I was browsing the Medieval II Total War forums at
www.totalwar.org (as I have the game and am about to play it) and I came across
this thread listing over 100 bugs in the game. So far not many of them appear to be showstoppers, but there's a lot of criticism of CA in that forum about "shipping a game unfinished". I believe CA are promising to fix a lot of the issues in their upcoming first patch.
This struck me, as the people over at the
NWN2 forums (and here, to think about it) have also been whinging about how NWN2 seems to be unfinished by Obsidian, and contains a lot of bugs, bad coding or whatever. A good example was the fact that there was a patch already available the day NWN2 shipped, with a lot of "new" content in it. Obsidian have already issued three patches for NWN2, each of them fixing bugs in the game.
Then you go back to KOTOR2, which also seemed to be unfinished (the game files had a lot of content which looked like it should've been in the game but was left out for whatever reason).
Those are just three examples I've noticed in the last couple of years. In all cases the games had to be launched to be on shelf in time for the pre-Christmas selling season, when the sales uplifts are crucial. They've then been "fixed" (or in KOTOR2's case, not been fixed) afterwards, with patches and whatnot.
There could be valid reasons of course; there's such a proliferation of systems configs these days that it's probably impossible to test for issues with all of them - but the games I highlighted above seem to have enough bugs on enough "common" systems to be more than coincidental.
Thing is, I don't remember this happening with earlier games like BG2 or KOTOR1, or before that. Maybe games were simpler then?
So I'd like to raise the following points for discussion:
1. Are game publishers shipping more "unfinished" or "incomplete" games these days, in order to meet year-end sales targets, and then fix them with patches afterwards? In other words, is this premeditated for economic reasons?
2. Is this because of a ) poor project management; b ) unreasonable timeframes; or c ) both?
3. Is this fair on people who do not have internet connections (what little of them there still are) and cannot download patches?
4. If so, is this a good idea for companies in the long term? In the short term they might get the uplifts that they need (and in Atari/Infogrames' case, desperately need) but wouldn't this affect their long term branding and credibility? On the other hand, if they wait and miss the holiday launch seasons (end Nov) they might not be around to reap the fruits of their labour (I'm not sure what cash burn rates these companies have - they might really need those sales to survive).
4. Do you feel it will change or only get worse? Should we all start buying consoles?
Comments?
[ 12-11-2006, 02:27 AM: Message edited by: Memnoch ]