55 réponses à ce sujet

[Cyonan]

I never said ACU wasn't a buggy release, I agreed with you there. But they didn't have any others.

About releasing a buggy game too early, you have a point, but take a look at the backlash to the W_D delay. They're doomed if they do, doomed if they don't.

 

People will always be annoyed at delays. Better to ignore them and release a working game.

 

Just don't lie about the graphics =P

 

At the end of the day people will complain about almost anything but what they will remember is how good the final product was, not that they had to wait a few extra months for it.

[Dio Demon]

Having bought the game day 1 I didn't have any crashes until I started installing mods, nor have I run into any game breaking bugs. I thought I did for the Dawnguard DLC, but it turns out it's just a poorly documented "You aren't allowed to continue" state.

 

I will admit that in New Vegas I did once get a corrupted quick save(as a result of a bug), which lost about 2 hours of play time.

PS3 Skyrim was total and utter bullshit. It makes Ubisoft games look good

[o Ventus]

PS3 Skyrim was total and utter bullshit.

 

Jesus. I forgot about the PS3 version.

 

 

 

It makes Ubisoft games look good

 

Which is saying something, since Ubisoft is the same company that released a game (Assassins Creed 2 on PC) which would forcefully quit (without saving) whenever an internet connection was lost, which would lose you a ton of time if you didn't manually save). And the same company whose former preferred method of DRM (StarForce) would literally melt and break people's HDD's. And the same company whose NEXT preferred method of DRM (SecuROM) was so invasive that it actually warranted class-action lawsuits.

[Isichar]

I don't care how long I have to wait for the game or how many delays there is. I just want a working title that is a fun experience.

 

When I go to start a game I just want to have as much fun with that title as possible. I don't want to go through it thinking about bugs, or microtransactions or any of that crap. Just give me a good strong standalone product that is meant to be a good experience from the moment I hit start to the moment the credits finish rolling. I want to immerse myself in a game completely and I hate anything that breaks away from that.

[Dermain]

Ooh, I didn't realize it stuck you in combat, I thought it just randomly happened.

 

Name a non-playstation bug for 360/PC and I've probably experienced it in Skyrim.

 

PS3 Skyrim was total and utter bullshit. It makes Ubisoft games look good

 

Most Bethesda games are horrible on Playstation anyways. Oblivion had(has?) numerous unfixed bugs specific to that system, Fallout 3 continued the trend, as did New Vegas and Skyrim. 

[o Ventus]

Thankfully they learned their lesson about always-online after one game.

And it only took irreversible property damage to consumers' machines and numerous lawsuits for them to drop StarForce.

 

... Only for them to move on to another DRM that would land them into numerous lawsuits.

[A Crusty Knight Of Colour]

Gamers are strange indeed. The rights of the consumer are paramount in this industry, but they also have responsibilities too.

 

No developer or publisher will take their audience seriously when stuff like this continues to happen:

 

[Dermain]

Gamers are strange indeed. The rights of the consumer are paramount in this industry, but they also have responsibilities too.

 

No developer or publisher will take their audience seriously when stuff like this continues to happen:

 

*snip*

 

I wonder why they were all playing Modern Warfare 2 then, or if they ever had that thought.

 

I suppose it must be one of those "hipster" things.

[Melra]

I guess it is the only kind of customer that might ask if his kid might like it and if it'd have sex scenes for himself.

[Fast Jimmy]

However you slice it, we are all being ripped off to some degree. There are dozens of examples. Sadly, most of us are okay with it...

Eh.

Video games have all the problems of rabid fandoms that come along with entertainment products, including ever-escalating expectations, a general cynical attitude towards the very consumerism they support and assumptions that they know how to do nearly every facet of the process better.

It's also coupled with all the problems of full-scale software development, including development cycles, project scope creep and a consumer base with assumptions that they know how to do nearly every facet of the process better.

It is an industry that takes all of the coordination and teamwork of a full scale Hollywood movie, but with the amount of content of multiple books. Compared to nearly any other form of entertainment - music, movies, books, theatre, the list goes on - the amount of content and bang for your buck is proportionally much higher.


I'm not advocating low quality products and find this ever-growing mindset of "we'll patch it later and make our most ardent fans essentially pay to beta-test our products" pretty abhorrent. It does treat consumers like disposable resources and not the bedrock upon which the industry rests. That being said, I think people are getting what they pay for. Outside of ludicrous taxes like in Australia, the price of video games has remained artificially stagnant for decades, not charging more for higher production values simply because companies are afraid to put a price tag on a game above $60.

So to counter this, they are instead selling DLC, and microtransactions, and tail-ending QA and non-vital development work for future patches. Which is precisely the problem the OP and others are bemoaning. I think higher price tags for higher quality games would resolve many of these issues. Or, aside from that, that people stop buying games at release and instead wait for reviews to come out to ensure the game is a quality purchase.

Since both of these proposals would require universal changes in the buying habits of millions across the world, I don't think we will see them ever go into effect. Meaning the DLC, MTX and "patch it six months after release" problems are not going away anytime soon.

[mybudgee]

For the record, I was just playing Skyrim on my 1 year-old Xbox. Fighting forsworn-- freeze bug

 

 

(No, it doesn't happen with any other game, & no I don't have 85 saves or dwarven keys)

[Seraphim24]

It is an industry that takes all of the coordination and teamwork of a full scale Hollywood movie, but with the amount of content of multiple books. Compared to nearly any other form of entertainment - music, movies, books, theatre, the list goes on - the amount of content and bang for your buck is proportionally much higher.

 

Er, I don't know about this one. I'd say video games were essentially the antithesis of Hollywood scale productions... it's just a trend that started in kind of the late 90s early 00s that's been gradually increasing in intensity. Many of the NES era games etc are pretty indistinguishable from modern mobile games in many respects. There's nothing Hollywood scale or DLC patch-based etc. about Super Mario Brothers 1.

 

I still to this day play plenty of games only made by a handful people with minimal investment and so on that I thought have been a lot of fun.. Order of Ecclesia comes to mind....

 

... actually to be honest I think it's the majority of the games I end up enjoying the most. Whenever things get escalated past a certain point a lot of the time I end up losing interest a lot of the time.

 

Even stuff like GTA which was eventually costing a bazillion dollars started out as an over the top gimmicky thing in many ways.

[Fast Jimmy]

I say this so many times. Software Engineering and development is a different ballpark. A lot of people think it is just a matter of learning how to code, but in actuality it is a whole school of management tools that you have to work on. Realistically, you will only be spending 30-40% of your time doing actual programming. Now why is software a different animal? First and foremost the idea of software is abstract. Building software is representing logical ideas on bits and bytes on the CPU.  This also brings me to my next point, it is extremely difficult. 

 

History Lesson

As a developer, the only way you can make good software is if it reliable, on budget, on time and easily maintainable. One idea that was thought of was to use development cycles. This was done because software at this point was just impossible to make to satisfy these parameters(This is true even for today, this is why you have so many "scrum masters" at companies. Which in my opinion is bullshit because you create a layer between the developers and the business. http://manifesto.sof...ftsmanship.org/, this works so much better).  

 

One of the models they came up with is,

the waterfall model. Which is basically what other cycles are based off and it served it's time but was still a **** model. This is because, by the time you enter the implementation phase, you have already encountered bugs in your design(statistically speaking) and there is no way to backtrack on your model.  To solve this, we have models that spawned from the few stages. One example is the rapid prototype.

which tried to solve some of the problems of the waterfall model by giving an option to backtrack. However, it still did not offer the direction needed for some projects. Where are we now?

 

 

Agile, takes the ideas used by giving a much more free flowing movement around the model for sprints. It is a very flexible idea. It has helped a lot of projects but it is starting to become convoluted with the amount of agile supporting staff members when this could already be looked at the developer himself.

 

 

 

 Which in my opinion is bullshit because you create a layer between the developers and the business. http://manifesto.sof...ftsmanship.org/, this works so much better).  

 

I pulled this quote out of what is otherwise a very good post to call shenanigan's.

Firstly, the programmer who would sign such a manifesto could (and often would) be overruled by those above his pay grade about when a product should ship and to what degree of quality the testing and polish could be applied. One could violate or fulfill this manifesto statement through no choice of the programmer.

 

Second, this model only works when the programmer knows what the heck they are talking about. Which is, in my experience, a few and far between scenario.

 

I can sit in a room with a Business contact, such as a Compliance expert who can tell me every requirement and step needed to be taken to ensure a business stays within the requirements of the law. I can sit in a room with a programmer who can tell me exactly what code they have time to create, test and generate within the timeframes given. But if you put the two of them in the same room and give them the goal, there will be mistakes. TONS of mistakes. Because the programmer doesn't know the business side. They don't WANT to know the business side. Because your programmer didn't go to law school (in this instance) and if they make any assumptions, it will be their work (and their a$$) on the line. And Business contacts know what they want, but often have no idea how to articulate that into something a programmer can easily break down into components, create and test.

 

If you don't have someone who knows enough of both sides of the fence keeping an eye on the big picture and watching to make sure common problems are avoided and all the right questions are being asked, then it all goes to crap, VERY quickly. If a programmer is working on their own (or is leading a team of other programmers) and has a vision of what to create, your idea of craftsmanship works. But when the programmer is being asked to create a product of which other people are the experts (which is 99% of the programming/development workload in the real world), then someone to manage that process who understands the business request and can appropriately translate to the development team is not just a nicety, but a requirement. 

[Fast Jimmy]

Er, I don't know about this one. I'd say video games were essentially the antithesis of Hollywood scale productions... it's just a trend that started in kind of the late 90s early 00s that's been gradually increasing in intensity. Many of the NES era games etc are pretty indistinguishable from modern mobile games in many respects. There's nothing Hollywood scale or DLC patch-based etc. about Super Mario Brothers 1.

 

I still to this day play plenty of games only made by a handful people with minimal investment and so on that I thought have been a lot of fun.. Order of Ecclesia comes to mind....

 

... actually to be honest I think it's the majority of the games I end up enjoying the most. Whenever things get escalated past a certain point a lot of the time I end up losing interest a lot of the time.

 

Even stuff like GTA which was eventually costing a bazillion dollars started out as an over the top gimmicky thing in many ways.

 

That's fair... but if the baseline for what video games are is based on how game development worked 25 years ago in the 90's, then I'd say its not an accurate view of how the industry works today. Sure, you have indie studios of a dozen or so people, but two things:

 

1) This isn't what people are talking about when they are speaking about Microtransactions or DLC.

 

2) Indie games are, much more often than not, more inexpensively priced than AAA games.

 

 

I, too, find myself enjoying older games and games made by indie studios who forgo a lot of the unnecessary complexity (and cost and propensity for bugs) in favor of a simplistic design that doesn't need to sell as much. But my comment on the "Hollywood movie" budget of video games is more focused on your average AAA video game coming out on the market today.

[Seraphim24]

That's fair... but if the baseline for what video games are is based on how game development worked 25 years ago in the 90's, then I'd say its not an accurate view of how the industry works today. Sure, you have indie studios of a dozen or so people, but two things:

 

1) This isn't what people are talking about when they are speaking about Microtransactions or DLC.

 

2) Indie games are, much more often than not, more inexpensively priced than AAA games.

 

 

I, too, find myself enjoying older games and games made by indie studios who forgo a lot of the unnecessary complexity (and cost and propensity for bugs) in favor of a simplistic design that doesn't need to sell as much. But my comment on the "Hollywood movie" budget of video games is more focused on your average AAA video game coming out on the market today.

 

Welllllllll even by number though, I mean there were apparently like 300,000 games released in the last 2-3 years on the app store, that's insane. I know people like to bash them but I've encountered some that were fairly addicting.

 

Moreover, there is an area between AAA and independent or free to play or something that is extremely vast, IMO. For example, most DS or 3DS aren't really the cheapest neither the largest scale, it's just somewhere in the middle, and both the 3ds and Vita together along with their predecessor DS and PSP you have around 1/3 of a billion consoles sold that are primarily made up of games that offer a kind of mid-range sort of experience.

 

What about games like Animal Crossing? Fire Emblem? Muramasa: The demon blade or Dragon's Crown? Rune Factory? None of these really fit squarely into Hollywood scale production.

 

The hollywood scale production game didn't exist, certainly, 25 years ago, but Hollywood didn't dictate the development of video games 25 years ago and I don't see any particular reason why they should dictate the development of particular types of games now.

 

As far as microtransactions and DLC idk what to think about all that it seemed crazy at the time, still is, but plenty of games don't have it so I just often play those instead.

[Fast Jimmy]

You will most likely be dealing with software engineers instead of programmers. A programmer just writes code, but a software engineer is aware of the whole business process.

 

An engineer should know the about the problem of the domain themselves before entering this type of domain. The engineer knows better than the business person, how long a certain project is going to take. How an engineer gets overruled is according to the structure of your company. Why should my company include 4-5 scrum masters when this concept was created as a computer science concept?

 

I would rather have the developer tell me the estimate is going to take 4-5 months than a business guy tell me "it should only take you about 2 months." Business people that I have worked with, do not see the value of some programming concepts. I tried convincing one of my bossess that one week of refactor would limit the number of bugs that are developed, at this moment the application is now a shitshow because of how much less care was taken into making sure it is polished. The old age question of being pushed out vs doing things right is one of the things that are killing development. Do you think the publisher cares if you add nice and maintainable abstractions in your code vs delivering a product? Nope, they for the most part only care about the end product. Publishers won't do test coverage, nor will they be at code reviews. 

 

Also of course the software engineer has to KNOW what they are talking about. I do not know where this idea of engineers not knowing the business side of software came from. I mean one of the most fundamental topics is how to manage a product and honestly it is much more efficiently done by the engineers because they know much more closely about what they are talking about. They can create proper estimates based on ability much more closer.  There is no software without knowing the business side because the first part of a software project is obtaining requirements. How are you going to obtain requirements when you do not know the language of the customer? "Picking out nouns" can only take you so far.

 

The idea that developers and engineers only need to code is what it killing software development in the first place.

 

A software engineer may understand the programming and application side of the business, but they don't understand the BUSINESS side of the business.

 

If you a software engineer for Rosetta Stone, should you know how to speak and write every language flawlessly to develop code for it? Of course not. But there may be grammar rules or special lessons involved that are special to one language over another that may require a different approach that only someone intimately familiar with the language would anticipate.

 

All too often, things play out like this...

 

Business: "The client wants program Alpha that has X, Y and Z features."

Software Engineer: "X, Y and Z? Okay, that should take 3 months."

<2 1/2 months later>

Business: "You didn't make me the program I asked for. You made me program alpha, not program Alpha."

Software Engineer: "What's the difference?"

Business: "There's new government requirements that state all programs effective this year must be capital-A Alpha or they won't be accepted."

Software Engineer: "That wasn't in the requirement."

Business: "Well, it's common knowledge! I didn't spell it out, but the requirements clearly had a capital A, not a lower-case a."

Software Engineer: "Okay, well, we won't get done in two weeks."
Business: "We told the client we would."
Software Engineer: "Okay, well, if we cut feature Z, we can still have X and Y be functional."

Business: "Okay, well go ahead. I'll let the client know."

<one week later>

Business: "Okay, the client demanded we keep all the features, but says we can downgrade to program Beta."

Software Engineer: "Beta? We've done all of our regression testing and development for Alpha. We can have Beta ready with all features in one more week, but we won't be able to test anything."

Business: "That's what the client wants - program to go live with all features on time."
Software Engineer: "I'm not going to recommend this."
Business: "Can we deliver anything else near what the client requested by one more week?"
Software Engineer: "Nope."
Business: "Then we launch Beta with all features and close to zero testing."

 

 

 

The Software Engineer knew the best way to develop for what they thought the original request was. And they even knew the best way to fix the change in project scope to start out with, or that moving to Beta would result in a terrible effective testing cycle. The Engineer knew all of the right decisions from a software business perspective... but they didn't know that Alpha was a government requirement when alpha is all their team made previously, while the Business has been neck deep in Alpha vs. alpha discussions for the past 18 months and can't conceive of a situation where someone in their company doesn't know the difference. 

 

That's when someone who is experienced in leading development projects comes in and clears up any assumptions, any miscommunications, any client requests or special items... they don't have to be an expert on the business side or an expert on the programming/development side. They just need to be someone who can review all the items that have been stated, evaluate the real objectives of both teams, ensure communication between the requester and the development team is clear and well-understood and who can shepherd the process when competing deliverables bubble up on the programming side, or when changes occur on the Business side that aren't trickled down to the development team. 

 

As much as I'd like to live in a world where there was an abundance of people who knew every programming answer as well as how to fulfill every Business need of clients, government regulations and strategic resource planning, there aren't. If there is even one person like that in a large company, they are not able to be assigned to every project to make sure everything works smoothly. Hence you have development experts, like Scrum or Agile project managers, who are taught to talk to both sides, plan long-term and communicate. Yes, it is an extra layer of bureaucracy, but it avoids situations where the slightest misunderstanding or oversight can result in months worth of development being wasted, while also not relying on a Messiah developer arising from the ranks to be the savior of all programming and development needs, waving their magic wand to create high quality solutions with zero mess or fallout.

[Cainhurst Crow]

If the success of micheal bays movies, the continued thriving of cash money records, the use of coercive copyright laws against people in making examples of people who download music over actually protecting property from intellectual theft, the very way apple is allowed to operate Itunes and clear channel can hold a monopoly on radio, and the complete disconnect of award show entries and winners to what the general public enjoys, are any indication. It's that game companies bringing their practices to music or movies would be hailed as saviors of the industry, not as bad influences.