Games being released that were not ready in 2014

dbit

Where in the name of jesus are the trading standards people in the year of 2014 ? In my eyes software houses in particularly on the XB1 platform ( I dont own any other console so cant speak for PS) Have been allowed get away with murder plenty of titles one year after launch are still broken and some of the titles i bought pre xmas again are still broken . We are then offered free add-ons or refunds ( Only if digitally downloaded/purchased).

How can the industry be allowed abuse the public in this way and get away with it?? I mean if i bought a car and was told weeeeeell , it only has three wheels , or you can only drive it on Sundays for two hours ...... Bull.

Titles currently broken :-

Batlle field - commonly known as broken Filed. ( Last update totally screwed the pooch)

Halo Master Chief - Havent a baldy why this was even allowed to be released 343 keep posting videos and apologies and promises of free stuff .

Destiny - This little baby at least seems to have more active corrections taking place daily , But aprty chats and internal nat complaints from the game itself are prevalent even though dash reports nat is 5 x 5.

Is it just me or is the console industry just dropped to a new low , Im seriously considering binning the console and staying on pc for good.

MOD NOTE:

As this issue affects more than just one platform, I'm moving this to the main Games forum. Thread title will be changed to reflect the more generic topic.

CatInABox

Techniques07

Plenty of the same games are broken on pc also. Its best not to buy game from the usual suspects (looking at you EA and Ubisoft) until you know they've been fixed to a point that they are playable. This is why I don't pre order games anymore as you don't know what kind of product you'll get. It's all about getting games out asap to bring in the money and they don't care if they are broken or not, they know people will still buy their crap.

dbit

Techniques07 wrote: »

Plenty of the same games are broken on pc also. Its best not to buy game from the usual suspects (looking at you EA and Ubisoft) until you know they've been fixed to a point that they are playable. This is why I don't pre order games anymore as you don't know what kind of product you'll get. It's all about getting games out asap to bring in the money and they don't care if they are broken or not, they know people will still buy their crap.

An utter disgrace that they are allowed to do it unregulated. I am in agreement no more pre purchasing of any software titles . This would have to happen from every user on the planet . Not going to happen anytime soon Seems Fanboy madness has molded this problem int he first place.

Grand theft Auto again another title that had ample development time ( I dont own it ) But all the buds online are bitching over that one too.

Akrasia

I can see a day when the big game studios jump onto early access / paid alphas models for releasing their big games. They release a mostly working game at a discount to early adopters who then support them to add in the final features and patches to get the game finished

Kerbal Space program would have been a total flop if it was released as a final game because it was unfinished and buggy, but by calling it a paid alpha, they have kept the community alive and happy for years while they continually make the game better and take advantage of free developed community mods and add them into the full game.

If BF4 had a 6 month Paid alpha program, the players couldn't complain when the games crashed because it's still in beta/alpha, but when the game was finally released, it should be working 99.9%

There would be no shortage of people who would be happy to play and test the game as long as there was support from the developer and their suggestions for improvements and tweaks were listened to.

evolutionqy7

Code masters are very good at this. Especially their Grid games...Grid Autosport. Corrupted save file...lost all my online progress cars and etc...have never provided a fix, had to delete save game and start again...This also happens to 4 other people I know. Never mind all the people world wide.

dbit

There needs to be some sort of policing of this as they are taking the piss 2014 the year of non working titles. Didint see this as much on xb360 or on pc until roughly 2014 . I cannot understand how they are allowed get away with it , its like asking for delivered goods from tesco , paying in full and only receiving half your shopping ? and no one seems to give a ****.

maximoose

Definitely wasn't limited to XB1, the games you listed (bar MCC obviously) had problems on all platforms.

MCC was a disaster, I'm guessing Microsoft just wanted it out and there was no budging on the release date, so they released an incredibly buggy mess and are still trying to tidy it up.

PS4 had it's own problems with exclusives too with Little Big Planet and Drive Club being pretty broken on release.

Assassin's Creed Unity another big stinking mess.

Bad year all round really.

Ctrl Alt Delete

dbit wrote: »

Titles currently broken :-

Batlle field - commonly known as broken Filed. ( Last update totally screwed the pooch)

That game was fixed (out of beta IMO) only about 2 months and is working fine now (apart from servers getting hammered traffic wise and not being restarting as part of the usual maintenance cycle at xmas) which lead to some horrible games the last week or so.

Though it is an absolute joke that BF4 limped on in such a sorry state for such a long time I take solace in the fact that DICE / EA damaged that franchise to the extent that BF: Hardline is looking like a gigantic flop already.

Thats were the comeuppance for ****ty development comes from IMO

CatInABox

MOD NOTE:

As this issue affects more than just one platform, I'm moving this to the main Games forum. Thread title will be changed to reflect the more generic topic.

CatInABox

ScumLord

dbit wrote: »

Where in the name of jesus are the trading standards people in the year of 2014 ? In my eyes software houses in particularly on the XB1 platform ( I dont own any other console so cant speak for PS) Have been allowed get away with murder plenty of titles one year after launch are still broken and some of the titles i bought pre xmas again are still broken . We are then offered free add-ons or refunds ( Only if digitally downloaded/purchased).

I think people are over reacting a tad to games coming out with bugs. Modern games are huge and complex things, that there are bugs across millions of users isn't surprising really. The fact people equate an NPC that pops up in the wrong place to murder shows it's an overreaction.

If people were a bit more relaxed about their stance on games and how quickly they want to play them then they'd realise this is a minor inconvenience and not the global conspiracy of evil that people are making it out to be.


Stop pre ordering games, wait until the first patch comes out before buying, at least wait for the reviews to come out.

I've seen people going ape about Assetto Corsas development, when developers met their goals people expected more, any delay was met with an angry mob, any bug was met with cries of why didn't you delay.

**** happens, delays happen, bugs happen. It's just a fact of life.

dbit

ScumLord wrote: »

I think people are over reacting a tad to games coming out with bugs. Modern games are huge and complex things, that there are bugs across millions of users isn't surprising really. The fact people equate an NPC that pops up in the wrong place to murder shows it's an overreaction.

If people were a bit more relaxed about their stance on games and how quickly they want to play them then they'd realise this is a minor inconvenience and not the global conspiracy of evil that people are making it out to be.


Stop pre ordering games, wait until the first patch comes out before buying, at least wait for the reviews to come out.

I've seen people going ape about Assetto Corsas development, when developers met their goals people expected more, any delay was met with an angry mob, any bug was met with cries of why didn't you delay.

**** happens, delays happen, bugs happen. It's just a fact of life.

I agree to a certain point , It seems obvious that QA has been tossed out the window . Developers telling the software company owners "we are not ready to ship" seems is never taken into account. The whole entire year saw games take up to 6 months after launch and even then they still did not run correctly. Alpha and Beta is where this stuff is supposed to be worked out, and I like many others take part in most of those. You would imagine that after beta and stress testing completes against severs that most of the gothca's would have been caught . Im just saying that gamers and the market share they provide should be entitled to a better quality of service as in some cases its non existent. Where do gamers have to turn once stiffed ?

dbit

70 euros for Halo Master Chief ( At least the halo 5 multiplayer beta is running well, for now ........) and the 100 advertised maps simply do not work in match making 343 have come out and promised free ODST to all who where let down by this massive cock up. It still does not work. Co-op campaign works but thats it .

This is only one title of a torrent of ****ty releases that to be fair to gamers should not have been released . Starwars battle front has seen multiple push backs and this is the way it should be . Who is regulating this ? and how can the software houses be held accountable for this behavior ?

Our money is hard earned they should earn theirs too.

dbit

I recently bought Elite Dangerous and was trying to get support for a 300KBs slow download - took 12 hours for a 5 gig download , didnt get one single ticket response. So I opened up the logs and noticed the server i was pulling from - trace routed and found its nested in Amazon AWS . I could only presume being a kickstarter based game, that the high traffic was an issue for them over Xmas - and now its slowed to a trickle to lower pipe requirements at hosting side. This title is working very well from official launch and they do not have the muster of the larger companies . Its about respecting your customer and Vendors seem to think now that we are not important nor do we deserve a good quality of service.

Sent from alpha centauri .

Generic Dreadhead

Destiny was probably ready in 2013 but then...... Activision happened :P

Evil Within minus the day 1 patch is a freaking mess.

Akrasia

Testing software is a resource heavy and hugely time consuming task, the more complex the software, the more things that there are to go wrong. A game developer (even EA) can not hire tens of thousands of play testers to locate and discover every bug, many of which are only apparent under specific environmental conditions

The compexity of modern AAA titles mean that there will always be issues on launch. Most games have open betas for a week or two before launch, but for commercial reasons, they don't test all the features of the full game in the Beta and the gap between the close of the beta and the release of the full game (which includes final fixes features and optimisations for the retail game) means there will almost certainly be issues introduced with the code changes which haven't had the benefit of the Beta test

The best we can hope for is that the game is released in a playable condition without game breaking issues, and the developer has resources available to quickly resolve issues after the launch.

Single player games should be much easier to test because most of the events are scripted and there aren't so many unpredictable variables, but the only way to properly test a multiplayer game is to get people playing it and logging issues as they are encountered.

Kiith

ScumLord wrote: »

Stop pre ordering games, wait until the first patch comes out before buying, at least wait for the reviews to come out.

This pretty much sums it up. If people constantly pre-order and buy games, even when they are in an absolutely awful state, publishers will keep releasing them. It's one thing to buy a game in early access, as you know it'll be a mess, but full releases should work as intended.

A bigger worry for me is that more publishers will keep review embargoes up till a few days/weeks after a game is released, to hide just how bad things are. Ubisoft seem to be worst for this (and everything else) at the moment.

dbit

I work in a SDDC corporation , We target corporate markets/customers and if we did anything like that we would be out of business . Im not saying that its possible to produce a bug free piece of software . But if it says on the tin i can do something id expect that i can at least do that when its launched.

I am well versed in the rigors of testing, QA, Bug analysis and final hand off for products, its just that the entertainment sector seems to be not regulated by anyone , anywhere ?

I need water to live , but i dont see any satisfaction meters around the place.

TerrorFirmer

I know Battlefield 4 had seriously problems, but I've been playing since it came out and to be honest, I found it tolerable, never had the serious issues others seemed to.

Halo: Master Chief Collection is the worst of 2014 in my opinion. What should have been the best video game package in recent years was a titanic mess that's turned a load of people off Halo as a franchise. I bought the Xb1 for the game - and I know a lot of people would have done the same - and the console sits unused since November for the most part, save those days I fire up MCC wondering if its fixed before inevitably discovering not.

Ctrl Alt Delete

dbit wrote: »

This is only one title of a torrent of ****ty releases that to be fair to gamers should not have been released . Starwars battle front has seen multiple push backs and this is the way it should be . Who is regulating this ? and how can the software houses be held accountable for this behavior ?

Considering that it's DICE and EA behind Battlefront I wouldn't be too optimistic they are pushing it back because of problems in the development cycle

dbit

Ctrl Alt Delete wrote: »

Considering that it's DICE and EA behind Battlefront I wouldn't be too optimistic they are pushing it back because of problems in the development cycle

Id like to think so possibly wishful thinking.

zl1whqvjs75cdy

Battlefield campaign is still knackered. If you start a campaign and then play a bit of multiplayer it wipes all your data and you have to start again. The game is out over a year and that is still happening!

dbit

TerrorFirmer wrote: »

I know Battlefield 4 had seriously problems, but I've been playing since it came out and to be honest, I found it tolerable, never had the serious issues others seemed to.

Halo: Master Chief Collection is the worst of 2014 in my opinion. What should have been the best video game package in recent years was a titanic mess that's turned a load of people off Halo as a franchise. I bought the Xb1 for the game - and I know a lot of people would have done the same - and the console sits unused since November for the most part, save those days I fire up MCC wondering if its fixed before inevitably discovering not.

Yup and i look at my xb1 and think the same thing - what a massive waste of €400 day one madness , ive only myself to blame i guess i realize that but for **** sake can they not be stopped from doing this to people.

ScumLord

dbit wrote: »

I agree to a certain point , It seems obvious that QA has been tossed out the window .

I don't think quality has gone out the window it's just that the games are so huge and available on so many different hardware devices that it's next to impossible to fully test it. No matter what product you're selling to the public, it doesn't matter how much testing you do in house, there's always going to be a few problems that don't show up until the product goes out into the wild of the public market. No matter how much money you spend, how much time you spend and how many people you throw at it, something always makes it through to the first release. I would always allow a company some bug on the first release of a product, as long as their customer service deals with the problem then that's the best that can be expected.

Developers telling the software company owners "we are not ready to ship" seems is never taken into account. The whole entire year saw games take up to 6 months after launch and even then they still did not run correctly.

Take into consideration we did have 2 new consoles on the market to introduce new problems.

Alpha and Beta is where this stuff is supposed to be worked out, and I like many others take part in most of those.

I didn't realise developers had that many betas on products as standard, and most are closed or limited to the general public.

Im just saying that gamers and the market share they provide should be entitled to a better quality of service as in some cases its non existent. Where do gamers have to turn once stiffed ?

Same place you go for any consumer issues. You raise the issue with the company you bought the game off or the manufacturer, if the game isn't as advertised and the company show no signs of resolving the issue you can raise the issue with the consumer authority.

dbit

donkeyoaty0099 wrote: »

Battlefield campaign is still knackered. If you start a campaign and then play a bit of multiplayer it wipes all your data and you have to start again. The game is out over a year and that is still happening!

Jesus i havent put it in my box for the last 6 months and cannot believe campaign is still goosed. Im not getting the new one . I Would love to see COD return to wwII and treiarch at the helm might bring me back to my console.

dbit

ScumLord wrote: »

I don't think quality has gone out the window it's just that the games are so huge and available on so many different hardware devices that it's next to impossible to fully test it. No matter what product you're selling to the public, it doesn't matter how much testing you do in house, there's always going to be a few problems that don't show up until the product goes out into the wild of the public market. No matter how much money you spend, how much time you spend and how many people you throw at it, something always makes it through to the first release. I would always allow a company some bug on the first release of a product, as long as their customer service deals with the problem then that's the best that can be expected.

Take into consideration we did have 2 new consoles on the market to introduce new problems.

I didn't realise developers had that many betas on products as standard, and most are closed or limited to the general public.

Same place you go for any consumer issues. You raise the issue with the company you bought the game off or the manufacturer, if the game isn't as advertised and the company show no signs of resolving the issue you can raise the issue with the consumer authority.

All that being said i still feel like we are being taken advantage of and that they are running wild in the woods naked with no real concept of final product and delivery , i could excuse the odd bug at launch but outright broken titles for one year or more is just not on.

ScumLord

dbit wrote: »

I work in a SDDC corporation , We target corporate markets/customers and if we did anything like that we would be out of business . Im not saying that its possible to produce a bug free piece of software . But if it says on the tin i can do something id expect that i can at least do that when its launched.

The product does tend to work for some people and not for other people and then other people have different problems.

The big difference is the scale. You might make software that thousands of people will use across a managed platform of a business network environment. These companies make software that millions of people will use across varying platforms (just think of the variety in PC hardware they have to deal with).

I'm sure your own software would come across problems that hadn't been considered that only show up days or weeks after the release because it's some rarely used feature. On the scale of these companies those problems pop up straight away because there's so many users, doing so many different things, across so many different operating systems and hardware devices.

dbit wrote: »

All that being said i still feel like we are being taken advantage of and that they are running wild in the woods naked with no real concept of final product and delivery , i could excuse the odd bug at launch but outright broken titles for one year or more is just not on.

They are trying to get as much money out of the customer base with as little effort as possible. Many companies end up with accountants in charge or go through a phase of adjustment as they go from smaller companies to larger global corporations.

It's a problem that we see in every industry these days though. We see it in films that put more effort into promoting the film than writing the script. Hardware companies try to pass of cheap hardware as good hardware by putting it into a fancy new case.

It's part of what I like about supporting independent developers through the likes of steam early access. There are new breeds of companies coming through that manage to balance excellence and passion with sound business accounting.

Stone Deaf 4evr

I can understand to a certain extent problems where servers go down or whatever, but I cannot for the life of me understand where you have problems like falling through the world, faces melting off etc in games like assassins creed.
At least PC's have the excuse that you have so many potential combinations of motherboards, drivers, etc etc that you'd expect to have to odd conflict, but consoles were supposed to offer the bonus of unified hardware to prevent this kind of thing.

dbit

Artifacting and glitches are common place but face's melting off now i gotta get me a copy to see that **** lolz. I dunno i just think the people they are trying to serve here are being walked on . Period.

dbit

Consumer watchdogs , forums , Retailers they don't seem to have any impact on the situation . None of this is new, 2014 - though put me on my ass with the amount of cocked up launches and bad QA/Beta testing. Agreed a locked in platform should not have more issues than pc versions only less and this is certainly not the case. Getting money back seems on XB1 anyway to be achievable via digitally acquired titles only.

Stone Deaf 4evr

dbit wrote: »

Artifacting and glitches are common place but face's melting off now i gotta get me a copy to see that **** lolz. I dunno i just think the people they are trying to serve here are being walked on . Period.

here ya go

dbit

Stone Deaf 4evr wrote: »

here ya go

Rotflcopter !!! haa ahaa is that not out of Mars attacks lolz.

ScumLord

Stone Deaf 4evr wrote: »

At least PC's have the excuse that you have so many potential combinations of motherboards, drivers, etc etc that you'd expect to have to odd conflict, but consoles were supposed to offer the bonus of unified hardware to prevent this kind of thing.

I'd wonder how much variation there can be across batches of consoles? I could imagine updated versions can have slightly different hardware and bios. even the same version might have had alternative chips put in for cost savings.

The problem with in house testing can also be that it tends to be very strict and specific so that it can be automated to an extent and results can be monitored. You can't test all the variables because you go over budget.


Money really is the bottom line for any company no matter what their doing. If it costs to much to do comprehensive testing it won't get done. The fact is if testing costs to much they'd be more likely to abandon the project than risk more money on it. A month of bad press is an easier pill to swallow.

dbit

FACE OFF !

dbit

ScumLord wrote: »

I'd wonder how much variation there can be across batches of consoles? I could imagine updated versions can have slightly different hardware and bios. even the same version might have had alternative chips put in for cost savings.

The problem with in house testing can also be that it tends to be very strict and specific so that it can be automated to an extent and results can be monitored. You can't test all the variables because you go over budget.


Money really is the bottom line for any company no matter what their doing. If it costs to much to do comprehensive testing it won't get done. The fact is if testing costs to much they'd be more likely to abandon the project than risk more money on it. A month of bad press is an easier pill to swallow.

True as xbox 360 had roughly 8 itterations of the main Phat mobo and then the slims had multiples as well. So nothing is as vanilla as one might initially think.

Shiminay

There's already a perfectly valid regulatory system for this. Stop pre-ordering. Don't buy any games till you've seen at least 10 different reviews for it. Then this problem goes away.

I'm not trying to over simplify, it really is the answer. Marketing Departments get half of the budget for a AAA game. That is madness when you see software teams struggling to get things done to the beat of marketing's drum. That is just madness, software is done when it's done, not when marketing says it needs to be released. All software has bugs. This is more or less unavoidable because writing software well is an art not a "by the numbers" exercise as so many non-software people think. We should expect some bugs on launch day and we judge the company on how well it responds to those bugs.

There are hundreds (maybe thousands) of brilliant software engineers out there who probably hate their jobs because the products they've had a hand in have been pushed out to an expectant consumer base in shockingly bad condition and their overlords have let people like them (gamers) down so badly.

Stone Deaf 4evr

I'll have to say that I've been guilty in the past of pre ordering, but I've never bought a season pass before the first round of DLC drops. It amazes me how people can shell out the guts of 100 euros on an untested product.

Destiny is a prime example of this, the content in the main game is thin, but lord help us, theres almost nothing in the DLC.

ScumLord

Shiminay wrote: »

I'm not trying to over simplify, it really is the answer. Marketing Departments get half of the budget for a AAA game. That is madness when you see software teams struggling to get things done to the beat of marketing's drum. That is just madness, software is done when it's done, not when marketing says it needs to be released. All software has bugs. This is more or less unavoidable because writing software well is an art not a "by the numbers" exercise as so many non-software people think. We should expect some bugs on launch day and we judge the company on how well it responds to those bugs.

The marketing department will always get priority because they bring in the sales (or so they'd have us all believe, to be fair their job is a lot harder in todays world).

But what you've described is happening in every industry all over the world. In most industries they have to met a bottom line because of competition and new technology is always forcing them to cut costs, that can be blamed on the consumer prioritising price over quality.

With the gaming industry being knowledge based more than anything I think they're applying the cost cutting measures purely to increase profits rather than to compete. It's a market with huge profits to be made, but rather than be happy with their profits their focused solely on gouging the market for everything they can get. The product is just the tool they use to do their gouging.

It is an odd industry that's pretty new to the human economy, I'm sure the market will find a way of balancing it out over time. It wouldn't surprise me if in ten years all the current crop of developers are gone and a completely different batch of companies that found a fair way of making software for a reasonable price in their place.

Big corporations that try and control the market to keep things as they like them tend to get left behind by the companies that innovate for the world as it actually is.

I'm not surprised by any of it, and once you're aware of it you can spend your money wisely. Expecting the market to not try and gouge you is like expecting rain not to get you wet.

johnny_ultimate

Even more than not pre-ordering, don't buy the game until it's been out in the real-world and consensus has decided it is indeed in a stable condition. I can't imagine many people value playing a game on day one over guaranteeing it actually works, and if they do then that is some peculiar prioritising :pac: Heck, wait it out and the first round of discounts may even have been applied by the time the major patches have filtered through. I get the impression Driveclub is now the game it should have been at launch, for example, and that at least coincides with the fact most shops are selling it with twenty or thirty euro knocked off the launch price.

Just wait it out, or if you must have the game at launch at least wait a couple of days to ensure no major issues are flagged. As games grow more complex and more ambitious in terms of their online features, there will inevitably be a few unstable launches, but then there's never been more coverage of games in the days and weeks following launch either, so one just needs to keep themselves informed.

dbit

johnny_ultimate wrote: »

Even more than not pre-ordering, don't buy the game until it's been out in the real-world and consensus has decided it is indeed in a stable condition. I can't imagine many people value playing a game on day one over guaranteeing it actually works, and if they do then that is some peculiar prioritising :pac: Heck, wait it out and the first round of discounts may even have been applied by the time the major patches have filtered through. I get the impression Driveclub is now the game it should have been at launch, for example, and that at least coincides with the fact most shops are selling it with twenty or thirty euro knocked off the launch price.

Just wait it out, or if you must have the game at launch at least wait a couple of days to ensure no major issues are flagged. As games grow more complex and more ambitious in terms of their online features, there will inevitably be a few unstable launches, but then there's never been more coverage of games in the days and weeks following launch either, so one just needs to keep themselves informed.

Yup did it with Alien isolation , and this was hard for me to wait as im a massive LV426 monkey. - Got it for 30 quid over 1.5 month ago launch date and cost of 70 quid . Sometimes its hard to hang in there when your group or social circle are running in there with they're micheal's isteach an lamh's

death1234567

I had a lot of problems with Far Cry 4 on PC. Apart from that I can't remember any others that stand out but I'm sure there were more. More Blizzard/Valve style the release date is when it's ready please.

Stone Deaf 4evr

dbit wrote: »

Yup did it with Alien isolation , and this was hard for me to wait as im a massive LV426 monkey. - Got it for 30 quid over 1.5 month ago launch date and cost of 70 quid . Sometimes its hard to hang in there when your group or social circle are running in there with they're micheal's isteach an lamh's

yup, thats certainly a part of it, and again its all part of marketing - most of it is meaningless whether I've never prestiged once of 10 times in Call of Duty, its like an artificial status symbol designed to make non n00bs feel better and to encourage n00bs to keep playing to rise their rank. people all want to start at the same level, it can be a bit (intimitdating is the wrong word) but you can feel out of place if you're a level 10 player trying to hang with a bunch of 5th prestige players just because you waited to buy the game.

dbit

Gamerscore was never really a valuable commodity to me , I simply love the gaming experience not a Chevy whore either . IF it plays well and i can get a good laugh out of the title or have the crack in party then im a happy camper . However titles that deserve to be the last piece of toilet paper on the roll is my gripe.

Shiminay

Shiminay wrote: »

There's already a perfectly valid regulatory system for this. Stop pre-ordering. Don't buy any games till you've seen at least 10 different reviews for it. Then this problem goes away.

I'm not trying to over simplify, it really is the answer. Marketing Departments get half of the budget for a AAA game. That is madness when you see software teams struggling to get things done to the beat of marketing's drum. That is just madness, software is done when it's done, not when marketing says it needs to be released. All software has bugs. This is more or less unavoidable because writing software well is an art not a "by the numbers" exercise as so many non-software people think. We should expect some bugs on launch day and we judge the company on how well it responds to those bugs.

There are hundreds (maybe thousands) of brilliant software engineers out there who probably hate their jobs because the products they've had a hand in have been pushed out to an expectant consumer base in shockingly bad condition and their overlords have let people like them (gamers) down so badly.

I'm going to quickly add that the devs are now putting emabrgos on reviews until release date or well past release date which is utter BS IMO

Stone Deaf 4evr

M!Ck^ wrote: »

I'm going to quickly add that the devs are now putting emabrgos on reviews until release date or well past release date which is utter BS IMO

yup, you'd have to smell a rat when that happens alright.
I feel bad for studios when it seems like a genuine case of pressure from a publisher to get the game out the door. Halo is surely a prime case of this, it was lined up as a big gun in the hugely aggressive thanksgiving / Christmas push that they did this year. Its ultimately hurt the franchise as a whole - a franchise that for the most part had an impeccable image.

I will quickly re-phrase what I said above...maybe not so much the devs that have placed embargos but the publishers themselves

Nody

Stone Deaf 4evr wrote: »

yup, you'd have to smell a rat when that happens alright.
I feel bad for studios when it seems like a genuine case of pressure from a publisher to get the game out the door. Halo is surely a prime case of this, it was lined up as a big gun in the hugely aggressive thanksgiving / Christmas push that they did this year. Its ultimately hurt the franchise as a whole - a franchise that for the most part had an impeccable image.

Smell a rat? Rather a case of "It's so **** we can't even buy reviews to be positive" bad that you should cancel any preorders and find out what's wrong once the reviews come in and buy it in store...

Every Early Access game ever "released". I absolutely hate this trend. Never again will I buy Early Access.

Shiminay

Actually, there was some stress around pre-release reviews for Shadow of Mordor which had everyone going "WTF?!" and had a lot of people wondering if it was about to be a magnificent failure (and thankfully, we were all wrong ). But I believe that was because they were selling exclusive "first look" partnerships to YouTubers and the likes (which is a horrible thing to be happening too I think).

ScumLord

Deleted User wrote: »

Every Early Access game ever "released". I absolutely hate this trend. Never again will I buy Early Access.

I bought into Assetto Corsa in early access and I've had no regrets. As long as you're aware of the fact you're getting access to early code and are prepared to live with bugs and a lack of content I think it's a great system for supporting games that wouldn't get made otherwise.

It is a bit of a gamble but a bit of research will give you some idea of what games are worth investing in.

BeerWolf

People seem to often forget that games today are hell of a lot more complex to develop compared to games a decade or more ago, a core test team can only discover so much... which is why many companies now are opting to have open betas for tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, of players to look for bugs for them.... unfortunately this is generally for PC games, as consoles don't readily have "Betas" out from what I've noticed... hence why many console games are buggy on release.

And it's not just bugs, but exploits too... which are infinitely harder to find as a tester, which would be a massive issue come online and MMO games.

That being said, right out of the box in regular play through with outstandingly obvious bugs and issues is absolutely NO excuse to not have been fixed before release... such as the horrid fps issues in The Evil Within. ... Honestly wonder if they even bother testing it on the actual console instead of through PCs via developers kits and what not. Such games should have the Developers and Publishers, mostly the publishers [absolute king culprit being EA], damned at.

dbit

BeerWolf wrote: »

People seem to often forget that games today are hell of a lot more complex to develop compared to games a decade or more ago, a core test team can only discover so much... which is why many companies now are opting to have open betas for tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, of players to look for bugs for them.... unfortunately this is generally for PC games, as consoles don't readily have "Betas" out from what I've noticed... hence why many console games are buggy on release.

And it's not just bugs, but exploits too... which are infinitely harder to find as a tester, which would be a massive issue come online and MMO games.

That being said, right out of the box in regular play through with outstandingly obvious bugs and issues is absolutely NO excuse to not have been fixed before release... such as the horrid fps issues in The Evil Within. ... Honestly wonder if they even bother testing it on the actual console instead of through PCs via developers kits and what not. Such games should have the Developers and Publishers, mostly the publishers [absolute king culprit being EA], damned at.

XB1 betas i have played on .
Halo MCC
Halo 5 MPB
Battlefield 4
Call of duty
Destiny
Titanfall
Cant rem the name of that everyone kill the beast game !!!!!! played it on beta as well.

Its only been a year and theres not much out but could have played more betas if i had the time.

These are usually opened up on the Dash to all after the first two waves or so of invited players to beta's.

Also im participating in the Dash preview update system since launch.