If a game has an awful release but becomes great after patches...

[Deleted member 11480]

...how should it be rated?

DISCUSS!!!

 

[damager]

When was the last time this has happend?

 

[made]

When was the last time this has happend?

VTMB IIRC

 

[DaveO]

The Sacred hack and slash series easily comes to mind for this. Both the first and second games suffered from numerous bugs. While S2 still has bugs and issues the Community Patch has made the game at least decent.

 

[damager]

Man Sacred was great as a kid. Riding around with my big titted, angel winged, blond elven girl spraying arrows from the horseback.

 

[Baron Dupek]

If the game give fun even in early stage- then I'm positive. That doesn't stop me from loathing endless Early Access zombie and else garbage, though.

When was the last time this has happend?

You think why devs release Enhanced Editions?

 

[tormund]

Few large sites like Eurogamer (with Beyond Earth expansion) have been really pushing for something that is relevant to this question, that if a game has serious issues that look like they could be fixed trough patching or DLCs reviews should be withheld or they should at least go easy on those issues. I can see their reasoning, but I can also see that as yet another way to screw customers.

 

[Berekän]

At release it should be rated as it is, bad. I don't care about future fixes or mods will fix it™ or any other shit.

The fact is you pay for a product and you get a broken mess, that's what should be reviewed because that's what you paid for. Promises about fixing it in the future can (and will, and have been) be broken.

Of course you can always rectify your review later or make a new one if it gets fixed and becomes a fun game to play, but understandably not many people will do that.

By letting them get away with it because it looks like they're going to fix it you're only enabling them and letting them screw you in the ass the next time because you gave them a pass last time.

 

[Farage]

Negatively at first, then, Positively for fixing the negative points.
Isn't it obvious?

 

[DraQ]

End result is what matters and if the devs can be credited for the resulting greatness and it comes as free upgrade from the initial shittiness, then the devs can be credited for greatness, period.

An exception for games that were so buggy on the release that they could be considered malware, for example wiping out data or damaging hardware of a reasonably configured system.
Another exception for "patches" that require additional payments (in which case we have two different products, one good and one still shit) and "mods fixed it" where any credit for added quality goes to modders.

 

[oldmanpaco]

Remember when the trunk of Highwayman would disappear with all your stuff. Good times.

 

[Ninja Destroyer]

Sin had that problem after release. Activision pushed Ritual to put the game on the shelves before Half Life. Well, it turns out that loading times were horrible, there were invisible walls and problems with AI. After the gigantic patch (30 mb, remember it was 7 kb/s at best ) was released the game was great. But it never had the recognition it deserved, with it's nonlinear missions, gunplay, great soundtrack and proto-gore system that was later mastered by Raven.

 

[tormund]

Sin is one of those games I really need to go back to one day... I tried it few times but never went past the first few levels. I remember it for one of those annoying stealth levels in a game without any tools designed for stealth (luckily it was possible to just go trough it guns blazing), and for the fact that handgun was somehow way more useful in combat than machine gun.

 

[DraQ]

In the end SiN had much worse graphics and the most basic layer of gunplay dynamics (basically how the gun would fire and how would player react to hits, even before counting in damage or any more involved mechanical aspects) than HL1, as well as less interesting guns (ok, quantum Destabilizer was cool, basic firearms were also workable, but I don't remember any game with shittier and wimpier rocket launcher, unless we count SS1's railgun as one, and I'm not sure even then).

Still, it's a very good game, it's a sin to never have played it.

 

[Black_Willow]

Warlock: master of the arcane had this. The game was missing many core features at launch, such as terrain affecting the gameplay or hero units. They fixed it with patches and added some nice features in the DLCs, which made the game much more enjoyable.

 

[Excidium II]

Interesting thread in a forum where the most popular games are commonly filled with obligatory unofficial patches and mods.

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

If the the devs release patches, then the final product should be rated in the end. It's like if Da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa 3/4ths of the way, and then later came back and finished it. It would still be a great painting, and the exact process to get there isn't as important as the final product.

If the game is completed or significantly improved by people other than devs (mods, another company, etc), then it's trickier. In that case the devs should be deducted points because they failed in some ways, but the game itself shouldn't be punished, and be rated on the strength of the final product. Fallout: New Vegas is a good example of this, the out of the box combat is shit, and that's why I would be hesitant to credit Obsidian with creating a great game, but if you mod it with stuff like Project Nevada and some other fan mods, you can claim that NV is a great game.

 

[sullynathan]

so wait for the enhanced directors GOTY edition.

 

[zwanzig_zwoelf]

E.Y.E: Divine Cybermancy was a bugged mess in the very beginning, but I still enjoyed it.
After 3 (?) years of patching, the game is a fucking godsend. No game-breaking bugs, none of that crap anymore, they even replaced the shitty unreadable font with a better one.

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

so wait for the enhanced directors GOTY edition.

Hmmm.
Is there any examples of games, where GOTY edition has made things worse?

 

[sullynathan]

DOOM 3 BFG edition?

 

[Daemongar]

FO:NV, Daggerfall (obvioiusly), Arcanum, Ultima 8, are all games that got better with patches. FO:NV crashed pretty regularly and peformance was pretty crappy on release, but with patches runs fairly well. Daggerfall required... 7 patches (and this was way before automated downloads), Arcanum needed help, and Ultima 8 needed (at minimum) a jump fix to be tolerable.

 

[Zarniwoop]

And all these should have resulted in shit reviews.

Jesus fuck Codex, what happened to you, 86% POSITIVELY votes? HOW THE FUCK WOULD THAT EVEN HAPPEN today, with reviews coming out BEFORE the game or at worst shortly after?

Games should be at least mostly functional on release, minor bugs aside. Everyone who voted Positively should positively eat a banquet of the finest donkey dick.

Unless you mean rated by some obscure system that only rates games years after release. In which case fuck you for not being clear.

 

[DraQ]

FO:NV, Daggerfall (obvioiusly), Arcanum, Ultima 8, are all games that got better with patches. FO:NV crashed pretty regularly and peformance was pretty crappy on release, but with patches runs fairly well. Daggerfall required... 7 patches (and this was way before automated downloads), Arcanum needed help, and Ultima 8 needed (at minimum) a jump fix to be tolerable.

Daggerfall was impossible to complete out of the box, so we're speaking of a rather massive jump in quality.

 

[GameGear]

Hmmm.
Is there any examples of games, where GOTY edition has made things worse?

This is a minor thing in Wasteland 2 DC, where they introduced a very console-y prompt whenever you wanted to interact with things that required skills. In vanilla WL2 you'd have to actually use some thought. Otherwise, WL2 DC is better in every other way.