I'm beginning to lose patience now, is a games developer going to actually release a finished product for once. If you guys think its just crysis then go over and check out the homefront forums, also black ops had the exact same problems on release.

So whats going on? Is it simply that standards are slipping or is there actually something thats causing all these problems with recent games?

Answers on a postcard guys because i have no idea and to be honest I've pretty much lost faith in games developers and there publishing companies. I think maybe its time that that some 3rd party standards agency stepped in as i buy these games for pleasure and enjoyment not to waste my money on untested beta's

I'm beginning to lose patience now, is a games developer going to actually release a finished product for once. If you guys think its just crysis then go over and check out the homefront forums, also black ops had the exact same problems on release.

So whats going on? Is it simply that standards are slipping or is there actually something thats causing all these problems with recent games?

Answers on a postcard guys because i have no idea and to be honest I've pretty much lost faith in games developers and there publishing companies. I think maybe its time that that some 3rd party standards agency stepped in as i buy these games for pleasure and enjoyment not to waste my money on untested beta's


Agreed peace

I'm beginning to lose patience now, is a games developer going to actually release a finished product for once. If you guys think its just crysis then go over and check out the homefront forums, also black ops had the exact same problems on release.

So whats going on? Is it simply that standards are slipping or is there actually something thats causing all these problems with recent games?

Answers on a postcard guys because i have no idea and to be honest I've pretty much lost faith in games developers and there publishing companies. I think maybe its time that that some 3rd party standards agency stepped in as i buy these games for pleasure and enjoyment not to waste my money on untested beta's

Amen.

The list for unfinished games at release is huge. MAG, socom confrontation took a year just to get what was in the manual.

brink might be a complete game they just said it is going to get released a week early.

think last game i got that was complete was red dead redemption.

I believe the main reason is pressure from the publishers like EA/Activision to get a game released. They are funding the game after all. Developers frequently complain of not having enough time.

However if this pressure wasn't there you may well get alot more games like GT5, you wait and wait and wait and what you end up getting can never live up to the expectation of the wait.

Ok,here's a total guess at how this whole thing works.

Developers shop a game idea to publishers.Publishers agree to terms with devs and work on said game begins.Publisher fronts money to devs to pay salaries to everyone that works on the game because no one is going to work for free.

A release date was set probably early on which is more than likely a date that both the publisher and the developer decided upon.

99.9% of the time,the game isn't finished by the time the original drop dead date,so a game is either delayed or released unfinished,which will be followed up by patches.

I believe that the reason that the games are always released unfinished is because the publisher starts to put the heat on the developer because they need to start recouping the money that they fronted.So in essence,it's all about money and getting payed as quickly as possible.

But this is all just a theory from an outsider looking in.

I'm beginning to lose patience now, is a games developer going to actually release a finished product for once. If you guys think its just crysis then go over and check out the homefront forums, also black ops had the exact same problems on release.

So whats going on? Is it simply that standards are slipping or is there actually something thats causing all these problems with recent games?

Answers on a postcard guys because i have no idea and to be honest I've pretty much lost faith in games developers and there publishing companies. I think maybe its time that that some 3rd party standards agency stepped in as i buy these games for pleasure and enjoyment not to waste my money on untested beta's
killzone 3 also

Yup , online games especially fps suffer badly with this , and others have summed it up, they get pressured by publishers to get it out, so they can avoid clashes with other big titles of their own and other companies, they can bring in cash and meet predictions and keep shareholders happy and to simply stop the costs of making game incteasing further etc. With kz3 the chances are the pressure was not related to above reasons, but more to front it's push for 3d and move, for which it had no real champion.kz3 became the champion.
The situation svcks, but not gonna change and will get worse overall I'm guessing .
Netcode is complex and unpredictable , and I'm guessing unless u have vast experience in making huge online franchises, then they have no idea of how it's going to perform until it's out there and how it performs with few thousand is totally different to hundreds of thousands too.

So after a beta is released and problems are found, would you guys actually mind waiting a month or two for the problems to be resolved?. I know i wouldn't and i think this should be made standard practice. I believe that we should all have a say in this somewhere because take a box office film release for example. The studio lend then producers money and give them a set time to complete the film, they then have something called a wavering period which gives them an extra month above the contract to complete things such as editing. Noone would go to the cinema to watch an uncompleted film and if they did word of mouth would spread not enough people would go and the studio would lose a ton of money.

I think this should be the same for games but our problem being that because of the copy right protection act we cannot return a game anymore and there is no clause that allows us to return a product for being uncompleted. Well i think its time this is changed because im sick of spending alot of money to pay the publishers when they have forced an early release of what is basically just a beta.

Im going to look into consumer law and see if there is some sort of government body that can apply rules to future releases and prevent greedy publishers from doing this. If games like red dead,mw2 and battlefield can work perfectly out of the box, then theres no excuse.

So after a beta is released and problems are found, would you guys actually mind waiting a month or two for the problems to be resolved?. I know i wouldn't and i think this should be made standard practice. I believe that we should all have a say in this somewhere because take a box office film release for example. The studio lend then producers money and give them a set time to complete the film, they then have something called a wavering period which gives them an extra month above the contract to complete things such as editing. Noone would go to the cinema to watch an uncompleted film and if they did word of mouth would spread not enough people would go and the studio would lose a ton of money.

I think this should be the same for games but our problem being that because of the copy right protection act we cannot return a game anymore and there is no clause that allows us to return a product for being uncompleted. Well i think its time this is changed because im sick of spending alot of money to pay the publishers when they have forced an early release of what is basically just a beta.

Im going to look into consumer law and see if there is some sort of government body that can apply rules to future releases and prevent greedy publishers from doing this. If games like red dead,mw2 and battlefield can work perfectly out of the box, then theres no excuse.

Just wont happen, as its not purely case of them finding them problems and fixing them before release. As i said in my post, u need to take into account that publishers have other titles being released, and other big publishers releasing competing titles, which they want to avoid competing with, plus quarterly predictions to meet, and shareholders to please etc.

They want that game out and fast as they want to be able to avoid other titles of their own not making cash due to crysis 2, losing money to other competing titles, as well as avoiding not meeting their predictions and shares dropping in value etc.

crysis 2 was already held back a few months as well.

regarding those games u mentioned, none of them worked perfectly out the box, at least not for everybody anyway, which seems to be the standard thing with online games. Some have no problems, whilst others get nothing but issues with it. Usually they eventually sort it out, but it takes them ages. Bc2 had dedcated servers which helped of course.

Regarding law, id imagine these companies got their backsides covered pretty good. British cod fans tried to take activision to court regarding black ops being substandard and unfinished, but dont think they got anywhere, even with the support of some politicians. It just faded away.

well i guess at the end of the day we just have to stand together as consumers and not buy these products. Its hard to tell though when you get reviewing companies like ign that are paid to say good things about games, I wish there was just an honest reviewing company that would say look like game has great potential but its full of glitches and bugs so dont buy it until its fixed.

What im also seeing alot of is these new game codes that are going to completely shut down the second hand game market, well especially for online gamers anyway

However if this pressure wasn't there you may well get alot more games like GT5, you wait and wait and wait and what you end up getting can never live up to the expectation of the wait.

Not to mention the release of GT5 was still followed by an avalanche of patches.

I think part of the problem is just that with the complexity of games these days, nothing is ever really going to work perfectly at release. Even back in the late 80s/early 90s games like Thunderforce IV suffered from framerate drops and other graphical glitches, and those seem like games you could run on a calculator compared to something like C2. It's really more of a question of where you draw the line, and at some point, a developer has to decide they've polished a game as much as they're going to before it's released.

That's no excuse though, it's just what's led to the problem, that and the fact that because it's possible to distribute patches online. And besides, if you look at something like the God of War series, it's clear that it's possible and financially viable to do proper beta testing and release games that are tweaked to near-perfection and run well.

And I'm usually not one of the people who are always foaming at the mouth about how bad and evil EA is, but they are notorious for forcing their studios to push games out of the gate before they're finished, and as much as I love Crysis 2 (and I love it far more than any healthy human being should love a piece of software), it's clear that there are problems with it that should have been fixed before release. And not just in the online.