Dear game devs... the BS has to stop... ok?

I totally agree.

The problem is it's not actually that easy to avoid buying these games - as when they initially launch you can't easily tell that there'll be problematic micro-transactions further down the line.
 
Maybe the problem is more with online multiplayer? I just don't do this either. Single player games all the way for me.

I don't buy or play that many games a year either, but I do buy some of the big AAA titles. I got Assassins Creed Origins last week, and I'm very happy with it. Looking at the map the world is enormous, almost dauntingly so. The core game will clearly contain enough for me to bez around in and do, so why would I need to buy any more for it?

My point is, the core game often is 'enough' I think, for the price that PC games can be had. The mentality is a bit like the fast food industry. You buy a meal and get asked if you want to supersize it. You don't need to supersize it, just get the core meal you greedy masses, and be happy with it, better off, and less obese. A poor analogy, but you get my drift...
 
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Gregster said:
I am old enough to remember the Spectrum and C64 and what you got was what you got. I used to buy magazines that had demo's of the games and you could decide from those if it was worth a buy or not. Games have certainly got bigger (and dare I say better now?) and I understand the need for patches but my gripe is with the way loot boxes seem to be a thing. I don't even mind DLC that needs to be bought but any game that has a pay to win system will not got my money.
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Those were the days, better i think, i hardly game today although games are better, in a way there not as originality has gone.
 
The days the OP refers to. Are the days when the game market was pretty small. And wasn't really being taken seriously.... So I presume devs were allowed (to some extent) to take all the time they wanted to develop games.

Whereas these days I imagine they're under so much pressure. Simply because of the huge sums of money to be made.

I personally don't like it.
 
In the old days the industry was run by gamers and game development was a bit of an artform. But it started to make a lot of money and that's when the banker types moved in. I'd say this probably happened about 10 years ago.

They are ruining the industry, many of the top developers who made the classics are long gone (and remain in name only under EA etc). Because they simply don't want to work in that environment. It's why we keep seeing modern "remakes" that are piles of crap compared to the originals. With the focus being on milking cash from the players.
 
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Nasher said:
In the old days the industry was run by gamers and game development was a bit of an artform. But it started to make a lot of money and that's when the banker types moved in. I'd say this probably happened about 10 years ago.
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This. And it's a real shame.

Although saying that. It's still nice to know that there are companies that don't treat their Devs like cashcows. Pressuring them into releasing a "new" title every year.
 
mistersprinkles said:
Are some of you old enough to remember a time when a game was actually completely finished and polished (obviously still within the margin of human error) BEFORE it was released? Because there was no internet and no way to push patches to users? When you could buy Super Mario bros 2 and pop it in your NES and you never needed to install anything, download any updates, etc? And you got the WHOLE game, on one cartridge, all at once. No expansions, no DLC, no loot packs. Everyone got the same game. A finished, whole, uncut game.
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You also got game breaking bugs that in certain cases caused games to be uncompletable, at least today games can be patched, and generally due to social media etc it does get raised and addressed.

mistersprinkles said:
Then the BS started to get a bit more severe. Enter the game expansion. "Hey, we know you payed $60 for Big Max's Smackdown Time 3... and you finished it... and you enjoyed it. So how about you give us another $25 and we'll give you a few new levels to play in the game! Maybe with a whole new story line!" People were irked. Suddenly, not only did your initial investment NOT guarantee a finished polished game, now it didn't guarantee the ENTIRE game. But we bent over and took it, and it became the norm.
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Completely disagree. Why shouldn't a developer be able to offer extra content and charge for it, if that took some time to create (even if not as much as the base game, where most of the work was done e.g. creating the game engine and assets e.g. textures and models).
Even going back as far as Half Life, then we have had paid expansions (e.g. Opposing Forces and Blue Shift), neither of which really added anything more than some new levels.

As long as any additional content isn't there to make up for the base game being short, I don't see there is an issue with offering extra content to people who enjoy it. It's kind of like buying music - most people will settle for a greatest hits cd that has most of the well known songs on, but if you really enjoy that band you can buy all of their albums.

The issue with expansions though is when they divide a community, which generally happens with multiplayer games and Map Packs (E.g. COD games and Battlefield) - a large percentage of people don't buy them, meaning those that do have to enjoy long wait times or even struggle to get a match on the maps that they have paid for.


Whilst I don't agree with how the situation currently is, I am not blind to the need for these companies to make money (and that is harder and harder these days, as the number of people employed for a single AAA game is similar to a blockbuster movie - a far cry from a couple of people working away in their bedroom e.g. during the 8 bit era).
 
You have to also think of the complexity of the games.

Super Mario Bro was a very small footprint game, with < than 1MB of total coding.
Game now are massive in terms of coding - even ingoring textures and audio files - the engine complexity is massively deeper.

Games take longer to code. Super Mario level designs were done in a matter of hours by a small team of people. Now games can take 1000s of hours with 100s of people working on them.

It is of course much more likely to have the odd bug etc after launch with something more complex.
 
broken new games are hardly new - i still clench my teeth when i think back to the debacle/embarassment of the Elite/Frontier: First Encounters release. as Ace says above, you can expect to find some bugs, it's almost inevitable, but sometimes the release of a game is a complate and total P-take; does anyone remember that cricket game that was released a few years back? The videos were hilarious but the fact someone saw fit to release it, much less ask money for it, was just plain offensive.

I agree w/ Armageus, if the company is going to develop new content and maps etc, i don't think it unreasonable if they ask for money - how much they ask should reflect what you're getting though.
as for the whole paid lootbox stuff, you could complain about EA et al all you want, but arguably the only reason they do it is because the players let them. for all the ranting on message boards there must be at least a similar amount of people who fork out, otherwise they'd have dropped the idea long ago. a bit part of the problem is impatient gamers who don't understand that "grind" and working for something in a game like Elite: Dangerous is actually PART of the whole game/universe and not some defect that needs to be avoided by just hoying real world money at an in-game shop. people seem to have no sense of achievement these days. i still remember the thrill of finishing a run and selling argo that got me enoguh credits to finally buy that docking computer, or military lasers etc.
 
Ace Modder said:
You have to also think of the complexity of the games.

Super Mario Bro was a very small footprint game, with < than 1MB of total coding.
Game now are massive in terms of coding - even ingoring textures and audio files - the engine complexity is massively deeper.

Games take longer to code. Super Mario level designs were done in a matter of hours by a small team of people. Now games can take 1000s of hours with 100s of people working on them.

It is of course much more likely to have the odd bug etc after launch with something more complex.
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Games these days are often built on top of ready made engines, whereas the original Mario Bros needed the engine to be written from scratch and a number of techniques to be invented to create it.

If you look at the composition of development teams these days very few are dedicated to the game engine on a lot of projects.
 
Frontier wrote a whole new engine for Elite Dangerous, plus the game with something like 200 people.

There are indie games out that which are better than AAA titles that were made by a handful of people. It's not man power, it's talent. But most of the real talent doesn't work for the big players.
 
Nasher said:
Frontier wrote a whole new engine for Elite Dangerous, plus the game with something like 200 people.
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They wouldn't have had much credibility if they had used the old First Encounters code... ;)

As an aside, despite my love of Frontier Elite 2 and the space sim in general, this is one game that I haven't got round to trying/buying. Like the poster a few paras above, I have no interest in MMO or a real time environment, I just want to enjoy a SP game at my own pace using accelerated time to skip the boring bits.
 
If people are stupid enough to buy into these games in the full knowledge that they are unfinished, cut down and contain predatory micro-transactions then the practice will just continue.

For me these games just aren't FUN. I rarely play them for very long and I never finish them to completion. I managed to finish Fallout 4 recently and never bothered with any of the expansions. I find that after a couple of hours these games become a chore and I've personally got nothing against shorter games.

I'd rather pay my £30-40 for a top quality 10-15 hour campaign that would draw me in and then try it again with a different character and some slight tweaks to the story based on the new characters.
 
Vern1961 said:
They wouldn't have had much credibility if they had used the old First Encounters code... ;)

As an aside, despite my love of Frontier Elite 2 and the space sim in general, this is one game that I haven't got round to trying/buying. Like the poster a few paras above, I have no interest in MMO or a real time environment, I just want to enjoy a SP game at my own pace using accelerated time to skip the boring bits.
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But they could have done what Chris Roberts did, which was licence an existing engine for Star Citizen.

Also you can play ED as a single player game, the economy is always online but you just won't see other players. Even if you go in to open play your still unlikely to see anyone unless you hang around the busy systems. I think less than 0.5% of the galaxy has been explored since launch. There are whole areas where no one has ever been.
 
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It does make me miss buying physical games TBH- yes steam is wonderful and I wouldn't want to give it up but when you bought a hard copy you pretty much knew it would be polished.
Even though I have re-bought most of my old games on steam to make installation quicker - I cannot bare to get rid of them and they sit proudly on the wall next to me.
 
Unfortunately it's never going to stop.

On PC I tend to play mainly single player, so I just normally wait until the price drops, and it normally does quite quickly, then pick up the inevitable GOTY edition. Not only do you get all the dlc, but you end up generally having a better experience as all the launch issues are normally resolved.
 
You can't go from lauding Super Mario Bros 2 for working every time to complaining about PC games needing patches. Super Mario Bros 2 ran on the NES, which had one hardware configuration, and maybe a handful of revisions. PC games are required to run on countless hardware configurations. This graphics card, that motherboard chipset, this 5 year old CPU, esoteric USB peripherals with drivers of varying quality, goodness knows which version of Windows and all manner of bits of software running at the same time... When you're developing a game you test on as many hardware and software configurations as is feasible, then you release it into the wild and pretty much hope for the best. Then it turns out that your 5 year old CPU has a little conflict with your motherboard chipset that only manifests on that version of Windows in incredibly rare circumstances, one of which is your new game. Is it really fair to moan at devs in that scenario? No, it isn't.
 
Vonhelmet said:
You can't go from lauding Super Mario Bros 2 for working every time to complaining about PC games needing patches. Super Mario Bros 2 ran on the NES, which had one hardware configuration, and maybe a handful of revisions. PC games are required to run on countless hardware configurations. This graphics card, that motherboard chipset, this 5 year old CPU, esoteric USB peripherals with drivers of varying quality, goodness knows which version of Windows and all manner of bits of software running at the same time... When you're developing a game you test on as many hardware and software configurations as is feasible, then you release it into the wild and pretty much hope for the best. Then it turns out that your 5 year old CPU has a little conflict with your motherboard chipset that only manifests on that version of Windows in incredibly rare circumstances, one of which is your new game. Is it really fair to moan at devs in that scenario? No, it isn't.
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Even console games launch with bugs these days. PC hardware is mostly standardized now, only AMD/Nvidia drivers can be an issue.

In the old days console games used to get tested to death by in-house QA and had to meet certain standards to get a licence. Now they just throw it out there and let the customers do the testing. If something is broken, oh well, just release a patch online and hope it works.
 
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