. If the game happens to save you when your game is in a game-breaking bugged state...well, you're screwed. It's a gamble. As I said, that didn't happen to me personally - I was fortunate enough that I had only just started up the game when it broke that badly, so simply restarting was enough to solve the problem. I recommend you play it because, based on my personal experience, overall I find the good to outweigh the bad.

See, I prefer to think of it this way: Suppose I buy a movie on DVD, and there's a minor scratch on the disc that makes it skip at a certain point. And, somehow, every copy of that DVD also has the same scratch. (It's an analogy; work with me.) Even if the movie makes Metropolis look like Superman IV, I'm not going to say "the good outweighed the bad" and that people should buy it in spite of the problem; I'm going to qualify whatever review I give of the actual movie (after having rubbed the scratch out with that acid stuff) by saying "Don't buy it now at all; wait for the recall and second printing. But after that, definitely get it."

I understand what you're saying, certainly, but your analogy is flawed in one key way: the DVD doesn't skip in the same spot for everyone. In fact, for some people, it doesn't skip at all.

I know many people who have played Fable 3 at this point. A quest that had a game-killing bug for one person ran flawlessly for another. I'm not sure I know of anyone who had the exact same sound issues I did (AIs repeating themselves, sound dropping out). It's possible you might play the game and have no bugs at all, or bugs that are mild annoyances at best. It's possible you might have your experience completely ruined by bugs. Because I can't say for sure what will happen to you, I can't say don't get the game.

 

[Steve the Pocket]

I understand what you're saying, certainly, but your analogy is flawed in one key way: the DVD doesn't skip in the same spot for everyone. In fact, for some people, it doesn't skip at all.

I know many people who have played Fable 3 at this point. A quest that had a game-killing bug for one person ran flawlessly for another. I'm not sure I know of anyone who had the exact same sound issues I did (AIs repeating themselves, sound dropping out). It's possible you might play the game and have no bugs at all, or bugs that are mild annoyances at best. It's possible you might have your experience completely ruined by bugs. Because I can't say for sure what will happen to you, I can't say don't get the game.

Odd. I thought consoles were supposed to be immune to bugs that only randomly show up for a handful of users for no apparent reason. This might say worse things about the 360 than it does about the game's developers, especially if they assumed the same thing.

 

[Levethian]

No one demands an absolutely perfect, bug-free game.

What they demand is a game that is *playable*, from beginning to end. That means "No bugs which prevent you from ever entering an area of the game," and "No bugs which completely halt progression of the primary campaign."

For what games is the above true?

I want in on the ranting - but, alas, all *my* games work fine!

 

[Susan Arendt]

I understand what you're saying, certainly, but your analogy is flawed in one key way: the DVD doesn't skip in the same spot for everyone. In fact, for some people, it doesn't skip at all.

I know many people who have played Fable 3 at this point. A quest that had a game-killing bug for one person ran flawlessly for another. I'm not sure I know of anyone who had the exact same sound issues I did (AIs repeating themselves, sound dropping out). It's possible you might play the game and have no bugs at all, or bugs that are mild annoyances at best. It's possible you might have your experience completely ruined by bugs. Because I can't say for sure what will happen to you, I can't say don't get the game.

Odd. I thought consoles were supposed to be immune to bugs that only randomly show up for a handful of users for no apparent reason. This might say worse things about the 360 than it does about the game's developers, especially if they assumed the same thing.

It's not so much about the hardware as it is about the game itself. There are a lot of variables in play at any given time - everything from the gender of your character to the order you've done things to how many quests you have going to whether or not the outfit you have on is assembled from different pieces or one set. Given that no two people are likely do play the game exactly the same way, down to the last detail, it makes sense that the issues are tough to replicate.

 

[Throwitawaynow]

Got New Vegas at midnight launch. I havn't encountered any game breaking bugs.

 

[demouse]

personally i don't see why everyone other than me seems to have such big problems with fallout new vegas. bought steam version, ran it, no bugs or crashes except 3 corpses falling through the world after 50 hours of playing.

same thing with my friend who diddn't even get the patch (he pirated it because he heard it was unplayably buggy and diddn't want to pay for it, then no bugs).

 

[The Random One]

They can get away with doing that because when word that a game sucks is out they'll have already sold half the units they'll sell for the next year. If people would learn to just fucking wait devs would actually have a tangible reason (rather than some lofty dedication to the craft) not to churn out unfinished garbage. I haven't played CoD5.5MW2 yet and I'm proud of it.

...Okay, that one I let linger fot too long. Maybe I'm not proud of that specific one. But still, would it kill you not to play games the second it comes out?

 

[cerebus23]

Amen, Mr. Pitts. The recent Fallout: New Vegas debacle is just the latest in a long line of broken-out-of-the-box games. I'm actually not interested in Fallout games personally, but the reports I've read are just unbelievable. The amount of flat out brokenness that is this game is unacceptable. Apparently this is par for the course when it comes to Bethesda. I may not play their games, but if they ever decided to make a game that really appealed to me, I'm going to have big red warning flags coming up going "Hey, this was made by those guys that ship broken games constantly!" and I'm probably not going to buy it. The era of online consoles with hard drives and broadband Internet connections has spoiled developers into thinking they can ship a broken game and then patch it later. This has to stop, period.

Bethesda did publish New Vegas but not developed. Obsidian developed and is the reason for the bugs. I'm saying this so that the developing team at Bethesda doesn't leave the wrong impression due to your own ignorance on the topic. Oblivion and Fallout 3 were great games for example.

Oblivion and fallout 3 both had problems it is a massive failing of the gamebro engine and the size of the games period. Both oblivion and fo3 had multiple patches to fix bugs and in the end had to have community made patches that fixed 100s of bugs every bethesda game that has come out had to have the community clean up bethesdas mess because bethesda never did.

new vegas was made by obsidian but used the gamebro engine from fallout 3 and it was published by bethesda.so while it was made by another team it was made using the same tool that gave us two buggy games already.

But on one hand i can give games like oblivion and fallout 3 and nv a semi pass, tjhese are MASSIVE games, with 100s of quests and npcs and nm that the whole engine is modular and can be heavily mofified, the day the game came out there were already mods for nv showing up, 2 days out you could have 15 to 40 mods loaded.

I could see side quests and mini quests being buggy, but the main issue arises is why are there game screeching bugs in some of the main quests? there is a list of q & a testers in the game credits if anything in testing the main quests should have been tested to hell and back. they even have god weapons in the game code to aid testing these q & a should have been abloe to blast through the main quest in no time flat several times over and discovered if you talk to npc x before you talk to npc y it bugs this quest line out and it will just stop, or the end quest where you trigger one event but one of the npcs does not trigger to come out and the game just kind of hangs out and people just stand around doing nothing.

I mean i played thru part of the game twice, and i lost about 20 hours of game time because of at one point a series of saves going corrupt, and another time when victor spontaneously exploded outside the lucky 38 and i could not even enter without getting shot at. victor also has the odd habit of randomly exploding up in the presidential suite, but when he explodes it does not change anything or bug anything out far as i can tell. But if i could encounter some of these same bugs in 1.5 play throughs why is not the q & a team catching some of them?

But fallout 3 and oblivion were no better or no worse they all had major issues anyone that has played all those games would admit that, not that fo nv is vastly worse than the other games, tho in some cases people claim that overall nv is more stable then fo3 was, and they maybe right but when something does go wrong in nv it goes very wrong and you might be loosing a bunch of hours to backtrack and fix the issue.

 

[beema]

Excellent letter. But I think the sad thing is the audience for games is both growing and becoming less discerning. There are enough morons out there with disposable income (or more likely, their parents income) who will just buy anything that strikes their fancy, and if it doesn't work, they will get mad of course, but they wont cease to buy in the future. Most people don't pay strict attention to developer/publisher names, industry-inside news, etc. These are the same dimwits who allow GameStop to continue in their unbridled success. They buy a game, play it for a week or two, trade it in, buy the next one.

 

[Krantos]

Um... Bethesda?

He does realize that New Vegas was developed by Obsidian right? He must. But I didn't think Bethesda had released anything since Fallout 3. Or did they publish New Vegas? need to check that....

Ah, yes. BethSoft published it.

So yes, the criticism is earned here. If the devs muck up (which Obsidian does on a regular basis) the publishers should catch it and bring them to task. Personally, I'd love to see Obsidian absorbed into Bethseda. Put the Obsidian people in the creative department, and get some competent coders to write the damn game.

 

[NotSoNimble]

So the point here is that games should cost more money, and be delayed more.

 

[RvLeshrac]

So the point here is that games should cost more money, and be delayed more.

They should simply be developed with some care and competence, rather than being rushed out with no QA, or rushed out in spite of QA.

APB is a prime recent example of this lack of care, where bugs and balance issues that we, the public beta testers, brought to Realtime Worlds's attention months before launch were left untouched a month after launch.

 

[viranimus]

Yeah, Im not going to claim to be the first one to say this in this thread as im not reading every post in the six prior pages.

Is it just me, or am I somehow different? Ive heard/read/seen bugs in games, but it seems like every game Ive been apprehensive about due to its "unplayable bugginess" when I actually encounter it myself seems like non existent overhype.

When I do actually encounter some glitch that people have touted as making the game unplayable I end up unimpressed, and 9 times out of 10 look at the glitch, then keep on playing the game or work around it in extreme cases. (only one that ever truly beat me was the glitch in Vampire, the masquerade: bloodlines. and that was simply because it came so late in the game I just didnt care to start over from scratch, which was my choice.

I rarely encounter a glitch with a game and this is coming from a predominant PC gamer which is supposed to be infinitely more susceptible to such. Encountering one that prevents game progression is almost non existent. A lot of times it feels like all the bug talk is coming from people who are scrutinizing with a microscopically fine tooth comb determined to find bugs in order to have merit to complain about it.

Even in instances like MMOs that not only have frequent bug problems, and will even report back to you alot of times on the nature of the bug in their patch notes, I have rarely encountered one of the bugs they are fixing and even if I do it was never anything that was hindering gameplay.

So why is it I dont seem to have the same problems that people express about these games? Im presuming that this is in reference to Civ V, which I ran flawlessly without the slightest hickup, New Vegas, which I may never experience the bugs because I dont have it yet and likely by the time I do get it, the bug fix patch will likely be firmly in place. I can only presume that the microsoft reference would be either Halo: reach or Fable 3, both of which I cannot speak to their bugginess, (although the Reach beta was polished more than well enough to merit an enjoyable gameplay exp, and I really couldnt see the released product being any worse than what they presented in beta.

So is it that I am so unbelievably lucky to rarely encounter these things? Is it that Im that skilled in using my equipment that I dont encounter them. Is it that im too forgiving? Is it that my equipment is that good that it compensates for it? (which having a core duo processor instead of current gen I series processor I would assume no) Or is it what seems most likely to me but the overtly loud shouting of people scrutinizing their hobby to death in order to make much adieu over nothing?

Perhaps the problem isnt the game, perhaps the problem isnt the developers, perhaps it is people who are getting overly critical in respect to what is considered a hobby. Or maybe its just me.

OT: Honestly do we really want all games on a Blizzard dev cycle where they are refined for years after the game has been made in order to satiate the developers anal retentive need to strive for a level of perfect that only exists in their own minds? Seriously, Diablo 3 should have been released almost 2 years ago and if it were would still be fine.

 

[TheBluesader]

I wonder if part of the problem new AAA games are having has to do with the big changes to the actual process of game production from 20 years ago to today. It used to be that one guy working alone for 3 months could make a good game. Then it took a team of 8 working for six months. Then a team of 20 working for a year. Then 100 for 2 years.

And now you'll have three independent companies employing 200 people each to make three different components of the same game, that then have to be shipped back to a fourth company of 200 people who have to find a way to put everything together and get it to work. And they only have 2 1/2 or 3 years in which to do it, during which a fifth company (the Hellspawn Publisher) is constantly yelling about deadlines and budgets and "how are we going to market a woman with small boobs to 14 year old boys who technically aren't allowed to play this" and "ooo, my brother's wife's step-daughter saw this really cool thing in a Facebook game, put it in NOW."

I'm not saying complexity or seemingly insurmountable odds are an excuse for crappy games. There are thousands if not millions of people in this country alone who spend years at school learning how to manage such things and work in such conditions and still make stuff that works and doesn't cost a thousand dollars a copy. And I would very much hope that the game industry is mature enough at this point to be hiring or at least consulting with these people, and I'm fairly certain it is. What I'm saying is, when you fundamentally alter the way a product is made every 5 or so years (and that's what the current rush to new technology seems to be doing to the industry), you simply shouldn't be surprised that even long-time industry veterans (and veteran companies) occasionally (and it IS still only occasionally) release completely broken piles of code.

My worry is that, if I'm right about this being part of the problem, things are only going to get worse. Because last time I checked, it doesn't look like the pace of technological advance is going to slow any time soon. In fact, it seems to be ever speeding up. And I can't imagine how an average or even above-average human being is supposed to be able to constantly turn out even the most basically playable game every 3 years, when there's a very good chance that they'll have to completely change what they're doing and how to make the next game.

Again, all in all, I agree that a $60 game should at the very least be playable, and its basically fraud if it isn't. But I'm no longer surprised that several AAA titles a year are not. And I'm not sure what anyone can do to stop it, except just slow the hell down, and keep in mind that, at the end of the day, a basically functional game is the only thing we really need.

Maybe we can retrain some of those legions of super-hi-def graphic artists and surround sound engineers to be beta polishers and Q&A grunts. I don't know. All I know for sure is, a beautiful game with great sound and a great story is utterly worthless if I can't play the thing through at least once without it imploding.

 

[Vortigar]

Clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, et al.

tldr:
Applause

 

[Russ Pitts]

And another thing.. If these games are unplayable, why don't you guys ever mention that in your reviews?

I just reread the Civ V, Fallout NV, and Fable 3 reviews. For Fable 3 Susan did devote a paragraph to the glitches, yet never says it's unplayable. The Fallout one mentions glitches in a sentence at the end of review, following paragraph after paragraph of praise. Finally Civ V sounds like Gods gift to gamers (fans of the series at least), no mention at all of game breaking folly.

So it's wrong to assume he's talking about these three games, even tho he used pictures of 2 of them in his rant.

That, or there should be some serious editing going on.

I'm not going to confirm or deny any guesses made by anyone regarding the games to which I am referring in this Open Letter. To do so would be to violate the spirit of the piece. And, to be frank, this kind of accusation and back-and-forth is a large part of the reason why I didn't name names.

Regarding my review of Fallout: New Vegas, I did mention that the game had bugs. In fact, I specifically stated the game received a lower mark than it should have, due to its bugginess.

I'm currently about 60+ hours into the game and so far have experienced about 1 hard system lock per 10 hours pf play, generally when walking into and out of doors, and the visual glitchiness remains even after the first patch. One could say that a game with so many bugs deserves an even lower score than 4 stars, but one could also argue that you don't play a game for 60+ hours (and counting) unless it's worth playing.

It's a fine line to ride, and I'm satisfied with the score I gave the game. It may not please or satisfy everyone, but I stand by it.