...
Okay. Those of you who raised your hands, please leave the internet. Why would you even do that? You have to know I can't see them. I think it's just better that we cull you from the herd while we still can.
To everyone else, I'm going to guess that-- Hey, what are you doing? No, not the sad face!
Where was I? Ah, yes.
I'm going to guess that it hasn't been all that long since you encountered your last glitch. Were you wandering the desert of New Vegas when you suddenly fell through the world? Perhaps you had been cruising the galaxy in Mass Effect 2 for about 30 hours when your save file got corrupted. Maybe an NPC refused to acknowledge that you were dangling the Bloodgrass she wanted in front of her, and so had to roam Cyrodil (minus 1 NPC) as a vampire, permanently unable to interact with most "normal" people. Or you may just be a member of the CoD Glitch of the Month Club. This month it's free kills from attacking corpses. Yay!
Glitches know no boundary. They can hit any game in countless ways. Some can be dealt with by clever means on the part of the player. Others will put an end to your adventures, leaving you with nothing but the dull glow of the cursor sitting on the New Game option.
But what's this? Riding in on the wave of the future, Online Gaming, it's *dramatic pause*
With this new hero in town all the old frustrating glitches are a thing of the past! In the event a nefarious bug infiltrates your machine, wrecking your saves and putting your digital damsels in distress, you can rest easy knowing that Patch Man will soon be there! Just raise up a cry to the afflicted game's developers and they will chant a mystical code that rolls out their champion to rewrite all wrongs. Yes, life sure is great now that no one's seen a glitch in years...
Oh, wait a second. All those examples up there near the top are from pretty recent titles. What terrible fate has befallen our hero? Is Ash from the Evil Dead movies the one they have chanting the code?
No, I'm afraid the reality is much worse. Turns out that instead of using the option to patch a game after release as a way to correct oversights, many companies are using it as an excuse to release unfinished or untested work. Not all of them, of course, but too many.
Let's look back to the old days for a moment. Many games back then had glitches, but how many were the kind that could really take the fun out of a game? You could be pretty certain that if a glitch made it's way into the final product it would be either very minor like the odd clipping issue, or even entertaining like the ungodly amount of things you can do in Zelda: Ocarina of Time.
The point is that if a game came out back then you could be certain it's company's Quality Assurance team had put it through the wringer with beta testing, feedback groups, and hours upon hours of play testing. That's not how it is anymore.
So, who's to blame? Well, everyone really. The developers for making the game wrong to begin with. The publishers for not giving devs the time they needed to make things right, and instead rushing title after title out the door. And lastly, all of us for supporting this type of business model by constantly buying these titles one after another. After all, why would Activision waste time beta testing Black Ops when they can just move on to Modern Warfare 3 in a year's time and collect another $650 million a week after launch?
Corporate greed and our own willingness to jump on the next big thing are the heart of our problems, my friends. If we can conquer our own tendency to head toward the cliff like lemmings whenever a launch day is set, then we can send a message to the publishers that just want the games out as fast as possible. They won't listen to angry rants or sensible criticism. Only the siren's song of Ben Franklin gets their attention.
Do keep in mind that not every company is like this though. For example, Media Molecule delayed the release of LittleBigPlanet 2 to make sure it was done, even though they said they could have just patched it. Way to go, guys. Quality and customer satisfaction before quick profit. The ball is in our court now. Let's do our best to give support to the companies who care.
Nice. Just noticing now that Franklin looks like he has trouble getting it.
ReplyDeleteWhat you are asking for there Monkey goes against the core tenant of a gamer. Be the first. First to get it, first to beat it, first to complain about it.
Its not possible for us to miss out on a game at launch time if you have the cash, specially for the younger generation of gamers. Older ones have more patience with games cause I remember the constant delays of games in development for years to get the game right when it came out, cause you couldn't patch it. Now with patching available to consoles its become a thing that "Beta Testing" is simply a thing where we salvate over the game in its unfinished stage, and continue to do so when it comes out, and wait till the patch. Cause raise our voices about it as much as we want we're just gonna still play the bloody thing.
And until we break ourselves of that, they've got us by the joystick. Change is not impossible; it's imperative.
ReplyDeleteTrue
ReplyDeleteGames just need more beta testing really. These days it seems to be more of a "going through the motions" than an actual process for removing bad glitches and bugs. I'll use Resistance 2 for my example, a game that had 2 weeks of closed beta, two weeks of open beta, all the while the release date was fast approaching. There was no way any of the issues brought up were going to be addressed before release. The time just wasn't there to re do code, and close the gaps etc.
ReplyDeleteDo you remember the Rfom matchmaking fix that someone at IG did during their lunch break? The coding takes no time at all really, it's getting the approval of SONY and the global checks that hold everything up apparently.
ReplyDelete