Fallout 4 - The Trend of Broken Games

Couchpotato

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Martin Toney has a new post on Gamingbolt where he talks about the trend of broken games recently, and has doubts that Fallout 4 will possible be one of them also.

So here’s a scary thought. Fallout 4… what if it comes to light and we all rush to our local retailers or our preferred online marketplace and put in our pre-orders for the game, only to have it revealed to use that it requires a massive “day one patch”.

Or that it will require an update to enable certain elements of in game functionality? What then? What if the game we’ve all been waiting for has fallen prey to the disgusting trend that is sweeping the development end of the gaming industry? Don’t get me wrong, I’m not writing this out of the want of creating hype or negative press for a property that I love. I’m writing this out of a general concern for something that I’ve loved for a huge portion of my life.

Bethesda aren’t beyond fault, we all know that far too well, but is it possible that Fallout 4 could pull an Assassin’s Creed Unity? Could the game descend from the sky shrouded in clouds, only for the clouds to part and reveal a half-assed product? It’s entirely possible, and that’s a scary thought. As Yahtzee of The Escapist Magazine once said, “You couldn’t get away with releasing a buggy game in the cartridge and cassette days – you’d get sentenced to a trampling under the company brontosaurus.”
Well all I know is every Bethesda game is a bug-fest on release. So Joxer this article is for you my friend so enjoy, and I look forward to your comments.


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Games released on cassettes/cartriges/diskettes were simple (from logic/programming point of view) in comparison with nowadays open world RPGs. Just try to complete every quest in Fallout New Vegas and you will get a headache! The amount of different solutions to the quests is huge. Add on top of that large amount of weapons, dehydration/starvation/radiation system, factions, random events and enemies, shading and lighting and so on and I guess you get my point of view.
It can be frustrating from the gamer's point of view - I know that very well - especially King's Bounty series. the next games had the same engine, yet every next one had some extra changes implemented and Warriors of the North was very buggy at the release and a year later too.
However if a gamer is patient he/she gets a fixed game a yer later with a significant discount. However lots of gamers have to buy that buggy game so the game developer will have funds to improve the game (perfect example - Jagged Alliance Flashback)....
 
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FWIW, I did not experience many bugs in Skyrim, very few actually, and far less than in Oblivion and Daggerfall. Can't say much about Morrowind, as I played that one long after it was released.

Pibbur who acknowledges several bugs in pibbur.
 
@xep624 use Risen 3 for comparing please.
Release version = total of 21 bug. One was patched with a hotfix, 20 issues remained broken. And you can't say it's a simple game.
Just to add... You probably won't see/notice any of them. :)

The only way to see Bethesda RPGs changing is if critics start lowering the score of buggy releases. Drastically.
Critics are there to warn people on bugs. I still can't understand no critic who praised Skyrim didn't at least mention some cloning dude. Even if someone is blind to bugs, that one can't possibly be missed to notice.
 
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The article is two or three wars late.

Multiple pressures led to the current state. The complexity of games is not involved.
Players demanded for more and more content and this came with a price.
I regularly replay old games from the age of cartridges/cassettes etc. Completion time: under three hours. The first completion took thirty hours.
To be compared with a game like Mass Effect two that took a bit less than 30 hours for a first completion. Subsequent completions were achieved in around 17 hours each time.
In one case, the compression is a ratio of ten, the other a ratio of 2. Much more content and a much less commanded gameplay. You cant command a 17 hour content the same way you can command a three hour content. It speaks in terms of bugs.
The production of an extended content is of course way easier than developping a gameplay to multiply by ten the basic completion time of a content.
All in all, games, these days, feature a much higher uncompressed completion time than before.

The article is too late as it did not ask the proper question: will the game be patched until a proper completion stage? Will some bugs be forgotten etc?

With movements like crowdfunding that showed that players are ready to pay to get an access to an alpha, shortening the release time line, every single developper now faces the issue of pushing their own version of the same trick: how to make money from releasing a product even earlier than what was done before?
Big corporations are going to be forced to align as there is some easy money to be made if they succeed in doing that.

The prospect of getting a properly completed product at first release has vanished. The question is the up to when the unavoidable process of patching the product can be sustained.
 
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Risen 3 was much less of a sandbox game than Skyrim was. It kind of comes with the territory of how they designed the world and its systems.

Thaurin who also did not experience many bugs in Skyrim but is always fixing bugs in Thaurin.
 
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Risen 3 is also about 1/15th the size of Skyrim, so 15X21 is 315 bugs for Skyrim vs. Risen 3. That's about right :)

P.S. I enjoyed Risen 3 too. Good game.
 
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Breaking news: Still no news on Fallout 4! ...So here's some mindless speculation to fill the gap!

I can't wait till we actually hear something substantial about Fallout 4. I seem to recall that Bethesda released a Christmas card last year which hinted at what to expect from them during 2014. I wonder if we will see another one this year.
 
The issue of buggy-ness in RPGs isn't limited to their massive complexity. The target consumer also has a huge array of different OS variations, video cards, and sound and video drivers. If you were developing for a C-64, that was one machine and one setup. Delivering a bug-free experience was a piece of cake. That's not how it is today.
 
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To be compared with a game like Mass Effect two that took a bit less than 30 hours for a first completion. Subsequent completions were achieved in around 17 hours each time.
A bit offtopic…
If you finished ME1 in 17 hours, you missed resources for ME2 which is not that bad, but you also missed war assets for ME3 which *is* bad.
This doesn't mean the game or it's sequels are broken, in fact it's IMO a great way to persuade players into exploration, not just run through the main story and ignore sidecontent.

And to not be completely offtopic…
Bethesda is into ESO and will be into ESO for months. They need to keep making fuss about that walking simulator because it's not attracting billions of players like they hoped it will.
Till they realize Morrowind fans are not really interested into that stuff, that the market got showered by good and great singleplayer RPGs this year unlike the year when they released Skyrim, we won't see any official word on FO4. Or on Dishonored 2.

I can only speculate based on the official store that FO4 will include vault 77. You can't buy vault77 apparel any more, it's completely sold out. But it was there, like this one:
http://www.videogameauctions.com/gr...fficial-bethesda-hooded-sweatshirt-no-puppet/
 
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If you were developing for a C-64, that was one machine and one setup. Delivering a bug-free experience was a piece of cake. That's not how it is today.

I wouldn't call it a piece of cake, but it was possible to intimately know the hardware and its quirks, going so far as to work around or exploit bugs in the C64 itself. Today's hardware is much more complex and, as you said, much more diverse.

This is one area where consoles may have an advantage over PC. ;)
 
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This is one are where consoles may have an advantage over PC. ;)
I'll agree on this 100%.
Since it's so simple and inferior hardware, you need no creativity to code on consoles. No need for coding talent = low cost on human resources as 5 year old kid and 99 year old granny can make "games" on consoles = CEOs bless consolegames.

Don't get me wrong please. It's still far better than "no talent needed to code" cow clickers and bejeweled clones on facebook.
 
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I don't really see a problem. But then, I'm a developer, so I'm attuned to reality. Complex software will have some bugs no matter how much its tested.

A day one patch is surely a lot better than having to wait days into release for a patch and at least with everything online and mostly tied into automatic patching (unless you're some kind of anal barbarian who refuses to live in the present) it's really not that big of a deal.

Consoles have gotten sloppier too now that they can patch and are just weak PCs with full online capabilities these days. When game cartridges and/or media were locked down at release they tended to put out more solid games - but also far less complex and content filled games.

There's an easy solution here. If you want the complex games but are scared of encountering bugs then wait a few weeks/months (depending on the developer) after release, since again, nobody is going to release anything bug free and no how matter how much you test you won't find some bugs that are only found once you have thousands/hundreds of thousands of people messing with your code.

IMO it's pretty rare for any decent quality game to have truly game breaking bugs that affect all players. It'll happen once in a while...and it's a video game...not the end of the world.
 
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We get buggy releases because some players can't wait to get their hands on new games, and corporate exec. types are greedy. That isn't going to change any time soon. But we can train them to properly patch games by delaying our purchases en masse.
 
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...
Critics are there to warn people on bugs. I still can't understand no critic who praised Skyrim didn't at least mention some cloning dude. Even if someone is blind to bugs, that one can't possibly be missed to notice.

What was that?

Pibbur who can't remember a day when he saw anything like cloning, but then again there's a lot of things pibbur doesn't remember.
 
This is a silly article, speculating and worrying about something that may never come to pass. A waste of electrons.
 
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The issue of buggy-ness in RPGs isn't limited to their massive complexity. The target consumer also has a huge array of different OS variations, video cards, and sound and video drivers... .

Other pieces of software as well. I run WindowsBlinds on my machine (because I like different styles on my desktop). Some games (I think Oblivion was one of them) may crash because of it. Nothing that can't be configured away, but I always look for compatibility issues with WB whenever a new game misbehaves.

I also remember when Oblivion came out, a colleague of mine experienced severely distorted graphics, Turned out that there was remains of earlier NVidia drivers on his rig, carefully removing those got rid of the problem.

pibbur who still likes WindowsBlinds and other Stardock things
 
Another thing you bone-headed, narrow-minded sourpusses ;) might not have considered, is that for a majority of game developers, every new game is still a gamble. And so money comes into play, since nobody wants to lose on his multi-million dollar investment and *gasp* actually make money off of their 3-year project. Thus these things have to be taken into consideration, because we don't all live in magic la-la land where things are free and every game is bug-free and perfect without any trace of controller-focused design and endless respawns. :D ;) :p
 
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IMO it's pretty rare for any decent quality game to have truly game breaking bugs that affect all players. It'll happen once in a while…and it's a video game…not the end of the world.

This!! (assuming "This" means that I agree).

pibbur who quite often doesn't notice bugs others complain about, but also realizes this may say more about his (lack of?) attention to things.
 
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