Decline [GQ was right] I am a proud member of the Patch Hater Club

[rusty_shackleford]

Ok wait so are we discussing the "games as a service" topic or whether or not games are buggier these days than before? Because those two do not overlap all that much.

this is the thread for shitting on game developers
I do not like them

 

[Humbaba]

If it makes you feel better, game devs have terrible working conditions. So you can rest assured that they are suffering all the time.

 

[J1M]

If it makes you feel better, game devs have terrible working conditions. So you can rest assured that they are suffering all the time.

Looking at recent releases, as a class, they deserve far worse.

 

[Zombra]

Ok wait so are we discussing the "games as a service" topic or whether or not games are buggier these days than before? Because those two do not overlap all that much.

If I understand correctly, neither. It's about developers releasing unfinished games and relying on the tolerance of consumers who expect the "day 1 patch" or the "2 week patch" or the "6 month patch" to make things playable.

 

[Zombra]

Also since we're talking about Troika and Bloodlines a lot - if "patch culture" had been in full swing by then, Bloodlines could have been quickly fixed and been a much bigger success instead of a cult hit that gained stature despite the state of its release. Troika might have survived and gone on to make more masterpieces; instead we can only wonder today about what might have been. rusty_shackleford, all your talk about what happened to Troika contradicts your main point of patching being bad, since it could have saved them.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

@rusty_shackleford, all your talk about what happened to Troika contradicts your main point of patching being bad, since it could have saved them.

The issue is that we've come to accept far worse than Troika's buggy releases. It's not a good thing.
These are major companies in the world's largest entertainment industry, asking them to behave professionally is not something you should be shamed for.

 

[Zombra]

These are major companies in the world's largest entertainment industry, asking them to behave professionally is not something you should be shamed for.

I don't disagree ... but supporting your product after release is professional behavior, and I think you're exaggerating a lot about how bad it is. Are the big name companies honestly releasing unplayable games and then patching them later? I don't make a lot of day one purchases but when I do they always run fine, maybe with a bug here or there but certainly not worse than "old days" releases. Then they plug the leaks and squash the few bugs that remain as reports come in. Pro-consumer and simply good business.

The issue is that we've come to accept far worse than Troika's buggy releases. It's not a good thing.

lol. What big name games are you buying that were released in a worse state than a Troika game? The only one in my recent memory is Arkham Knight (2015), which I agree was a disaster and Rocksteady should be (and are) ashamed of themselves.

Oh wait! Is this about Cyberpunk 2077? If so I understand your rage about that, but patch culture isn't the problem there - the projekt seems to have been mishandled from the top down as (from what I understand) the whole design sucks and was unfixable from the start. I never played it myself so I can't fully comment.

But I think these exceptions prove the rule that for the most part big games are perfectly good at release.

 

[J1M]

You have a short memory.

First five that come to mind that you haven't already mentioned:
Skyrim
No Man's Sky
Warcraft 3 Reforged
Mass Effect Andromeda
Halo Infinite

 

[Zombra]

Fair enough. I never paid attention to any of those* except Skyrim, and Bethesda has been buggy garbage since at least Daggerfall so they don't count for purposes of this conversation.

*I did try No Man's Sky at one point and bugs are not the problem with that piece of crap.

 

[Roguey]

"the coach said his plan failed because ..."
random fan: "NO HE'S WRONG AND I'M RIGHT!"

that random fan is you btw

Tim Cain said there was nothing wrong with ToEE's encounters. Josh Sawyer said he legitimately didn't understand why Deadfire underperformed. Developers are not infallible or objective about their own products.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

What big name games are you buying that were released in a worse state than a Troika game? The only one in my recent memory is Arkham Knight (2015), which I agree was a disaster and Rocksteady should be (and are) ashamed of themselves.

Oh wait! Is this about Cyberpunk 2077? If so I understand your rage about that, but patch culture isn't the problem there - the projekt seems to have been mishandled from the top down as (from what I understand) the whole design sucks and was unfixable from the start. I never played it myself so I can't fully comment.

But I think these exceptions prove the rule that for the most part big games are perfectly good at release.

I could probably dub that animaniacs geography song over with just recent, notable bugged releases
the fact that you identified one I wasn't even thinking of is icing on the cake
if you want an example of how unfinished and buggy games are now, go look at battlefield 2042 which released last year. Game journalists were shilling hard for that game and had to issue limpwristed responses after they conned people into buying it. We've gone so far past Troika-tier releases that it's not even funny, these are basically alpha prototypes being sold for full price.

And since we're on this topic: IIRC, you were one of the posters defending Prey against a game journalist who actually did their job and knocked it in their review score when the game was too buggy to be completed, while reviewing a post-release copy and with the developer's help.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Josh Sawyer said he legitimately didn't understand why Deadfire underperformed.

Sawyer isn't part of business operations at Obsidian, Jason Anderson was a co-owner who most likely directly communicated with potential publishers.

 

[Roguey]

Sawyer isn't part of business operations at Obsidian, Jason Anderson was a co-owner who most likely directly communicated with potential publishers.

If all Sawyer had to do to find out why Deadfire underperfomed was talk to an owner, I think that's one of the first things he'd do.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

I think consoomers have the right to complain that a $200 million dollar production has AGREEABLE GRUNTS

 

[Pink Eye]

I think consoomers have the right to complain that a $200 million dollar production has AGREEABLE GRUNTS

Did someone voice act that? Or was that an AI talking? Cause imagine wasting a Voice Actor's time to say [Agreeable Grunt]

 

[FriendlyMerchant]

Bethesda beat CoD to this. By at least a decade. Daggerfall required numerous patches after release in order for it just to be playable.

 

[A horse of course]

I think consoomers have the right to complain that a $200 million dollar production has AGREEABLE GRUNTS

Did someone voice act that? Or was that an AI talking? Cause imagine wasting a Voice Actor's time to say [Agreeable Grunt]

Sounds like text-to-speech, but it's not unusual for a random dev to say lines as placeholder audio.

 

[mondblut]

Cool story bro.

Publishers aren’t interested in games from developers that consistently turn out B titles. Unfortunately, although our games had depth and vision, we were never able to release a game that had been thoroughly tested and rid of bugs. The large quantity of errors in our product automatically rendered them B titles.

"Hurr durr, it's not because we were too self-important to make a Fallout copycat that people would be actually interested in, or tried to compete with Halflife 2 at its own turf, it's because we missed a few bugs! That totally ruined us, yeah. If not for that memory leak, Arcanum would have blown diablo 2 and the sims out of the water!"

It's easier to blame your failure on testers and sloppy coders than to admit that your brand of games is simply not attractive to the audience that matters. Bethesda games are so full of bugs it's not even funny, yet I reckon they are somehow still considered "AAA" or whatever.

 

[Ismaul]

The internet made patch delivery much easier, which came with both its advantages and degenerate behaviors.

Of course it enabled publishers and devs to release buggier games due to impatience or incompetence, but frankly I think some responsability goes to the consumers. The fuckers keep D1Ping those buggy games man! The lure of the new shit is too strong. But if we stopped D1Ping games unless they weren't overly buggy, publishers and devs would stop this behavior right the fuck there or go bankrupt. It really just seems that premature release satisfies both parties: publishers/devs just want to unload their precum and call it cum while cumsumers rush to catch it before it touches the floor.

Personally I never D1P anything, usually it's more like Y2P (year 2). And even then there's still content and patches coming, but unless the devs suck, major bugs should be gone by then.

You aren't a real Patch Hater unless you Stop the D1P! And for that matter stop the GOTY voting that goes with it. Let's vote >1 year after release.

 

[Ismaul]

"Hurr durr, it's not because we were too self-important to make a Fallout copycat that people would be actually interested in, or tried to compete with Halflife at its own turf, it's because we missed a few bugs!

I assumed you knew Bloodlines was forced to release at the same time as Half-Life 2, it wasn't Troika's decision. Valve didn't want some other devs releasing the first Source engine game.

The game as it was released was ready months before, but they couldn't release, and the publisher wouldn't allow them to patch it during that time. They couldn't even update their Source engine to the final version, and were left with an unfinished version of it lol. Plus the engine was constantly changing during development, forcing them to redo many things.

Maybe it was Troika's fault for using Source at that time, but it clearly went worse than expected.

 

[mondblut]

I assumed you knew Bloodlines was forced to release at the same time as Half-Life 2, it wasn't Troika's decision. Valve didn't want some other devs releasing the first Source engine game.

The game as it was released was ready months before, but they couldn't release, and the publisher wouldn't allow them to patch it during that time.

Are you trying to tell me they were forced to delay the release as opposed to rushing it? Sounds entirely plausible.

I can imagine how "ready" it was months before, considering the fucking mess we've got when they did release it.

Plus the engine was constantly changing during development, forcing them to redo many things.

Welcome to game development.

 

[Roguey]

Are you trying to tell me they were forced to delay the release as opposed to rushing it? Sounds entirely plausible.

I can imagine how "ready" it was months before, considering the fucking mess we've got when they did release it.

That's what Tim Cain said happened. Also the version we got was the version that was "ready"

Ramsay: Troika also had some trouble with release timing. How did Valve’s embargo on Vampire impact the company?

Cain: Well, the embargo caused several problems. First, while the game was held until Half-Life 2 shipped, we were also not allowed to keep the title in development. Activision had us work on the game until a certain point, and then they froze the project. We’d have continued to improve the game, especially by fixing bugs and finishing incomplete areas, but they didn’t let that happen. They picked a version as the gold master for duplication, and then they held that version close until the ship date. We fixed some bugs, but they didn’t want to pass new builds to quality assurance.

Second, while our game was being held, Valve continued to make improvements to the Source engine—improvements we couldn’t add to our game. It was frustrating to play Half-Life 2 and see advancements in physics, modeling, facial animation, and other features that our game did not have.

Finally, the embargo really demoralized the team. They had finished a game that couldn’t be shipped, or changed, or talked about. And when Vampire was shipped, the game was compared unfavorably to the only other Source game on the market. Needless to say, we lost some good people during that time. They quit in frustration and went elsewhere.


Ramsay: Even if there was a need for the title to be published before Half-Life 2, Valve made that impossible. Why did Activision freeze the project?

Cain: Just to be clear, I came over to the Vampire team after the first two years of development, and my role was to provide programming leadership and work on areas of the game code that needed immediate help, such as creature artificial intelligence and file-packing issues. So, I never interacted with Activision during development.

With that said, the Vampire game had been under development for three years. While that’s not a long time for a role-playing game—Fallout had taken three and half years to develop, and that was a simpler game made almost a decade earlier—Activision had become impatient and wanted the game shipped as soon as possible. They wanted to cut areas of complexity, we wanted to maintain quality, and the game was caught in a lopsided tug-of-war. In the end, Activision “won,” and the game was shipped with many bugs, cinematic cutscene issues, and incomplete areas.


Ramsay: Can you give me some examples of these problems?

Cain: Some of the most egregious examples included the game crashing when a Nosferatu player character finished a particular map. This was caused by a bad map value in a script that teleported a Nosferatu to a different map than other player characters because Nosferatu were not allowed to appear in public places. The crash was discovered after the embargo, along with the disheartening fact that no one in quality assurance at Activision had ever tested the Nosferatu character.

We were also working on smoothing out the walking animations of characters during in-game cinematic sequences. The embargo occurred during the middle of this process, which left a great many characters skating or stuttering during those sequences. And the warrens near the end of the game were barely populated with creatures when development was frozen. No balancing or dialogue was added at all.

I don’t have to restate how demoralizing these issues were to the team. All of these problems were easily solvable with more time, but that time was not available.


Ramsay: Was there any ill will toward Valve?

Cain: No, we weren’t really angry with Valve. They made their deal with Activision, and part of that deal was that any Source-based game had to be shipped after their Half-Life 2. Valve had the luxury of pushing out their ship date repeatedly—and they did—to ensure that their game was great. We were hoping for the same luxury, but Activision didn’t grant it.

Now Activision, on the other hand, did get a bit of our ire. When we discovered that we could not ship before Valve, we never imagined that Activision would ship Vampire on the same day as Half-Life 2. For several reasons, a much better idea would have been to ship Vampire a couple of months later. It would have given us time to polish our game with a stable engine. It would have given the consumer something else to buy that used the Source engine after Half-Life 2. And a later release would also not have put us in direct competition for consumer dollars during our important first few weeks on store shelves, because we all knew that consumers were going to choose Half-Life 2 over Vampire. And, really, was the cost of a few more months of development really that much more than the years we had already spent on the game? No, I may not be a businessman, but that seemed like a bad choice on Activision’s part.


Ramsay: Sounds like a reasonable solution to me. Did Leonard or Jason make these arguments to Activision?

Cain: Leonard did a lot of the interacting with Activision, and he did suggest this course of action many times. As far as I knew, Activision either ignored the suggestion or complained about how much time Vampire had already taken. They really did not want to put any more money into the game than they absolutely had to, but at the same time, they demanded triple-A quality. It was quite schizophrenic.

Troika brought these problems on themselves by agreeing to contracts that required them to deliver more than they could capably deliver (and with ToEE they actually delivered more than what the contract required).

 

[Tavar]

What frustrates me most about the current "patch culture" is the total lack of end user control. Back in ye olde days patching was a manual activity and often you didn't even bother to patch your games. Now, everything happens more or less automatically which can bite you in the ass. For example, Blizzard ruined Warcraft III for everyone with the release of Reforged. While you can use your old cds / images and then manually patch them to a pre-Reforged version, the last versions before Reforged aren't available as stand-alone patches. This is very frustrating as they added proper widescreen support shortly before Reforged was released. So your options are to either use an old patch without widescreen support or get your game infected with Reforged decline (which includes mandatory usage of the Blizzard launcher) even though you didn't even buy the remaster. Automatic patching is convenient, but they should at least give you an easy way to downgrade as well.

 

[Average Manatee]

Don't play a game until it's ~2 years old and/or devs have stated that they are done patching the game. Saves you a shit ton of money on the games and your hardware too.

 

[J1M]

Are you trying to tell me they were forced to delay the release as opposed to rushing it? Sounds entirely plausible.

I can imagine how "ready" it was months before, considering the fucking mess we've got when they did release it.

That's what Tim Cain said happened. Also the version we got was the version that was "ready"

Ramsay: Troika also had some trouble with release timing. How did Valve’s embargo on Vampire impact the company?

Cain: Well, the embargo caused several problems. First, while the game was held until Half-Life 2 shipped, we were also not allowed to keep the title in development. Activision had us work on the game until a certain point, and then they froze the project. We’d have continued to improve the game, especially by fixing bugs and finishing incomplete areas, but they didn’t let that happen. They picked a version as the gold master for duplication, and then they held that version close until the ship date. We fixed some bugs, but they didn’t want to pass new builds to quality assurance.

Second, while our game was being held, Valve continued to make improvements to the Source engine—improvements we couldn’t add to our game. It was frustrating to play Half-Life 2 and see advancements in physics, modeling, facial animation, and other features that our game did not have.

Finally, the embargo really demoralized the team. They had finished a game that couldn’t be shipped, or changed, or talked about. And when Vampire was shipped, the game was compared unfavorably to the only other Source game on the market. Needless to say, we lost some good people during that time. They quit in frustration and went elsewhere.


Ramsay: Even if there was a need for the title to be published before Half-Life 2, Valve made that impossible. Why did Activision freeze the project?

Cain: Just to be clear, I came over to the Vampire team after the first two years of development, and my role was to provide programming leadership and work on areas of the game code that needed immediate help, such as creature artificial intelligence and file-packing issues. So, I never interacted with Activision during development.

With that said, the Vampire game had been under development for three years. While that’s not a long time for a role-playing game—Fallout had taken three and half years to develop, and that was a simpler game made almost a decade earlier—Activision had become impatient and wanted the game shipped as soon as possible. They wanted to cut areas of complexity, we wanted to maintain quality, and the game was caught in a lopsided tug-of-war. In the end, Activision “won,” and the game was shipped with many bugs, cinematic cutscene issues, and incomplete areas.


Ramsay: Can you give me some examples of these problems?

Cain: Some of the most egregious examples included the game crashing when a Nosferatu player character finished a particular map. This was caused by a bad map value in a script that teleported a Nosferatu to a different map than other player characters because Nosferatu were not allowed to appear in public places. The crash was discovered after the embargo, along with the disheartening fact that no one in quality assurance at Activision had ever tested the Nosferatu character.

We were also working on smoothing out the walking animations of characters during in-game cinematic sequences. The embargo occurred during the middle of this process, which left a great many characters skating or stuttering during those sequences. And the warrens near the end of the game were barely populated with creatures when development was frozen. No balancing or dialogue was added at all.

I don’t have to restate how demoralizing these issues were to the team. All of these problems were easily solvable with more time, but that time was not available.


Ramsay: Was there any ill will toward Valve?

Cain: No, we weren’t really angry with Valve. They made their deal with Activision, and part of that deal was that any Source-based game had to be shipped after their Half-Life 2. Valve had the luxury of pushing out their ship date repeatedly—and they did—to ensure that their game was great. We were hoping for the same luxury, but Activision didn’t grant it.

Now Activision, on the other hand, did get a bit of our ire. When we discovered that we could not ship before Valve, we never imagined that Activision would ship Vampire on the same day as Half-Life 2. For several reasons, a much better idea would have been to ship Vampire a couple of months later. It would have given us time to polish our game with a stable engine. It would have given the consumer something else to buy that used the Source engine after Half-Life 2. And a later release would also not have put us in direct competition for consumer dollars during our important first few weeks on store shelves, because we all knew that consumers were going to choose Half-Life 2 over Vampire. And, really, was the cost of a few more months of development really that much more than the years we had already spent on the game? No, I may not be a businessman, but that seemed like a bad choice on Activision’s part.


Ramsay: Sounds like a reasonable solution to me. Did Leonard or Jason make these arguments to Activision?

Cain: Leonard did a lot of the interacting with Activision, and he did suggest this course of action many times. As far as I knew, Activision either ignored the suggestion or complained about how much time Vampire had already taken. They really did not want to put any more money into the game than they absolutely had to, but at the same time, they demanded triple-A quality. It was quite schizophrenic.

Troika brought these problems on themselves by agreeing to contracts that required them to deliver more than they could capably deliver (and with ToEE they actually delivered more than what the contract required).

Even if all of those things are true, they were known in advance and the product should have been delayed more so as not to release at the same time as Half-Life 2.