Games these days...

Over the years, computers are having much more powerful components, and graphical improvement has also seen a jump. Games nowadays are getting more realistic, while also having much improve in gameplay. But is the economy affecting game production? I feel games these days are rushed out the door to appeal to consumers. Games poorly optimized, filled with bugs and glitches can be seen. Are companies rushing out unfinished games to get our money or games are becoming much harder to program, so their test team might not be able to catch all the bugs? Your opinion??

 

Games are getting more complex to make, which requires more people to make them, which requires more funding to make, which results in games requiring large budgets and teams. Games are rushed out because they don't pay whilst they are in development...(even bad games can make a mint if they are marketed well). The invention of patches, and the expectation of patches is another way publishers get away with releasing products quickly.

Seriously, is there a better beta tester, than the end-user?

 

The latter is undeniably true. Software is so incredibly complex these days that bugs are inevitable. Anyone who has ever worked on software development knows that you don't strive for zero bugs, you strive for a minimum of software-breaking bugs (i.e. the bugs that cause major parts of a program, or the entire program itself, to not work) and other issues can be fixed later.

As much as Blizzard is given credit for only releasing games "when it's done," software is never truly done. There's always more bugs to fix. What you do is optimize the balance between the number of bugs, your budget, and your release schedule. There comes a point at which extending QA gives diminishing returns on software quality, and that's when you release your product. It just so happens that Blizzard is better at this than most game companies (the fact that their games are fun doesn't hurt either ).

Most people have heard of the saying, "cheaper, better, sooner...pick any two." That applies to software development as well.

 

Bug's have always been around, and I've seen people complaining about the same thing for years now. Don't worry there have been many worse games out than ones these days. I remember a certain game that REQUIRED a patch in order for it to run. lol....I won't mention the name but it was a bit back.

 

Good point WuJen, When I bought the original "Rainbow Six" back in the day, it was incompatible with my CPU(!).

I emailed Red Storm and a tech guy emailed me a special patch for the issue (20mb through dial-up!)

I also remember all the hassles I used to have back in the day where you had to set up all the sound card settings manually for each game (IRQ etc). I'd say that about 20% of games I played had either no music or no sound (or both) because my sound card wasn't quite a perfect match.

Most of the time games wouldn't start first go (until you messed around with the graphics/sound settings) and if they didn't work the usually booted you back into DOS, or hung the system!

Ah good times...