Its getting a bit annoying now

Ollie83

Ollie83

Ollie83

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Kirkwall, Orkney
Before I start my rant I should say im a relative newbie here so hi to everyone!

So the problem i have is that more and more new games are being released before they are ready. Im not going to name names but it is more annoying getting the game early and patching the whole time for months till the game runs how it should in the first place, than to wait a couple of more months for a "complete" game.

I used to game using my pc years ago (starcraft days!) and have only returned recently from xbox 360 and ps3 consoles. I remember patching games back then but not to the extent that a game was unplayable until patch 1.0.2 etc was out. It also seems the craze to not make previous save games compatible with the new patches! Crazy.

Does anyone else feel this way?!
 
No games are going to be released glitch free, their may be few glitches or their maybe more than a few. It's never really bothered me as I've never run into anything major.
 
I agree, Blizzard are still patching Starcraft lol. But the amount of times i read threads how a new game is great but rendered unplayable by major glitches so wait till patch xxx is released is starting to drive me mad.
 
there.

I always try and wait for a few months myself, get a better polished game due to patches and lower costs too, win win.
 
Yeh think am gonna start doing that. Just a shame because i remember counting the days till halo 3 was released and the excitement of playing it on day of release with a bunch of other excited people was a great experience. Have to give that up slightly by gaming more on the pc.
 
To be honest, there's not really that many games I can think of that were completely broke on release day and needed a patch. Fallout 3 was really bad, kept crashing. Arma 2 is apparantly mega buggy, some hassle with Bioshock's DRM at the start... that's all I can think of :P
 
Fallout 3
Football Manager 2009
Arma 2
Empire Total War
Are games that i really like playing but were woeful to start with due to glitches and my saves in some of them were not backwards compatible :(
 
This isn't a new thing really, the vast majority of games from the last 10 years have been patched, or if they haven't, have often needed a patch (some publishers like Atari don't seem to go in for patching much). For every mainstream title that hasn't been patched, I could probably name you half a dozen that have been.

Likewise savegame compatibility between certain versions has cropped up with quite a few games down the years... to be fair it is probably more of a problem nowadays when some developers are shying away from the traditional patching method in favour of automatic updating, making it harder to choose your version.

At the end of the day, patching is a good thing, rather than something to be concerned about. The most respected game developers in the world (Blizzard, id software, Epic, Valve, Bethesda, Bioware etc) all patch their games. Bugs are fixed, new features are added - what's not to like?

The last time I bought a game which didn't work out of the box was Unreal in 1998, I had to go to a net cafe and download a patch onto floppies at my own expense.

As an aside I fall into the category of gamers who play a lot of games months/years after release day, for singleplayer games I don't think that really detracts from the experience much. You get patches, cheaper prices and potentially faster hardware in your rig. Looking at the games you mentioned, the only one I've got is Fallout 3, which I started on version 1.06.
 
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Im not saying patches are bad at all! Ok my point is would it not be better to release a game a few months later which worked pretty good than rush it out and need loads of patches before it is playable (fun to play and not frustrating)?

Im all for patches fixing niggily little things later on!
 
developers dont want to release games with bugs but time constraints/deadlines coupled with overheads force them to get the product out in order to recoup their mass debts.

i cant recall a game i purchased that didnt work from the off, although i do keep up to date and follow games i want through their development/testing and leave poor games well alone..

as mentioned in above replies, simply waiting a month or two usually means the game is much cheaper and it has had patches released to fix some problems, it really pays to be prudent and not buy any old churn...

do your homework before buying,
 
Valid point. Just wish buying a pc game was a similar experience to that of buying a console game. With minor patches through its lifetime.
 
Well console games have the benefit of static hardware / OS, so there are much fewer things that could go wrong in terms of incompatibility etc (especially with drivers).

I think that as time moves on though and more and more people hook their consoles up to the internet, we'll see more patching on consoles too. Historically they had to have very good QA, because if a game didn't work properly out of the box, they were screwed.

As for the point about delaying games a few months rather than rushing it out, well, the fact is even games which are delayed for years often end up getting patched! No matter how much internal testing goes on, it's only once a game gets out in the wild that it'll get a proper going over on a huge range of different hardware/configurations etc
 
At least the release patches to fix the problems!

I've got a copy of Warrior Kings here that I've had for years and years, I've never been able to complete it and I never will because it was so buggy they released 2 patches and gave up on it! :(

Lets not forget that a lot of bugs are issues with hardware compatibility, an issue that you can't ever fully sort because a) you can't code for every combination of hardware and b) hardware advances at a faster rate than software meaning games companies are playing catch up!
 
Console games are just as bad, I don't play my consoles that often so when I do you can pretty much guarantee that I need a firmware update for the console itself, then I put a game in and that decides it needs to update.

At least the 360 only takes a minute max, The PS3 can take anywhere up to an hour
 
I borrowed my mates ps3 and tried a few games online. I remember resistance: fall of man (think thats the name) taking an hour and ten mins to finish the update, so much for consoles being fast!
 
AFAIK we're still waiting for a patch to properly fix Saints Row 2 - I don't think one is ever going to be forthcoming.

I agree with the OP that it is becoming more common for games to require major patching just to be properly functional which used to be a rarity.
 
GTA4 is a perfect example of what the OP means.

Shocking state to release a game in


open beta test for the win
 
I was gonna say GTA 4, except I remembered that the patches released for it actually did little or nothing to address the major issues with the game. The performance is just as slow now as upon release and there is still no AA, for example. And nor will there ever be.

I can't even play GTA 4 any more; when I start it, it tells me there is an update for Games for Windows and I have to update it before I can play the game and save it. So I say yes, update then - it does so (which takes ages), the game restarts... and then it AGAIN tells me there is an update (the same one) and do I want to install it? :rolleyes: Pathetic. I expect if I had a pirate copy I wouldn't have any of this garbage but because I paid about £35 for it on its Steam release, I have to jump through these stupid hoops.


Oh, NFS Undercover is another example of a recent PC game which didn't work properly out of the box, suffering major framerate stuttering problems. It could be fixed by altering the registry or by the patch. Still an appalling game though.
 
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Ollie83 said:
Valid point. Just wish buying a pc game was a similar experience to that of buying a console game. With minor patches through its lifetime.
Click to expand...

I find many games that are like this now even on consoles. If you look at Team Fortress 2, Call of Duty 2 etc for the Xbox that had major issues for 4months+ before they were fixed. Most games on consoles now get patched quickly but their is still many cases when they don't like castle crashers.

Same on PC but usually they are patched slightly faster but still it's a pain. I think the main problem is that many game companies have been cutting back on QA or don't have the facilities to properly test the game (in latency server configuration issues). I find Steam is trying to help make all this easier but most of it is just due to the company making the game and how they make it.
 
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