Yeah I miss it. I mean we'd actually have games that people work hard on. Here's a prime example...
You can mute the video... the guy is kind of annoying...
Anyway, THAT'S UNACCEPTABLE! Ubisoft should be lucky they're still around. It's a game like that that kills a company.
While I'm not saying that the amount of bugs that were in the new Assassin's Creed were acceptable by any means, to imply that the people who worked on it did not 'work hard' is childish and ignorant. Games today are INFINITELY more complex then they were in the past. There's a ridiculously incredible amount of work that goes into making them. It's like comparing 'See Spot Run' to 'The Hunchback of Notre-Dame'- Obviously one of them is going to be easier to proofread then the other.
Assassin's Creed is a bad example because it was so horrendously bad when released, it's just not comparable to the majority of games. Let's take a look at Mario Kart 7. There were several 'bad bugs' in it, like being able to glitch into water, and the game placing you forward onto the track, rather then where you were. Obviously, this is a bad bug for a racing game. How did this bug trigger? By stopping your kart after a jump, turning around and driving backwards up the track for a few feet (while people are
passing you in a
racing game), and then driving off, at an angle into the water and hitting in a fairly specific spot, and hoping you did it right. It pisses me off to see people whining about how they 'missed this' and they didn't 'test it enough', when you have to go way the freaking hell out the way just to trigger it, and do it perfectly on top of that. Sometimes, there's just some bugs you're not going to come across until you have literally millions of people 'testing' for them by playing 24/7, for weeks on end. It's just the way it works when the programming is so very complex.
And on top of that, with PC in particular, some bugs are only going to show up for some people, using some systems, with some settings. Sometimes, stuff only happens occasionally. My husband played for like 60 Hours of Assassin's Creed: Unity on the PS4 launch weekend, and we didn't see a single melted face. The only thing we encountered was some fairly minor frame rate stuttering for how massive the game world is. So why were we different? that's the kind of crap that the programmers have to figure out, and I'm pretty sure it ain't easy or we'd all be building games.
So when you add in ridiculously complex programming, extremely tight schedules, market pressures, and
everything else that game makers have to deal with, saying they're not 'trying hard enough' is bullshit. Sure, they shouldn't release games that are so clearly very broken, but at the same time, the gaming community is fickle as hell. Delay a game? "F you, you have betrayed the community, we hate you as a producer now!" Gamers don't put up with delays, and then whine about the bugs, and if they weren't whining about the bugs, it'd the graphics, or the audio, or the story, or that one character's hairdo they
just don't like. The community demanding bigger, better, but must be released at break-neck speed is part of what's driven games to be released this way, just as much as money hungry devs.
So, do I miss when games were 'just one and done'? Yeah, who doesn't, at least in a way. But do I whine about it and flip my shit when games have a r
easonable amount of
reasonable bugs given time constraints and other issues facing game creators? No, I don't. That's what patches are for. We should be happy that patches are now available to fix issues that might mar an otherwise great game. It gives them a second chance. It lets them update when the consoles update to
make things better. It let's them work in an ever expanding, ever changing digital market. The people like Ubisoft who don't respect how they
should work are the problem.
