Actually, video games aren't much more pricey than they were when you didn't have a true price to look out for. Many games were actually much more overpriced in some cases. Just look up how much the Sega Genesis game Phantasy Star IV was when it was first released. Pricing didn't have much of a structure back when games could cost 100 bucks just for the normal version of the game. $60 is pricey, but it also isn't going to mean your allowance or paycheck is gone over one game. There's also titles that are priced under $60 new known as budget titles.

I know this.


My point is that, you should make every attempt possible to make a game GOOD or NOT buggy before you even think about charging 60$ for it.


Dead Island was a perfect example. They charged you 60$ for the game, and the Saving didn't work. They 'accidentally' left in Noclip mode for PC users, and the whole game was generally buggy.

At that time, Dead Island should've EITHER still been in development, OR cost 30$ less than what it was.


There is so much proof in my games cabinet to go on about how there are 60$ games that should be worth 30-45$.

Good points. I definitely agree that Skyrim is too streamlined and shallow in a lot of places. What really annoyed me about Skyrim was the utter lack of importance surrounding choices. No way to finish a quest in various way, speech skill utterly useless, what you mentioned about the races too.

I feel most (all) movie licensed games should be $15-$20.


That is why I say Skyrim is Beth's Dragon Age II.

Look at all the cutting, streamlining, etc that Dragon Age II did.

Now look at how, with Skyrim, things as simple as choosing whether to wear Light or Heavy Armor has no real significance to it. While I know Heavy Armor could be weightless in other games, that doesn't mean that said trend should continue. I want there to be a difference between Warrior A and Warrior B and Skyrim doesn't reflect that.

TES can keep you hooked 750+ hours easy. When one is hard to play after 500, theres a serious issue. It's about precedent man! PRECEDENT!

Developers don't "design" the game. They share their input, but they are not the ones who make the final call in what goes in and what comes out. They can only provide estimates on particular pieces of functionality and the business uses those estimates when performing cost/benefit anolysis. Most developers try to get in every bell and whistle but it's usually the business that decides to pull the plug on some ideas because it either doesn't fit the proposed budget or it will break the deadline. I've worked with spectacular QA anolysts throughout my career. Some that I consider invaluable and irreplaceable because of their knowledge of their industry. But, at the same time, what makes them invaluable is their understanding and sense of how they fit into the SDLC. The fact is, opinions are like @ssholes, everyone's got one. A good QA anolyst can differentiate between a personal preference and a "must have" in terms of the overall goal of meeting a deadline within the budget (or without completely blowing the budget out of the water). Bad QA anolysts are ones that think they are there to be critics and not to test a finished product.

Whether a QA anolyst thinks that the application could be better to suit their own needs is irrelevant. Like I said, by the time QA gets to see the product at all, the rest of the SDLC has been completed in almost all methodologies. In some cases, QA anolysts aren't even staffed until the product is already in the development phase (which occurs after design has been signed off and finalized barring technical difficulties). So, if you're going to get feelings about what I said, I hope what I've just explained fills the gaps. QA is obviously important to any SDLC, but their role is to help shake out the bugs in a product that is in development (design complete) or a completed product. They have no say at all in what the product should look like. That's not a slight on QA, that's their role. To change it would require a complete revision in methodologies that exist today (ones that are already proven) and most QA anolysts don't know anything about the particular industry they're in... they just know QA. So, including them on design would be a total inefficiency and would bog down a product (you'd never see a game on the shelves... or any software product for that matter). That is the fundamentals of SDLC.

If you want to complain about the bugs in the Skyrim base or patch packages, then the most logical place to point fingers is QA! They failed to discover the bugs in their alotted test phase, or they did and didn't report them, or they did report them and business decided that they weren't showstoppers. That goes back to the idea that QA can be offshored (an idea I disagree with) to inexperienced QA testers and anolysts in India. This has caused me thousands of headaches myself.

Considering the point of most movie licensed games, it'd make sense to price them at a price that they should be at. Even good ones are promotional objects, so a lower price would shut the kids screaming for the game up.

Thank you for the sarcasm.

If you want to argue on principle, i'm ALL ears, because I can give you a few examples.



You shouldn't pay for an unfinished game. Why are there patches for games? Because the developers want to release it on a 'set' date. WHY DOES IT NEED TO BE A 'SET' DATE?! You have all the time in the damn world to develop a good game.

So in reality, they are charging you for an unfinished game, so they can use 'patches' as an excuse to clog more memory into your PC/Console, and then 'claim' it had been finished, when it wasn't.

I know how gaming developers work. I'm not stupid like the rest of the world that 'thinks' the games were just 'slightly' buggy.


So there. I have countered your sarcasm with sensical logic.



EDIT: Oh, on top of all of this, let me just clarify something with you. When someone says a game is BUGGY, what does that generally mean? It means there's a part of the game THAT ISN'T FINISHED.

When development is faced with a massive project like, presumably, Skyrim was, they depend on QA to catch the bugs before the product rolls out to production. If there are bugs in the application in runtime, QA dropped the ball.

You say the MQ is not thrown in your face like oblivions was? Considering my adventure opens up with a dragon attack at my execution, and the fact that dragons attack me every where, even in towns(where they some times kill NPC's), Id say stoping them is a pretty big deal, even bigger than Oblivion. At least in oblivion, the gates didnt open up untill I want to kavatch.Sure, it felt a little wierd knowing you were holding on to the amulet of an assassinated emporor, and that some bad things might happen if you dont act, but its much easier to ignore that then it is dragon attacks every where.

Not that this is a bad thing per say. While the dialog is stale/short throughout the MQ, I quite like it. But, It still(IMO at least!) is harder to avoid than oblivions was.

If you do not agree with the current design of Skyrim, and you are sure you have figured out what's wrong with the game and 'what not to do', why are you still here?
I've also played games simply to figure out what does and doesn't work in them, but I can tell you form a design perspective it doesn't pay to get all worked up about someone else's project as if it were your own project. Whether or not you can influence any of the guys with the money who get to say what goes, getting worked up about it and spending a lot of time trying to convince people will only end up in frustration and stress for you. Wouldn't it be better to put your energy and what knowledge you've gained into your own projects? Skyrim is a successful game. Can you see the double edged sword in that statement? The results of too much one sided criticism of Skyrim:
M'aiq would think you are an idiot.

That is where I fit in, how I learned, and why I decided to ultimately become a designer rather than the 2D/3D artist I was originally going for. I know there's a huge difference between development and QA (as a designer my job is already done before half of the other dev team even gets started) but QA is where I started to learn, thus why I give it so much credit.


Because I'm a designer, I talk game mechanics and I still like Skyrim. I still want to have fun playing it. I talk and discuss the games I like, even if I "hate" 90% of said game, doesn't mean I still don't like it. It's a personal preference kind of thing; do I dislike Skyrim as it is now? Yeah. Do I dislike TES? No. So I come here to talk and offer ideas that might, if implemented, make Skyrim more enjoyable in the future for me, or perhaps make the next TES game more enjoyable than Skyrim is.

Just because I may not like part, most or all of the game doesn't mean I can't sit down and talk shop. I've done it with Halo, done it with Call of Duty, Street Fighter, whathaveyou. Again, I can talk shop for hours about mechanics because ultimately, mechanics are what I care about the most.

As far as "why talk about other people's work," well that's simple; eventually I'm going to have to look for influences and compare A to B. If I don't know what A is doing, has done right or wrong, I won't be best informed when I try to make B. If I want to make a medieval fantasy RPG I should be looking at D&D, Dragon Age, Final Fantasy (some of them) and TES so I can compare and contrast what works and what doesn't so I can then judge how I want to shape my own game.

You know, first of all I think Eric was agreeing with you, and not being sarcastic but I guess I could be mistaken. You opined that you shouldn't release a video game for $60 which is broken or in heavy need of patching, and Eric basically replied that he thought the game you were referring to should have only been released for 15-20 dollars, essentially agreeing that the value of the game is less than the 60 dollars, thus in agreement with you. But I guess I could be mistaken.

Secondly, the reason games are released with bugs or in need of patching is because the developers don't necessarily set the release date. Its the publisher - the corporate suits and accountants who are up there scheming, and making deadlines. The game has to be released sometime, afterall, and some games would stay in development almost indefinitely if there was nothing making them aim at a concrete release date. Plus there's also the issue of money. Let's say you're a game developer with 1 million dollars in the bank, and your production costs are $50,000 per month. At the absolute latest, you have to release the game after twenty months, or you go out of business and the game doesn't finish. I know of one developer who actually released a game on Steam for 40 bucks that was literally unplayable, and didn't say anything about its viability until the week after it was released. Turns out the company was broke and needed the influx of revenue to finish the game at all, so they admitted to 'fooling' everyone into paying for it early (Sword of the Stars II) .

I was actually agreeing with him.

Many of the problems in Skyrim (and games in general these days), both bugs and questionable/flawed design choices, make it all the way through this system way too often for me to have much faith in it anymore. Unless it is Valve or Blizzard, companies who are obviously taking more time and doing things the truly right way, when it comes to software development and release. Just getting tired of unfinished, buggy, 'we got this holiday deadline and maybe we'll fix it up later' games. You can't blame it all on QA, when so many of the faults and bugs were obvious to any 6 year old once the game hit the shelves- QA couldn't have 'missed' them. It was just shoved out the door to hit the suit's deadline, no question about that. And streamlining. And console porting. And chopping out the tried and true to make it easier on themselves. I really wish Blizzard or Valve would just buy up these other companies and teach 'em how to do it right.

It's hard to figure out what we are paying for. We used to own our games, in the same sense that we own our books--sure they have copyrights, but we can sell them second hand and pass them on to friends, as long as it is the original and not a copy. Now, according to the Eula, I don't see that we own it, or even have any rights regarding it at all. I figure for what we legally get, it should be free.

I think the reason for all the +100 hrs and still complaining is very simple: Skyrim is the only game in town. If you want anything similar, you gotta go back 10 years. That's their golden age Morrowind. There is nothing in between the two that comes close to a Morrowind for 2012 and there might not be anything coming for a long, long time. Fallout 3 and FNV are not in the same genre as Skyrim - completely different setting but similar game mechanics.

As for the bad writing, there is so much cherry picking going on base on rose-tinted glasses, its not even funny. If you can write better, go ahead and create a mod for all to see. However, I doubt we will see anything like that.

Rose-tinted glasses? No, no nothing rose-tinted about it. Morrowind definitely had better writing than Skyrim. And I think most people could write better.

yep.

any 'rose-tinted glasses' rationale gets an immediate dismissal, for me.

Well, second hand PS2 and earlier games have no problems since the whole second hand thing was a different thing at the time. Gamestop actually had true competitors like Gamecrazy and EB games. There was more choice to where you could get the games second hand. Before used games even became a market, people would give their friends a game or people would trade games with eachother much like the old days of metal where tape trading would occur and the band might even do some tape trading of their own, which would allow bands from, say, Norway to gain a fanbase in other countries.

Sadly, I'd bet most of the rage publishers have towards second hand game sells has to do with the fact that Gamestop doesn't really have any competitors. The only thing they got that could be called barely competitors is mom and pop type game stores that have a better consumer to seller relationship(I buy most of my games second hand from such a shop, and have forged a friendship with the owners. This store is run by a family, so sometimes the mother will be the person at the counter.) and those side-parts of rental services and the like that might do used game sales. Gamestop is now a monopoly and this means they have too much control over one market. If this wasn't the case, there probably would be less spitting contests over whether used games are evil or not.

Now Gamefly... That is what should be having more worry over because it doesn't seem to care if you replace their working copy of a game with a broken one. The no late fees thing means people will not ever mail the game back. If any of my very, very unprofessional market observations and theories are wrong, inform me. I may not work in any market, but I do like to observe things.

Wait... what?

How did I not catch this?

I was wrong about Diablo, when I assumed the same thing.

I have come to accept that I will never understand this commonly mentioned sentiment; and I'm dismayed that Bethesda seems to take it to heart. When I look back on the entire TES franchise, for the most part I prefer them more the farther back you go...(No comment on Skyrim just yet, I've only 5 hours in that game).

*Oblivion was my first Bethesda title.


That's a disturbing spoilerific detail. Off hand I'd say it destroys the world setting credibility if you can find no evidence of craftsmanship better than your own.

I play RPG's for the story and the game mechanics (combat and dialog potential). The voice work and art style always take a back seat to these; they just do. I do tend to appreciate better art and audio though... but I don't hold that it trumps gameplay; and don't appreciate it if it actually hinders gameplay due to engine deficiency.

The real trend as I see it is an industry wide change-over to simulation as gameplay.

And I'd rather have a living, immersive world that allows me to create my own stories...

Skyrim achieved exactly what makes a good RPG a good RPG.

Yeah, you know what story I can't create?


Skyrim did not achieve exactly what makes a good RPG a good RPG. It has more limitations on it than New Vegas and arguably every TES game before it.

not only are the character-based rpg elements practically nonexistent, but, actual in-game mechanics and functionality trump mindplay 100% of the time.

skyrim is closer to a roleplaying sim than a rpg.