DracoSuave said:
I would love to hear your suggestion for GOTY then.
Arkham City's looking preeeeeety good, and it has the level of quality control I
expect on a game release. Have you picked up that Dark Souls? THAT is a polished release. I don't expect bug free, but I DO expect game-crash free on common hardware releases. I expect 'free from graphic driver problems' on the consoles, because anything less than that is, and always has been, completely unacceptable. Hey, multiplatform releases that are game-killing-bug free you say? Impossible you say?
Bethesda makes ambitiously expansive games that always have a few horrible bugs that have nothing to do with their expansiveness. Oblivion was their
fourth Elder Scroll game. Yes, ambition counts for something, but ambition doesn't make your game Game of the Year. Polish does.
This acceptable of game-crashing bugs, savegame deletion... of basic failures of quality control is an example of the PCification of the console-gaming market. The circumstances that permit certain leeway in the PC Market's acceptance of bugs (hardware configuration and driver issues) simply
do not exist in the console market. Noticably frequent crashes should NOT occur. Period.
Major bug free isn't some impossible holy grail, it's
the fucking standard on consoles and has been that way for thirty years. Major bugs on a console are
completely preventable and must be caught in QC.
The fact is: PC Gamers have lowered their standards over the years of dealing with game developers (like Troika) who put forth incomplete or massively bugged games lacking simple basic expected functionality. You'll know those games by the recomendations. 'Yeah, get that game, it's awesome... just... make sure you run the patch first.... yeahhhh....'
It's happened often enough that you'll actually let a game developer like Bethesda slide on it because, hey, at least the game is huge! Sure. It's big and all, but if it crashes every hour or so because it doesn't know how to load a texture right, then it should
rightfully go into the 'well, they tried' catagory.