Increasing trend of PC games being rushed out unfinished?

[Memnoch]

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 ]

[Zaleukos]

Hehe, Medieval 2 is ironically one of the most polished new releases I've gotten my hands on this year, way ahead of Sid Meier's Railroads, Gothic III, and Age of Pirates: Caribbean Tales (arguably the buggiest game to ever occupy space on a HD of mine).

1) My instinctive response is that this isnt all that new. Daggerfall, Darklands, Ultima IX, Elite II, Frontier: First Encounters... I've had a lot of experience with crappy first releases, and we tend to forget . There is one difference compared to the past though, and that is that devs and publishers feel that since "everyone" is online nowadays you can expect your customers to download patches to a larger extent. In a way this makes it easier to meet deadlines. It would however surprise me if it is more economical overall to release a buggy product, as patching requires resources that could have been devoted to creating new products.

2) C. Unrealistic deadlines are symptoms of poor project management From my experience with other areas of software (or other) engineering you have three groups involved. The marketing/sales people who push for a deadline but have limited grasp of the capabilities and difficulty of technology, the creative people who come up with great concepts but tend to underestimate the difficulty of implementation, and the engineers/programmers. It's the second or the first group that plans the project, and the first one that sets the deadline.

Then there are some problems caused by the rapid improvement of gaming technology. If you withhold your release for too long then your technology (the graphics engine for instance) might be obsolete. Couple this with there being a few highly preferrable release points in the year (meaning that it is imperative to get a game out before christmas or some other holidays) and you have a situation where a missed deadline (which often is set by external factors rather than by a realistic estimate of how long it would take to finish the project) could make the project a pure money sink...

Finally there is the fact that games do become bigger. Customers except more content with each new release, and more refined graphics/gameplay/AI/whatnot. These improvements do require more manpower and a stronger cash flow, which makes it more costly to miss a deadline.

3) Of course not. But the world isnt fair...

4) It will probably get worse. I can see two ways of reversing it. First reviewers (that do help quite a few buyers make up their mind) need to be more critical towards technical problems in games, and reduce the amount of uncritical raving about unfinished preview versions. Second we as consumers need to start using the great power we have in a market economy. Namely that of voting with our feet. We put up with way too much crap from publishers and developers.

Since I dont expect review quality to go up anytime soon (to me it rather seems like reviewing is following general trends becoming more tabloid-like outside the niche channels) it is up to the gamers to bite the bullet and deal with this.

I'm not sure consoles will remain problem free either. Some titles (such as Morrowind a few years ago) already took bugginess and crashing into the console world.
We are also seeing consoles with online capability now, making it possible to offer patches to console games as well, offering the same kind of temptation to devs. But maybe the fact that the console market have more "joe blow" ordinary consumers that have less patience with this crap can moderate that?

[JrKASperov]

1. Yes, but old news.

2. None of the above. Greed is the answer. And that trend is most vividly shown on the huge leap to consoles.

3. Eh if you don't have an internet connection, you're not bound to have fun with most new games anyway, since SP games seem to be rare. Good ones that is.

4. Yes it sucks both for us and the companies. They will die off and decent companies might grow, or the circle repeats itself. Interplay didn't learn, and so doesn't Atari.

5. Never. Consoles were the whole start of this mess.

[Memnoch]

I moved this topic to GD to access a bigger audience.