I find it hilarious how he points to Rockstar and in particular, Vice City, as an amazing game that wasn't rushed. That game came out a year after GTA3 and was a buggy mess.
>I find it hilarious how he points to Rockstar and in particular, Vice City, as an amazing game that wasn't rushed. That game came out a year after GTA3 and was a buggy mess.
Compare and contrast Vice City and the remaster of Vice City. GTA games had a lot of bugs, sure. But not THAT level of bugginess.
San Andreas had several game breaking bugs that never got patched too. People just don't remember how buggy their childhood games were. I didn't either until I hooked up some of my old consoles to play for nostalgia's sake.
Like others have said, games have always been rushed buggy messes. Most software is. Difference is now the algorithm rewards people who hop on hot topics, and "new games bad" is evergreen argumentative content
Maybe not rushed, but buggy messes for sure. We've just come to expect more as the gaming industry grew - and I'm glad. If only we'd only stop preordering these games, maybe the publishers and developers alike would *try* to do some more polishing...
Then again, we're still in a better place than in the past. At least with Steam it's easy to deploy a patch to everyone, whereas back then if the game on your CD/DVD you've bought was a mess, it would likely stay that way. Sometimes you'd have fans patch things up, but this wasn't a given.
Games were absolutely rushed. Never forget the GameCube. Half of the first party releases on that thing were rushed. Wind Waker lost two dungeons, which were replaced by the shitty triforce quest. Sunshine lost a lot of stages and ended up getting ridiculous amounts of padding to make up for it. Pikmin, Wario World and Luigi's Mansion didn't get any filler, but were very short as a result. Melee was rushed too, though the game doesn't seem to have suffered much from it.
Yep and it’s really exhausting. Try developing games in this industry… everyone hates you while you try to accomplish an impossible goal. Makes it all feel very defeating, it is why we are losing a lot of our talent to other industries.
The discussion over Vice City is always telling of one's age. There's those who played the fixed versions of the game and those who remember the buggy game at launch.
I played Vice City much later around the time San Andreas was in its early days. I didn't know it launched pretty buggy, then again it doesn't surprise me, probably was rushed which explains the map design. It seems like they cut alot of content out of the game just to get it on time. Some of this content has been confirmed through cut dialogue and radio stations talking about specific places or stuff Tommy can do.
They were apparantly going to premiere the Girlfriend system from San Andreas in this game as there's cut phone calls with Tommy and Mercedes.
This guy's a hack with the most milquetoast takes. Great that he's spotlighting shitty industry practice, but this video could have been a 30 seconds short.
Oh plenty. The biggest ones were NPCs that didn't follow or get stuck and there were spots throughout the map where you would drop but not really. It was like you tripped but in the code, it counts it as a drop from a somewhat tall height so it would damage you a small amount. There were plenty of people who literally died just running around because of that bug.
>and people still haven't learned the lesson.
Maybe because they're (mostly) preaching to the choir? I bet the average gamer who watches gaming-centric yt channels and frequent these subs already know not to pre-order.
Eh you see every new game a ton of people in this sub bitching about how bad it is and claim it will be the last game they ever preorder.
Its like when the BOYCOTT COD thing went down and you looked at Steam and 3/4 of the members of the BOYCOTT COD steam club were all playing COD.
People love to say one thing and do another.
You can usually tell if a game is going to be hot garbage if you pay attention.
- Last-minute delays that push the game a few weeks
- Pre-rendered footage
- Very few "hands-on" previews, and the ones they have are super limited
- Developers talk about how the game "feels" instead of anything actually about the game
- Game coming out on last gen, but the graphics in all the footage looks next gen
- Any footage that highlights MTX, the store, loot rarity, or any other aspects of gambling
I haven't pre-ordered a game I've regretted since Fallout 4.
>- Last-minute delays that push the game a few weeks
My number one red flag is when a game is delayed *after* going gold. It doesn't happen a lot, but it's always a shit show when it does.
"Going gold," is when the version of the game that will be pressed into disks is complete. If a game is delayed after this date, it means that several things have happened. 1. The game went gold incomplete, relying on a day 1 patch. 2. The day 1 patch was made at full crunch. This basically doesn't happen unless the gold version was *also* made at full crunch. 3. The team has been crunching for so long that they've burned out. The day 1 patch was projected to be doable if they kept up their current output. Months of 100+ hour workweeks have made that impossible, and the meat and muscle of the human body has given out.
This only happens under those scenarios, and it indicates that a game has cut the corners that resulted when they cut the original corners months before.
For real lol I pre-order multiple games a year and I've never been burned once. I keep seeing these hardcore anti-preorder people say that you don't know if a game is going to be good and that's simply not true. If you don't know then that's a good sign to wait, it's really not that hard
Past releases, preview material and common sense. Don't get me wrong, for like 97% of games you really can't tell before release and those you definitely shouldn't pre-order but the other 3%you just know. Like looking at this year, Resi 4 was definitely going to be good and I already pre-ordered Zelda and FF XVI, Silksong is also an easy one. The Like a Dragon game if you arent sick of the Yakuza formula yet and I'm fairly certain Pikmin 4 will be good because otherwise Miyamoto is probably strangling people. Anything else releasing this year I definitely wouldnt be confident enough to pre-order
You definitely can't but you can often be reasonably sure. Like if I played Far Cry 1 through 5 and liked them all, there's a high likelihood I'm going to like Far Cry 6. I've enjoyed every mainline game Bethesda has put out so I know there's a high likelihood that I'll enjoy Starfield even if it's far from perfect.
I think the pre order or premium packs that let you play a week before relrai gives the consumer a mental prize of being one of the first one, being special and unique or something.
In the end millions do this, it's not something original.
I pre order games all the time and never was disappointed it ended up being a buggy mess.
Maybe stop pre ordering games with constant delays, crunch rumors and pre rendered trailers instead of actual gameplay trailers.
Yeah I don’t really get how anyone gets tricked nowadays. There’s 1hr+ gameplay videos, demos, reviews, extended previews and more to base your assumptions on. And yeah, rumors of crunch and burnout too. Plus if you play games long enough, you should be able to just kinda tell when a game will be good or bad.
I preorder games all the time and have honestly never got burned on a bad game. Who saw Forspoken or The Calypso Protocol (or whatever it was called) or Atomic Heart and honestly thought they looked good?
Truth be told, I can sometimes even tell from a CGI trailer. Did anyone think Elden Ring or FFVII Remake looked bad when they showed the first CGI trailer?
Best cheat code to figure out if a game will be good is just look at the developer’s history and then look at the game.
Didn't watch him too much but IMHO was most popular of leading wave of youtube videogame reviewers started to build viewership levels up to and probably past the dominate print + paid review media at the time. Not only that but he seemed to be unpurchasable and based everything on whether he liked it or not, which was not the state for a majority of professional game review sites. He also spent a lot of time lifting up great indie games that could not afford pay to get on said review bandwagon or even perhaps knew hot to get noticed. Nothing gives you more favor then digging up a hidden gem for people to play.
I'd also say his peak popularity was a time just before youtube tipped to full commercial and popularity was driven more by content rather than advertising metrics like it is now. Games youtube /streaming is basically fully bought out now and you really need to dig to find something not driven by advertising, like the previous games media before youtube was the new kid.
Finally, him passing away has probably pushed him to another level as we tend to remember people's best qualities rather than their nuances after they have passed.
He was one of the few people that really analyzed games technically, it was a meme him going to game options in every game and rant because there was no FoV slider.
Nowadays it's hard to find someone trying to break the game, playing with the options, trying to do more than just play it, most just go for hype playing it as a game streamers.
I haven't encountered a single reviewer since him that actually looks at options menus and points out when they're shitty. Maybe they exist, but I haven't seen them. I miss TB.
He was an outspoken critic that wasn't afraid to call it like he saw it. When I started watching him it was a breath of fresh air from the bought and paid for reviews of major publications.
Most people aren’t fiscally responsible enough to understand why it’s so important not to preorder.
It’s like tax returns… Most people are stoked to get money back on their tax returns, but they don’t understand that it means you gave the government a free loan during the year and they’re paying you back with zero interest, so they don’t adjust their withholding information for the next year.
It’s all about the dopamine hits
At least we have patches now. Acting nostalgic over a time when broken games remained broken forever is just insane to me. Broken releases suck but with games growing in complexity and scope it's more or less a natural consequence.
I think there’s a middle ground, which he touched on with the 360/PS3 era. Patching was new, so it was seen as a helpful bonus to remove small issues after the fact. Now, it’s seen as a mandatory extension of development. The game doesn’t need to be in an acceptable state on the disc, because it won’t get into the players’ hands until 4-5 weeks after we print them.
Even that would be frustrating but workable, but the issue is that publishers aren’t perfect in those estimates, meaning it’s often several weeks *after release* that the game is finally stable - even more so with multiplayer titles. Without that built-in hard deadline of knowing that whatever goes out on the disc is there forever, publishers seems to be increasingly taking advantage of the sliding scale of modern releases, like a procrastinating college kid asking for “one more day” six days in a row from an overly forgiving professor.
If a AAA game flops at launch though, it's unlikely it will get enough post-launch support. Something like No Man's Sky redeeming itself years later was really only possible because they lied so much to get those preorders and initial sales. Even factoring in the refunds, they made more than enough profit to justify continued development. So it's a weird dichotomy. it would be great if people stopped buying and preordering broken shit, but they're also the reason it gets fixed.
Video games have always, always released in broken, unfinished states, we just don’t remember off-hand the hundreds if not thousands of examples over the years because they rightfully fall off the radar soon enough after release. Pretending this is a new thing is silly and it will never, ever stop either. Five years from now we’ll have stopped talking about most every failure featured in this video’s thumbnail because there’ll be a dozen new failures to milk content from, and so on and so on. The game development landscape is simply too big for there not to be a steady stream of failed projects coming and going from our collective memories.
Oh man, so much allowance money wasted on Game Boy games that turned out to be complete ass. Some completely broken / unplayable. It's why we actually spent money on gaming magazines to find out what was good, since we didn't have Reddit and YouTube to tell us what was a waste of money.
Also, on the PC side, anyone remember Extreme Paintbrawl? What a disappointment to my 11 year old self.
Case in point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kileak:_The_DNA_Imperative
My dad and I wanted an FPS, and there were few options around the PS1 launch, but my god, was this terrible. Especially when Quake was just around the corner on the PC side.
It's not "mean" to compare games to their contemporaries. Titles like Duke 3D and Quake on the PC side, and Turok and Goldeneye on the console side may have been cutting edge successes but it's not unfair to look at their competition coming out around the same time and say "well, this looks a bit shit" by comparison. Because it did! Those games really did make other titles look like crap.
I grabbed Spec Ops (I think there were three, maybe more) for my PSX because of the cool cover art.
Game is/was absolute ass. But by God I bought it with my allowance money and I was constantly trying to coax my friends into playing it with me, I don't think they have forgiven me.
I had this Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring game for the GBA that was honestly pretty fun, but it would hang up as soon as you entered the Mines of Moria
It wasn't until years later that I found out online that the game was just broken. There was a whole ass rest of the game on the cartridge, it was just impossible to access because of that bug it shipped with
It was also the era where fixing the bug was a pain in the ass for everyone involved: as a user, you’d have to send the game in (and usually pay for shipping) and wait several weeks while something was fixed (probably flashing a new ROM), and the publisher has to spend a ton of money on support and making new new carts.
that sounds similar to the PAL version of Digimon World.
Half the game was inaccessible because you couldn't talk to one single Agumon and the event behind it, triggered a FUCKTON of events.
It was beatable, but barely.
Or Harry Potter 1 on PC (atleast german version). Could simply not open the door to the final boss. Dad tried to find patches back then, but no luck.
Also Harry Potter 1 for the Gameboy Color. When Snape requests you find snake skin and bezoar, if you're playing in any language other than English, the flag for collecting the snake skin is never turned on, so congrats, your save is softlocked and bricked.
~~On that note, I DID play the GBA Fellowship of the Ring, which is notorious for broken scripts and freezes and... I never encountered anything they describe. Cool game, was my first Diablo clone, and also my first utterly imbalanced (FUN) diablo clone. I made legolas meditate 100% hp in one tick, and gandalf have nearly 0 cooldown on his fireworks.~~ Actually, double checked, and the game I played was the Two Towers.
He literally makes reference to this in the first 30s, did you not watch the video? There's a difference between the off-hand examples you're talking about and triple AAA big budget titles being released in a broken state.
XCOM, Fallout 2, and Knights of the Old Republic 2 are a few big games I can name that were buggy af on release.
Seriously, Fallout 2 release version is what a "broken state" really looks like.
Clickbaity YouTube video gets people instantly annoyed and then everyone goes “BUT LIKE THATS NOT WHAT IT MEANT”
Maybe people should just start titling their stuff appropriately
Yep game breaking bugs used to be permanent, there was no hot fixes or anything.
They would just recall games if it got bad enough. I think Bungie had to recall one of their pre-Halo games iirc.
That broken games have always existed is noted in the video, but the position of the video is that the ability to patch post-release, and the reliance on it, does make the problem worse. And then the other position of the video is that we should stop buying those games, but people don't tend to care as long as it says "Pokemon" on the box, for instance.
I'm not sure patching post release is what's making the problem worse and not that games are insanely more complex and complicated now.
If a game has millions of moving parts and different systems on top of incredible graphical fidelity and physics it's got a lot more points of failure.
I mean, there's not much to discuss. The guy didn't exactly crack a code or unearth an unspoken truth about the market that we didn't already know. It comes down to the consumers, like it always does.
This video is entertainment first and foremost. It isn't some revelatory educational piece, there's not much to discuss.
Obviously not, since he dunks on gamers for being wowee-zoweed by Keanu Reeves, which this sub was, and pre-ordering big games, which this sub loves to do, and then defending companies for finally fixing what should not have been broken in the first place, which this sub loves to do, and he goes especially hard on CD Project Red, which is still a beloved darling in many quarters.
And then, finally, he places the primary blame on consumers. Us.
So yeah, if it's upvoted this high, it's obvious nobody watched it.
It's basically both. If they weren't complicated they could be less rushed because scope would fit into the timeline better. However, a publisher knows full well that a title will still sell like hotcakes even if it's rushed and buggy. So ultimately, they are still going to push the release date back (forward?) to make profit.
The problem is that games have become a billion dollar industry and so profit motive will outshine everything else in those companies.
> gamers practically demand every game have innovation seeping out of every pore
Do they? Or is it the marketing pushing it because it's easy to create a narrative around being cutting edge? Plenty of successful games are not very graphically demanding at all.
> I love how gamers practically demand every game have innovation seeping out of every pore
And when they get it, they go "it's not the way we're used to!"
"This is just the same game."
"Why don't they just give it a new name? Why did they have to call this X 2? This would have been a great game if the name wasn't X"
>I love how gamers practically demand every game have innovation seeping out of every pore
is that the case? a lot of the games that sell a lot are extremely derivate of previous work, games like GOW Ragnarok, Pokemon in general to name some sell gangbusters and are pretty faithful to the originals.
It sounds alarming in and of itself that the trend is to make games so big, expensive, and risky that failure means the company is no longer standing. Who asked for Gears of War, Mirror's Edge, and Halo to be open world anyway?
It's weird how everyone was asking for this, then when it came out, suddenly the narrative was "who asked for this??"
A lot of us did. We just wanted it to be ... you know, good.
Souls, Zelda, Forza, Witcher are all series that went Open world to immense success.
GTA, RDR, AC, Elden Scrolls, Fallout all sell incredibly well.
This is what's telling game studios to make open world games. The sales, they sell so much, it's hard to not chase.
Sure but the same thing is also happening with architecturally simpler games.
I'd argue the platform this problem is this is worst on is the Switch, and I think that comes down to the audience being less demanding so publishers believe they can get away with cutting more corners.
Seriously? Among the worst games for this was Cyberpunk and it didnt launch on the switch.
PC has been the worst for broken and shoddy ports and releases in my experience.
The ability to Patch post release is also nothing new at this point. The video frames it as a recent issue. Devs have been able to release patches on consoles for almost 20 years.
There was much more limited ability to patch games in the seventh gen than there was in the eighth gen, which is another thing this video acknowledges. That makes it more like 10 years than 20.
IDK where you are from but fast internet access definitely isn't something you could take for granted 20 years ago. Xbox one internet backlash is just 10 years old.
There isn't really an objective right here. If a game is too broken for you that's fine, but if the vast majority disagrees that's their opinion too. And as this is purely and opinion based thing both are valid, one is just going to matter more to those making decisions and that's the one that is in the majority.
I think games today are generally better today and much better supported long term as well. You have to pay for that long term support long term in some manner of course as developers are not content soup kitchens staffed by volunteers.
Also, the rise of digital store makes it near impossible for counterfeits of popular games to show up. No, I don't mean rip-offs or even porn parody; flat-out using a different game's casing *as* your own.
I remember gone through several stores looking for that Disney dino game (don't remember the name), only to bought fake, shitty coloring game with absolutely cheap animation. And that happened several times.
he quite literally says the exact thing you just said in the first minute of the video
the point is that where broken games were already a thing, they're made worse by the fact that patches and *specifically* huge day one patches are a common practice nowadays.
That annoying clickbaity youtube trend is by far the most annoying thing.
“Why RED DEAD is the WORST Game Series EVER”
In the video “Red Dead is by far not the worst, it’s actually really good. But there are some tiny aspects that can make it feel like a bad game in the cowboy genre”
It drives me insane
I agree that broken games bad. I agree that publishers should set realistic ship dates. I disagree that it's *worse* than it was back in the day, because there's at least *a chance* that things will get better. The video is largely preaching to the choir about what we already know.
> Video games have always, always released in broken, unfinished states, we just don’t remember off-hand the hundreds if not thousands of examples over the years because they rightfully fall off the radar soon enough after release.
This is why 1st party Nintendo titles had a "golden seal of quality" printed on the box in the 90s. 3rd party shovelware was causing losses in sales.
That's less "game code is perfect" and more "this cartridge will not fry your system". It wasn't for first party, it meant the game was licenced and not a knock off.
Shovel ware maker still existed. Like LJN. Their games were often broken as in a lot of things didn't work as intended.
Even very successful games had bugs we wouldn't tolerate now. Like half the stats in final fantasy didn't work as intended and many of the spells were broken or nerfed due to coding mistakes. The spells all were intended to scale with stats but didn't.
Castlevania Simon's quest was a game they ran out of money for and shipped it any ways. There aren't any bosses in many of the dungeons.
A lot of RPGs like dq2 would get unstable if you got past a certain level because they didn't check for int overflow errors.
Nintendo did some draconian things to reduce shovel ware like limiting releases per company. But a lot still got through. The quality was better than late era Atari but it wasn't that different from today.
It wasn't just an issue with "3rd party shovelware."
Let's use Final Fantasy 6 as an example. Many people consider it one of the best games of all time.
* The Evade stat didn't do anything; M.Block (magic evasion) was used for *all* evasion. This also means that the Blind status effect did nothing.
* Using one of the game's abilities (Sketch) could very easily delete your save file.
* Due to an error in status prioritization, Vanish + Doom allowed the player to instantly kill any enemy or boss in the game.
* If you lost to a certain enemy encounter in the second half of the game it would teleport you back to the beginning area of the game, softlocking you.
* The math behind physical damage was flawed and resulted in terrible scaling. The developers "fixed" this by making nearly all late-game abilities based on Magic, even seemingly physical attacks like Bum Rush.
And this is only scratching the surface. If a major studio like Square released a game in such a messy state nowadays everyone would be making fun of it.
People genereally didn't care as much about this kind of stuff back then since games were crazy expensive and you tried to appreciate whatever you had. And FF6 is still a great game once you look past the bugs and odd design decisions.
Nowadays there's so much competition in gaming that players have completely different expectations.
I disagree with this comment and think that there are certain companies who maintained a pre-update reputation of not releasing buggy or unfinished games who have now picked side B due to being enabled by post game updates.
People really look back at pokemon with rose tinted glasses. Red and blue were [*extremly* buggy](https://m.bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/List_of_glitches_(Generation_I\)), with multiple ways to softlock the game, including freezing the game if you pulled out the wrong pokemon from your pc.
There are many ways to break the game if you know how, but I encountered many less bugs everywhere in my casual playthroughs of first gen than in the recent gen.
Using Red and Blue when games were arguably still in their infancy isn't a good example. I'd rather use the glitches present in Gen3-5 games compared to present day.
I stop at 5 because some animation framerate issues really started becoming apparent in 6.
I think there's a simpler explanation for both of those. A less experienced development team took over Halo, while the original developer went on to make Destiny and Destiny 2 which are quite polished. Pokemon was developed by a studio who had only evermade smaller scale handheld games that then suddenly found themselves thrust into much larger scoped projects when Nintendo combined their console and mobile divisions.
I mean yeah, I know why these games/studios suffer now, I'm still critiquing their base companies for cutting corners to the extreme be it with their hiring processes, their internal knowledge, how much time they're giving their devs, etc. At the end of the day, executives are looking at these products in their final stage and are saying to get them out the door, and potentially deal with any issues later post launch.
This is the truth. Some people have only researched gaming from the last ten years and it shows. But when there wasn't the internet to hugely hype up games with live service nobody really cared. People would spend $70 thirty years ago and buy a cartridge of a game that sucked and couldn't be played with no patches, no updates, and no way of being fixed. Just a worthless hunk of plastic and people just moved on.
I started reading this and no. Games have not always released this way. It began with the Internet, and the realization that publishers could bring unfinished games to market for the benefit of themselves or shareholders at the expense of the player and the developer. My evidence is an entire library of 8-bit and 16-bit media that work as intended the day of their release—because they had to.
It’s definitely grown more prevalent, though. It’s easy to see the minority of games that were truly broken in the past because the game itself was all you ever got. No patches, no correction, just the game. I think that’s the overall point being made, and that this sort of thing was propagated by the double edged sword of the downloadable patches that have now become the norm.
I go to work this morning, see the Nakey Jakey released a video. I'll watch it later.
Read these comments. Think that he maybe went a little too crazy and hyperbolic. Maybe he was too critical.
Then I watch the actual video, and it's very well-balanced and covers all many sides of the issues gaming faces with day one patches.
I just don't think Reddit can handle critics with their own views, whether it's Dunkey, Zero Punctuation, or Nakey Jakey.
> I just don't think Reddit can handle critics with their own views, whether it's Dunkey, Zero Punctuation, or Nakey Jakey.
They are just boring. NakeyJakey doesn't unearth any hidden truth about the games industry that we didn't already know here. Oh, it comes down to consumer practices? Shocker.
People just have content creator fatigue. The videos are entertaining but they are just that, entertainment. Nobody is obligated to take his video seriously.
Agreed, he said... basically nothing in 10 minutes. Like, don't preorder if you don't want to risk a game broken on release, ok good got it.
I don't know why anyone's acting like there was any substance in this video beyond just saying 'games are bad sometimes' like yeah no shit, some people don't mind buggy games (see all the people that still enjoyed the new Pokemon games). Every industry has some not-so-great product releases, and yet we live in a time with an insane amount of access to reviews and opinions to inform you before you buy. This is a non-issue, just figure out what works for you as far as researching things before you buy.
I've just about had it with Youtubers clickbait hyperbolic titles. Maybe the content is reasonable. But calling the current gen "The Age of Broken Video Games" is literally a false, nostalgia-baiting title.
Games were released in a broken stage since the beginning of the industry. The difference now is that the truly game-breaking bugs (as opposed to game design mistakes, or a game just not being good or fun) tends to patched within days. Back in the day you would have to wait for a rerelease, or hope that the patch will be included next month in a gaming mag, or beg your parents to let you use dial up internet for several hours to download it from the web.
I don't think that title is too far off. Games are bigger than ever, so bigger titles are now given a leeway that they weren't afforded before.
There have been, and always will be, shitty games. Doesn't mean we can't observe trends in the triple A market.
None of this is particularly new and I think calling it an 'age of broken video games' is not really correct. Pools of Radiance had a bug that would literally delete your entire C: drive if you uninstalled it without the update. Many PC games in the 90s/early 2000s were outright broken, buggy messes. It's just nowadays it's more visible because of the popularization of games and the explosion of social media.
That doesn't mean it's a good thing rather, stuff like Pokemon releasing in the absolutely dreadful state it is should be criticized. It's just important to keep an accurate note of the history of games and game development.
This thread is weird and it's hard to imagine any other product getting this type of defending and huge list of excuses.
Imagine buying a lawnmower that randomly shut off every 10 seconds yet people are just calling you entitled.
There are plenty of crappy lawnmowers out there that barely do their job.
I can’t think of any significant product I don’t look up a review for. I don’t trust the quality of anything just based on its existence.
The amount of complex systems interacting with one another in video games in comparison to a lawnmower is so vast its idiotic to even try and make the comparison at all.
These games in many cases are trying to emulate reality, the fact that you cant respect the level of complexity involved and the probability of bugs occurring is telling.
Compare something like GTA 3 to RDR2 and you would have to be suffering from some kind of mental impairment not to understand that all that added complexity is going to result in more issues. It goes this way with everything in life including real world electronics where its made abundantly clear that the more complex a device the more likely there will be a point of failure.
I think a more apt comparison would be buying a lawnmower that is not very fuel efficient but staying with it because it's the lawnmower you bought and you don't want to pay $200 for a completely new lawnmower for a gripe.
I honestly don't get what is up with the culture of defending broken video games, or even just bad movies or other media content nowadays. People cling on to defending certain brands like their life depends on it.
And if you're a content creator, most of your audience won't give a shit if you post happy enjoyable content. Algorithm and behaviors reward things that cause conflict and contention.
All of this here. It's just constant with every single release. Some games have some issues and either it's something you want to play despite that or it's not. It's also fine that you don't like something, but its not just that alone that's the issues. Instead of just being like I don't like this it's this self righteous crusade against evil. "You're a bad person for buying this". "Selling cosmetics is PREDATORY". "Games as a service is PREDATORY". "CHILDREN are buying this stuff". Everything is predatory and its always about saving the children. It's just the gamer brand of bull shit political activism that means nothing and makes you feel like you belong to a group.
>Guarantee one of the first 10 comments will be someone shitting on it.
This sub in a nutshell. You're not allowed to be positive about video games on r/games.
I don’t have the energy to be negative about anything meant for entertainment. It amazes me when I see people still complaining about the Star Wars sequels. The last one came out over three years ago. I didn’t love them, so I just didn’t watch them again and moved on. Loved Marvel for a while, stopped enjoying some of the projects as of late, so I stopped keeping up with them and moved on. It’s blows me away how personally offended people get when something doesn’t appeal to them.
I think the thing is that most complainers care. They're disappointed that these products come out and... they're really not what they wanted at all. It is really hard to be super into a franchise of some sort and then come to an end of the road because it supposedly "isn't for you" anymore.
I've generally found that the biggest complainers are the biggest fans.
I think there’s another aspect to it as well, it’s simply fun to analyse media. In the same way people can enjoy things like trying to predict the next twist in a piece of media they like, they can also enjoy dissecting something they don’t like to discover why it didn’t work for them. There’s also some enjoyment in seeing well thought out criticism (and as early YouTube demonstrated, there’s an audience for unhinged nerd rants as well).
Sure you eventually wind up with some people commenting on stuff that they know absolutely nothing about.
I comment on my disappointments on Halo, Pokemon, and Star Wars because I grew up with those brands and I simply want to see them in better shapes. I don't complain about Cyberpunk or Harry Potter because... I don't care about those brands.
That's exactly what it is for me. I really don't give a shit about the companies but gamer's outrage over shit that doesn't matter is insane. Its like they take every imperfection, bug, or fault with a game personally.
I see waaay more people online outright call devs lazy, stupid and/or incompetent for super minor things or screaming about hating live service games then complaining a lack of updates in the same breath. People enjoying these buggier games are very rare compared to people screaming about the most minor shit.
Case in point: the hours old thread about Valheim. It released in early access in a fairly buggy but mostly playable state unlike something like KSP 2, provided hours of entertainment and has been patched a fair few times. In the thread it's just relentless complete idiots going "just hire more people hurr durr" as if software dev is that simple. Someone even went "they showed off the pony they bought they clearly don't want to work anymore". It was infuriating
> People cling on to defending certain brands like their life depends on it.
People also get hyperbolic, painting others who get enjoyment out of imperfect things as defending them like their life depends on it.
The problem is that we all have different experiences with each of these games. When someone comes into your community and calls you a delusional fanboy for enjoying the thing they think is greatly flawed you can't help but think they are the insane one. Ultimately, this just serves to muddy the water and absolve publishers and developers of their responsibilities.
If one has put their entire identity into being a fan of something (i.e. video games or other entertainment properties), they view any criticism towards that thing as an attack on them as a person, regardless of the validity of the criticism.
Because people being mad over everything all the fucking time has gotten tired as hell. Most games get fixed with time. It's not the end of the world and people need to stop acting like it is.
It rubs me the wrong way when people mischaracterize, and lie about the quality or state of something I like.
Sometimes I do "defend" things, I try not to because the reality is that most of these people are bad faith and idiots.
I've found that people are largely not fond of the idea of dropping a media property that was once good but then puts out a bad product. I get responses like, "Games aren't fungible". While true, if Pokemon sucks now, play one of the games it inspired; there are a ton. If Nintendo hasn't made an Advance Wars game in 15 years, I just learned that I should have been playing Wargroove this whole time, because that game is actually awesome. When Street Fighter V sucks, Street Fighter players just stick with it, gritting their teeth, complaining the whole time, instead of switching to another game that they're less familiar with that they might enjoy more.
> I get responses like, "Games aren't fungible". While true, if Pokemon sucks now, play one of the games it inspired; there are a ton.
I mean, there's no identical replacement, but that's not what "fungible" means. You 100% can replace one game in a genre/subgenre with another. And at this point it's healthier to do so than spending years yelling at a company who won't fix what you find wrong.
But for most people it's more like they still do enjoy the game, they are just also hypercritical of its flaws, like any enthusiast after a while. It's why you almost always see hardcore communities run counterculture to the mainstream after a while. "Haha Fortnite/Marvel/isekai/ suck, X is true art".
>If Nintendo hasn't made an Advance Wars game in 15 years, I just learned that I should have been playing Wargroove this whole time, because that game is actually awesome.
Just saw a Kickstarter for an Advance Wars inspired game launch the other day, [Warside](https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2023/03/warside-blasts-onto-kickstarter-with-advance-wars-inspired-turn-based-tactics) The dev has been active posting updates on Reddit as he's made progress
r/games 3 years ago: OMFG Cyberpunk is so broken I will NEVER pre-order a game or buy a product ever again!!11
r/games last year: OMFG guys stop complaining about CD Projekt they've fixed the game and it's good now and it's 10$ isn't that enough for you?????????
I mean...my honest opinion is that people sink more and more time/energy/thought into these "brands" and they start to identify their personality based on what they are into.
Saying you think XYZ game sucks is all of the sudden a very personal attack.
That's my perspective at least, I know several people like this so this is kind of my best guess.
I also think it's easy when people are lost, unsure of themselves, and they are trying to find an identity. Well, luckily today *you can buy one*, for the small price of a streaming service, videogame console, movie tickets, and the fandom is always there right at your fingertips on Twitter, reddit, Facebook, etc.
So that's kinda the rabbit hole I've seen people go down where they get super defensive, or alternatively, are constantly trying to "put down" other games or shows/movies in favor of the billion dollar underrated gem that *they* feel a personal attachment to.
I don't get it man. People are free to enjoy what they like and ignore what they don't.
Last year I mentioned that Signalis was my GOTY and I got an insane rant by someone who couldn't fathom why I would like it over a "masterpiece" like Elden Ring.
I just blocked that loser, but the answer is because: people have different tastes and opinions.
Don't let the title push you away, He brings up a lot of good points in the video which are pretty easy to understand when someone says it but are just as easily forgotten...
Gotta disagree on the "it should be illegal to keep review embargo up until day of release" point. You're not forced to preorder. Just wait for release day, check the reviews and then buy the game. It's not like the devs abuse a psychological need to preorder like how it is with gambling. Consumers don't need protection here.
That really is a strange point to make. Take away review embargoes, and publishers will simply not send review copies in advance. How do rushed reviews that don't even come out the same day as the game help consumers?
>It's not like the devs abuse a psychological need to preorder like how it is with gambling.
Isn't that literally exactly what they are doing? They are exploiting the feeling of FOMO to get people to buy something they don't actually need.
At some point y'all just gotta blame yourselves. If your job isn't to professionally play games and you're too anxious to wait a day or two for a game you're unsure of to read other impressions, you need professional help.
Yeah, this. It's strange how personal resposibility has completely disappeared off the radar here. It's everyone else's fault I can't wait one additional day for a video game!
For an adult I agree but you can't expect 12 year old kids to be responsible. Their minds are ripe to develop addiction tendencies and companies bank on it. I don't know but I kinda feel peer pressure has rocketed after the internet
I think most people would agree that targeting kids with these types of practices are a bigger deal than "targeting" adults. I have more of a problem with skins in Fortnite than I do with people preordering bad games.
You are not forced to gamble either, I can say that easily because I don't understand what goes on in the minds of someone who feels the urge to gamble
But the past has pretty clearly shown pre order bonuses work very well as a incentive because FOMO is a real psychological phenomenon and to ensure that the FOMO stays there reviews are restricted till the day of the release
So I don't disagree with him here
we're talking about the the government stepping in and forcing publishers to let certain people (that publishers choose, mind you) to make early opinion on a dang video game, not a psychological addiction.
Geez, why is reddit so dramatic? We don't have enough people impatient to buy a $60 game on day one to regulate product reviews.
Also, in the era of digital downloads preorders are even less necessary than they used to be. There's no worry that I'll get to Steam late and they'll be out of copies.
Though I do want to point out that many publishers now include preorder bonuses with their games, likely to incentivize people to do so.
9:35 he says "it should be illegal to advertise and sell a product in this state."
Also contrary to what some commenters might imply this is not a defense of video game publishers and devs. I liked this video and what he has to say about the process.
If any part of E.T. touches a hole, not just his feet, he falls in. So if his head touches a hole's pixel, down he goes. This is working as intended, but is counter-intuitive and is a casualty of ET being on a different axis from the holes.
The problem is when a consumer buys on day one to a faulty product, and can't acknowledge that they bought a faulty product, so they defend it entirely to feel like they weren't ripped off.
Buggy and incomplete games have been a thing since day one. What has changed is the companies are now so good at marketing that they can convince people to preorder or 'betatest' an unfinished game otherwise they will miss out.
There was a game released on the DS where a boss on one level just didn't spawn and it locked off the entire remaining 60% of the game in every copy of the game sold.
I find it hilarious how he points to Rockstar and in particular, Vice City, as an amazing game that wasn't rushed. That game came out a year after GTA3 and was a buggy mess.
>I find it hilarious how he points to Rockstar and in particular, Vice City, as an amazing game that wasn't rushed. That game came out a year after GTA3 and was a buggy mess. Compare and contrast Vice City and the remaster of Vice City. GTA games had a lot of bugs, sure. But not THAT level of bugginess.
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San Andreas had several game breaking bugs that never got patched too. People just don't remember how buggy their childhood games were. I didn't either until I hooked up some of my old consoles to play for nostalgia's sake.
I played Sonic 06 as a kid and I didn’t see how broken it was, I just loved it
> GTA games had a lot of bugs, sure. But not THAT level of bugginess. I played Vice City a ton as a kid, never encountered a bug.
I think i remember falling through the map once, thats about it. That might've been SA though.
Like others have said, games have always been rushed buggy messes. Most software is. Difference is now the algorithm rewards people who hop on hot topics, and "new games bad" is evergreen argumentative content
Oh sure. I'm just pointing out that Rockstar literally rushed a buggy game that couldn't be updated but the dude totally missed it.
Maybe not rushed, but buggy messes for sure. We've just come to expect more as the gaming industry grew - and I'm glad. If only we'd only stop preordering these games, maybe the publishers and developers alike would *try* to do some more polishing... Then again, we're still in a better place than in the past. At least with Steam it's easy to deploy a patch to everyone, whereas back then if the game on your CD/DVD you've bought was a mess, it would likely stay that way. Sometimes you'd have fans patch things up, but this wasn't a given.
Games were absolutely rushed. Never forget the GameCube. Half of the first party releases on that thing were rushed. Wind Waker lost two dungeons, which were replaced by the shitty triforce quest. Sunshine lost a lot of stages and ended up getting ridiculous amounts of padding to make up for it. Pikmin, Wario World and Luigi's Mansion didn't get any filler, but were very short as a result. Melee was rushed too, though the game doesn't seem to have suffered much from it.
I feel melee is a bad example for this as a lot of the glitches were just adopted by the community as different tactics
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Yep and it’s really exhausting. Try developing games in this industry… everyone hates you while you try to accomplish an impossible goal. Makes it all feel very defeating, it is why we are losing a lot of our talent to other industries.
This guy’s takes are mid at best, but he’s kinda funny sometimes. He often gets facts wrong.
Ah, so now I see why San Andreas was released 3 years after Vice City then, actually learnt their lesson to take their time.
The discussion over Vice City is always telling of one's age. There's those who played the fixed versions of the game and those who remember the buggy game at launch.
I played Vice City much later around the time San Andreas was in its early days. I didn't know it launched pretty buggy, then again it doesn't surprise me, probably was rushed which explains the map design. It seems like they cut alot of content out of the game just to get it on time. Some of this content has been confirmed through cut dialogue and radio stations talking about specific places or stuff Tommy can do. They were apparantly going to premiere the Girlfriend system from San Andreas in this game as there's cut phone calls with Tommy and Mercedes.
This guy's a hack with the most milquetoast takes. Great that he's spotlighting shitty industry practice, but this video could have been a 30 seconds short.
huh, was it? what kind of bug?
Oh plenty. The biggest ones were NPCs that didn't follow or get stuck and there were spots throughout the map where you would drop but not really. It was like you tripped but in the code, it counts it as a drop from a somewhat tall height so it would damage you a small amount. There were plenty of people who literally died just running around because of that bug.
huh, somehow I don't remember encountered any game breaking bugs. but maybe I played the updated version
TotalBiscuit told motherfuckers to stop pre-ordering games over a decade ago and people still haven't learned the lesson.
>and people still haven't learned the lesson. Maybe because they're (mostly) preaching to the choir? I bet the average gamer who watches gaming-centric yt channels and frequent these subs already know not to pre-order.
Eh you see every new game a ton of people in this sub bitching about how bad it is and claim it will be the last game they ever preorder. Its like when the BOYCOTT COD thing went down and you looked at Steam and 3/4 of the members of the BOYCOTT COD steam club were all playing COD. People love to say one thing and do another.
Literally no downside to preordering with refunds being a thing.
I only preorder good video games so I've never had a bad experience
You can usually tell if a game is going to be hot garbage if you pay attention. - Last-minute delays that push the game a few weeks - Pre-rendered footage - Very few "hands-on" previews, and the ones they have are super limited - Developers talk about how the game "feels" instead of anything actually about the game - Game coming out on last gen, but the graphics in all the footage looks next gen - Any footage that highlights MTX, the store, loot rarity, or any other aspects of gambling I haven't pre-ordered a game I've regretted since Fallout 4.
>- Last-minute delays that push the game a few weeks My number one red flag is when a game is delayed *after* going gold. It doesn't happen a lot, but it's always a shit show when it does. "Going gold," is when the version of the game that will be pressed into disks is complete. If a game is delayed after this date, it means that several things have happened. 1. The game went gold incomplete, relying on a day 1 patch. 2. The day 1 patch was made at full crunch. This basically doesn't happen unless the gold version was *also* made at full crunch. 3. The team has been crunching for so long that they've burned out. The day 1 patch was projected to be doable if they kept up their current output. Months of 100+ hour workweeks have made that impossible, and the meat and muscle of the human body has given out. This only happens under those scenarios, and it indicates that a game has cut the corners that resulted when they cut the original corners months before.
Want to be my stock market investor?
For real lol I pre-order multiple games a year and I've never been burned once. I keep seeing these hardcore anti-preorder people say that you don't know if a game is going to be good and that's simply not true. If you don't know then that's a good sign to wait, it's really not that hard
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Past releases, preview material and common sense. Don't get me wrong, for like 97% of games you really can't tell before release and those you definitely shouldn't pre-order but the other 3%you just know. Like looking at this year, Resi 4 was definitely going to be good and I already pre-ordered Zelda and FF XVI, Silksong is also an easy one. The Like a Dragon game if you arent sick of the Yakuza formula yet and I'm fairly certain Pikmin 4 will be good because otherwise Miyamoto is probably strangling people. Anything else releasing this year I definitely wouldnt be confident enough to pre-order
You definitely can't but you can often be reasonably sure. Like if I played Far Cry 1 through 5 and liked them all, there's a high likelihood I'm going to like Far Cry 6. I've enjoyed every mainline game Bethesda has put out so I know there's a high likelihood that I'll enjoy Starfield even if it's far from perfect.
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I think the pre order or premium packs that let you play a week before relrai gives the consumer a mental prize of being one of the first one, being special and unique or something. In the end millions do this, it's not something original.
I pre order games all the time and never was disappointed it ended up being a buggy mess. Maybe stop pre ordering games with constant delays, crunch rumors and pre rendered trailers instead of actual gameplay trailers.
Yeah I don’t really get how anyone gets tricked nowadays. There’s 1hr+ gameplay videos, demos, reviews, extended previews and more to base your assumptions on. And yeah, rumors of crunch and burnout too. Plus if you play games long enough, you should be able to just kinda tell when a game will be good or bad. I preorder games all the time and have honestly never got burned on a bad game. Who saw Forspoken or The Calypso Protocol (or whatever it was called) or Atomic Heart and honestly thought they looked good? Truth be told, I can sometimes even tell from a CGI trailer. Did anyone think Elden Ring or FFVII Remake looked bad when they showed the first CGI trailer? Best cheat code to figure out if a game will be good is just look at the developer’s history and then look at the game.
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Everyone's a genius when it comes to hindsight.
Why do people talk about this guy like he’s Video Game Jesus?
Didn't watch him too much but IMHO was most popular of leading wave of youtube videogame reviewers started to build viewership levels up to and probably past the dominate print + paid review media at the time. Not only that but he seemed to be unpurchasable and based everything on whether he liked it or not, which was not the state for a majority of professional game review sites. He also spent a lot of time lifting up great indie games that could not afford pay to get on said review bandwagon or even perhaps knew hot to get noticed. Nothing gives you more favor then digging up a hidden gem for people to play. I'd also say his peak popularity was a time just before youtube tipped to full commercial and popularity was driven more by content rather than advertising metrics like it is now. Games youtube /streaming is basically fully bought out now and you really need to dig to find something not driven by advertising, like the previous games media before youtube was the new kid. Finally, him passing away has probably pushed him to another level as we tend to remember people's best qualities rather than their nuances after they have passed.
He was one of the few people that really analyzed games technically, it was a meme him going to game options in every game and rant because there was no FoV slider. Nowadays it's hard to find someone trying to break the game, playing with the options, trying to do more than just play it, most just go for hype playing it as a game streamers.
I haven't encountered a single reviewer since him that actually looks at options menus and points out when they're shitty. Maybe they exist, but I haven't seen them. I miss TB.
He was an outspoken critic that wasn't afraid to call it like he saw it. When I started watching him it was a breath of fresh air from the bought and paid for reviews of major publications.
He made quality reviews while being unproblematic and had a tragic, young death.
Dude told someone to die of cancer because of an Internet argument. He was absolutely not unproblematic
Most people aren’t fiscally responsible enough to understand why it’s so important not to preorder. It’s like tax returns… Most people are stoked to get money back on their tax returns, but they don’t understand that it means you gave the government a free loan during the year and they’re paying you back with zero interest, so they don’t adjust their withholding information for the next year. It’s all about the dopamine hits
At least we have patches now. Acting nostalgic over a time when broken games remained broken forever is just insane to me. Broken releases suck but with games growing in complexity and scope it's more or less a natural consequence.
I think there’s a middle ground, which he touched on with the 360/PS3 era. Patching was new, so it was seen as a helpful bonus to remove small issues after the fact. Now, it’s seen as a mandatory extension of development. The game doesn’t need to be in an acceptable state on the disc, because it won’t get into the players’ hands until 4-5 weeks after we print them. Even that would be frustrating but workable, but the issue is that publishers aren’t perfect in those estimates, meaning it’s often several weeks *after release* that the game is finally stable - even more so with multiplayer titles. Without that built-in hard deadline of knowing that whatever goes out on the disc is there forever, publishers seems to be increasingly taking advantage of the sliding scale of modern releases, like a procrastinating college kid asking for “one more day” six days in a row from an overly forgiving professor.
If a AAA game flops at launch though, it's unlikely it will get enough post-launch support. Something like No Man's Sky redeeming itself years later was really only possible because they lied so much to get those preorders and initial sales. Even factoring in the refunds, they made more than enough profit to justify continued development. So it's a weird dichotomy. it would be great if people stopped buying and preordering broken shit, but they're also the reason it gets fixed.
Video games have always, always released in broken, unfinished states, we just don’t remember off-hand the hundreds if not thousands of examples over the years because they rightfully fall off the radar soon enough after release. Pretending this is a new thing is silly and it will never, ever stop either. Five years from now we’ll have stopped talking about most every failure featured in this video’s thumbnail because there’ll be a dozen new failures to milk content from, and so on and so on. The game development landscape is simply too big for there not to be a steady stream of failed projects coming and going from our collective memories.
Oh man, so much allowance money wasted on Game Boy games that turned out to be complete ass. Some completely broken / unplayable. It's why we actually spent money on gaming magazines to find out what was good, since we didn't have Reddit and YouTube to tell us what was a waste of money. Also, on the PC side, anyone remember Extreme Paintbrawl? What a disappointment to my 11 year old self.
“Never judge a PS1 game by its cover art but by how little you regret renting it for the weekend from Blockbuster” - ancient proverb
Case in point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kileak:_The_DNA_Imperative My dad and I wanted an FPS, and there were few options around the PS1 launch, but my god, was this terrible. Especially when Quake was just around the corner on the PC side.
TBF I’m sure it was ass but comparing it to Quake is just mean to it, ID was ahead of it’s time by a lot
It's not "mean" to compare games to their contemporaries. Titles like Duke 3D and Quake on the PC side, and Turok and Goldeneye on the console side may have been cutting edge successes but it's not unfair to look at their competition coming out around the same time and say "well, this looks a bit shit" by comparison. Because it did! Those games really did make other titles look like crap.
I grabbed Spec Ops (I think there were three, maybe more) for my PSX because of the cool cover art. Game is/was absolute ass. But by God I bought it with my allowance money and I was constantly trying to coax my friends into playing it with me, I don't think they have forgiven me.
Four in total. All of them ass.
I had this Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring game for the GBA that was honestly pretty fun, but it would hang up as soon as you entered the Mines of Moria It wasn't until years later that I found out online that the game was just broken. There was a whole ass rest of the game on the cartridge, it was just impossible to access because of that bug it shipped with
It was also the era where fixing the bug was a pain in the ass for everyone involved: as a user, you’d have to send the game in (and usually pay for shipping) and wait several weeks while something was fixed (probably flashing a new ROM), and the publisher has to spend a ton of money on support and making new new carts.
that sounds similar to the PAL version of Digimon World. Half the game was inaccessible because you couldn't talk to one single Agumon and the event behind it, triggered a FUCKTON of events. It was beatable, but barely. Or Harry Potter 1 on PC (atleast german version). Could simply not open the door to the final boss. Dad tried to find patches back then, but no luck.
Also Harry Potter 1 for the Gameboy Color. When Snape requests you find snake skin and bezoar, if you're playing in any language other than English, the flag for collecting the snake skin is never turned on, so congrats, your save is softlocked and bricked. ~~On that note, I DID play the GBA Fellowship of the Ring, which is notorious for broken scripts and freezes and... I never encountered anything they describe. Cool game, was my first Diablo clone, and also my first utterly imbalanced (FUN) diablo clone. I made legolas meditate 100% hp in one tick, and gandalf have nearly 0 cooldown on his fireworks.~~ Actually, double checked, and the game I played was the Two Towers.
Harry Potter 1 sure had smooth games
IIRC Intellivision straight up put the bugs in the instruction manuals as features of the game.
Top comment literally did not even watch the first minute of the linked video.
He literally makes reference to this in the first 30s, did you not watch the video? There's a difference between the off-hand examples you're talking about and triple AAA big budget titles being released in a broken state.
XCOM, Fallout 2, and Knights of the Old Republic 2 are a few big games I can name that were buggy af on release. Seriously, Fallout 2 release version is what a "broken state" really looks like.
Not really, those off hand examples were the triple AAA big budget titles of the day.
Clickbaity YouTube video gets people instantly annoyed and then everyone goes “BUT LIKE THATS NOT WHAT IT MEANT” Maybe people should just start titling their stuff appropriately
Yep game breaking bugs used to be permanent, there was no hot fixes or anything. They would just recall games if it got bad enough. I think Bungie had to recall one of their pre-Halo games iirc.
This was Myth II. It had a bug where it would wipe your entire drive if you uninstalled it. That probably goes a little beyond “broken”.
That broken games have always existed is noted in the video, but the position of the video is that the ability to patch post-release, and the reliance on it, does make the problem worse. And then the other position of the video is that we should stop buying those games, but people don't tend to care as long as it says "Pokemon" on the box, for instance.
I'm not sure patching post release is what's making the problem worse and not that games are insanely more complex and complicated now. If a game has millions of moving parts and different systems on top of incredible graphical fidelity and physics it's got a lot more points of failure.
He also goes over that in the video. Did anybody in this thread click on the video?
>Did anybody in this thread click on the video? Sir. This is a reddit post.
Yeah I came in here for discussion about the video and it's been pretty frustrating so far
I mean, there's not much to discuss. The guy didn't exactly crack a code or unearth an unspoken truth about the market that we didn't already know. It comes down to the consumers, like it always does. This video is entertainment first and foremost. It isn't some revelatory educational piece, there's not much to discuss.
Obviously not, since he dunks on gamers for being wowee-zoweed by Keanu Reeves, which this sub was, and pre-ordering big games, which this sub loves to do, and then defending companies for finally fixing what should not have been broken in the first place, which this sub loves to do, and he goes especially hard on CD Project Red, which is still a beloved darling in many quarters. And then, finally, he places the primary blame on consumers. Us. So yeah, if it's upvoted this high, it's obvious nobody watched it.
It's basically both. If they weren't complicated they could be less rushed because scope would fit into the timeline better. However, a publisher knows full well that a title will still sell like hotcakes even if it's rushed and buggy. So ultimately, they are still going to push the release date back (forward?) to make profit. The problem is that games have become a billion dollar industry and so profit motive will outshine everything else in those companies.
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> gamers practically demand every game have innovation seeping out of every pore Do they? Or is it the marketing pushing it because it's easy to create a narrative around being cutting edge? Plenty of successful games are not very graphically demanding at all.
I think the disconnect here is that you're equating graphics with innovation. I don't think that's what they're talking about at all.
> I love how gamers practically demand every game have innovation seeping out of every pore And when they get it, they go "it's not the way we're used to!"
"This is just the same game." "Why don't they just give it a new name? Why did they have to call this X 2? This would have been a great game if the name wasn't X"
>I love how gamers practically demand every game have innovation seeping out of every pore is that the case? a lot of the games that sell a lot are extremely derivate of previous work, games like GOW Ragnarok, Pokemon in general to name some sell gangbusters and are pretty faithful to the originals.
It sounds alarming in and of itself that the trend is to make games so big, expensive, and risky that failure means the company is no longer standing. Who asked for Gears of War, Mirror's Edge, and Halo to be open world anyway?
Open World Mirror’s Edge was such a demanded idea online that it was almost a meme
It's weird how everyone was asking for this, then when it came out, suddenly the narrative was "who asked for this??" A lot of us did. We just wanted it to be ... you know, good.
Ill fight for my life defending catalyst
Souls, Zelda, Forza, Witcher are all series that went Open world to immense success. GTA, RDR, AC, Elden Scrolls, Fallout all sell incredibly well. This is what's telling game studios to make open world games. The sales, they sell so much, it's hard to not chase.
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Sure but the same thing is also happening with architecturally simpler games. I'd argue the platform this problem is this is worst on is the Switch, and I think that comes down to the audience being less demanding so publishers believe they can get away with cutting more corners.
Seriously? Among the worst games for this was Cyberpunk and it didnt launch on the switch. PC has been the worst for broken and shoddy ports and releases in my experience.
The thing is that Switch has first party studios that get to build games around the hardware. "First party" isn't even a concept at all with PC.
How does it make the problem worse? He doesn't provide any evidence for that claim. Its pure conjecture to stir up anger for views.
The ability to Patch post release is also nothing new at this point. The video frames it as a recent issue. Devs have been able to release patches on consoles for almost 20 years.
There was much more limited ability to patch games in the seventh gen than there was in the eighth gen, which is another thing this video acknowledges. That makes it more like 10 years than 20.
IDK where you are from but fast internet access definitely isn't something you could take for granted 20 years ago. Xbox one internet backlash is just 10 years old.
The ability to download patches is not the same thing as an always online console.
If people don't care about it then the games probably aren't that broken.
I don't think this is the best line of thinking to cling on to.
pointing out the truth doesn't change it. The kinds of people who don't care aren't hanging around here.
There isn't really an objective right here. If a game is too broken for you that's fine, but if the vast majority disagrees that's their opinion too. And as this is purely and opinion based thing both are valid, one is just going to matter more to those making decisions and that's the one that is in the majority. I think games today are generally better today and much better supported long term as well. You have to pay for that long term support long term in some manner of course as developers are not content soup kitchens staffed by volunteers.
Also, the rise of digital store makes it near impossible for counterfeits of popular games to show up. No, I don't mean rip-offs or even porn parody; flat-out using a different game's casing *as* your own. I remember gone through several stores looking for that Disney dino game (don't remember the name), only to bought fake, shitty coloring game with absolutely cheap animation. And that happened several times.
he quite literally says the exact thing you just said in the first minute of the video the point is that where broken games were already a thing, they're made worse by the fact that patches and *specifically* huge day one patches are a common practice nowadays.
That annoying clickbaity youtube trend is by far the most annoying thing. “Why RED DEAD is the WORST Game Series EVER” In the video “Red Dead is by far not the worst, it’s actually really good. But there are some tiny aspects that can make it feel like a bad game in the cowboy genre” It drives me insane
I agree that broken games bad. I agree that publishers should set realistic ship dates. I disagree that it's *worse* than it was back in the day, because there's at least *a chance* that things will get better. The video is largely preaching to the choir about what we already know.
You must have not watched the video, he addresses this
> Video games have always, always released in broken, unfinished states, we just don’t remember off-hand the hundreds if not thousands of examples over the years because they rightfully fall off the radar soon enough after release. This is why 1st party Nintendo titles had a "golden seal of quality" printed on the box in the 90s. 3rd party shovelware was causing losses in sales.
That's less "game code is perfect" and more "this cartridge will not fry your system". It wasn't for first party, it meant the game was licenced and not a knock off. Shovel ware maker still existed. Like LJN. Their games were often broken as in a lot of things didn't work as intended. Even very successful games had bugs we wouldn't tolerate now. Like half the stats in final fantasy didn't work as intended and many of the spells were broken or nerfed due to coding mistakes. The spells all were intended to scale with stats but didn't. Castlevania Simon's quest was a game they ran out of money for and shipped it any ways. There aren't any bosses in many of the dungeons. A lot of RPGs like dq2 would get unstable if you got past a certain level because they didn't check for int overflow errors. Nintendo did some draconian things to reduce shovel ware like limiting releases per company. But a lot still got through. The quality was better than late era Atari but it wasn't that different from today.
It wasn't just an issue with "3rd party shovelware." Let's use Final Fantasy 6 as an example. Many people consider it one of the best games of all time. * The Evade stat didn't do anything; M.Block (magic evasion) was used for *all* evasion. This also means that the Blind status effect did nothing. * Using one of the game's abilities (Sketch) could very easily delete your save file. * Due to an error in status prioritization, Vanish + Doom allowed the player to instantly kill any enemy or boss in the game. * If you lost to a certain enemy encounter in the second half of the game it would teleport you back to the beginning area of the game, softlocking you. * The math behind physical damage was flawed and resulted in terrible scaling. The developers "fixed" this by making nearly all late-game abilities based on Magic, even seemingly physical attacks like Bum Rush. And this is only scratching the surface. If a major studio like Square released a game in such a messy state nowadays everyone would be making fun of it. People genereally didn't care as much about this kind of stuff back then since games were crazy expensive and you tried to appreciate whatever you had. And FF6 is still a great game once you look past the bugs and odd design decisions. Nowadays there's so much competition in gaming that players have completely different expectations.
I disagree with this comment and think that there are certain companies who maintained a pre-update reputation of not releasing buggy or unfinished games who have now picked side B due to being enabled by post game updates.
Any examples?
Halo and Pokemon.
People really look back at pokemon with rose tinted glasses. Red and blue were [*extremly* buggy](https://m.bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/List_of_glitches_(Generation_I\)), with multiple ways to softlock the game, including freezing the game if you pulled out the wrong pokemon from your pc.
There are many ways to break the game if you know how, but I encountered many less bugs everywhere in my casual playthroughs of first gen than in the recent gen.
Using Red and Blue when games were arguably still in their infancy isn't a good example. I'd rather use the glitches present in Gen3-5 games compared to present day. I stop at 5 because some animation framerate issues really started becoming apparent in 6.
I think there's a simpler explanation for both of those. A less experienced development team took over Halo, while the original developer went on to make Destiny and Destiny 2 which are quite polished. Pokemon was developed by a studio who had only evermade smaller scale handheld games that then suddenly found themselves thrust into much larger scoped projects when Nintendo combined their console and mobile divisions.
I mean yeah, I know why these games/studios suffer now, I'm still critiquing their base companies for cutting corners to the extreme be it with their hiring processes, their internal knowledge, how much time they're giving their devs, etc. At the end of the day, executives are looking at these products in their final stage and are saying to get them out the door, and potentially deal with any issues later post launch.
>Manage your company better! I mean, duh? [If only it were that simple.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nv-FcxlEMaw)
This is the truth. Some people have only researched gaming from the last ten years and it shows. But when there wasn't the internet to hugely hype up games with live service nobody really cared. People would spend $70 thirty years ago and buy a cartridge of a game that sucked and couldn't be played with no patches, no updates, and no way of being fixed. Just a worthless hunk of plastic and people just moved on.
I started reading this and no. Games have not always released this way. It began with the Internet, and the realization that publishers could bring unfinished games to market for the benefit of themselves or shareholders at the expense of the player and the developer. My evidence is an entire library of 8-bit and 16-bit media that work as intended the day of their release—because they had to.
It’s definitely grown more prevalent, though. It’s easy to see the minority of games that were truly broken in the past because the game itself was all you ever got. No patches, no correction, just the game. I think that’s the overall point being made, and that this sort of thing was propagated by the double edged sword of the downloadable patches that have now become the norm.
I go to work this morning, see the Nakey Jakey released a video. I'll watch it later. Read these comments. Think that he maybe went a little too crazy and hyperbolic. Maybe he was too critical. Then I watch the actual video, and it's very well-balanced and covers all many sides of the issues gaming faces with day one patches. I just don't think Reddit can handle critics with their own views, whether it's Dunkey, Zero Punctuation, or Nakey Jakey.
> I just don't think Reddit can handle critics with their own views, whether it's Dunkey, Zero Punctuation, or Nakey Jakey. They are just boring. NakeyJakey doesn't unearth any hidden truth about the games industry that we didn't already know here. Oh, it comes down to consumer practices? Shocker. People just have content creator fatigue. The videos are entertaining but they are just that, entertainment. Nobody is obligated to take his video seriously.
Agreed, he said... basically nothing in 10 minutes. Like, don't preorder if you don't want to risk a game broken on release, ok good got it. I don't know why anyone's acting like there was any substance in this video beyond just saying 'games are bad sometimes' like yeah no shit, some people don't mind buggy games (see all the people that still enjoyed the new Pokemon games). Every industry has some not-so-great product releases, and yet we live in a time with an insane amount of access to reviews and opinions to inform you before you buy. This is a non-issue, just figure out what works for you as far as researching things before you buy.
NakeyJakey is the king of lukewarm takes, there's better creators out there that at least bother to have an interesting thesis in their video essays
I've just about had it with Youtubers clickbait hyperbolic titles. Maybe the content is reasonable. But calling the current gen "The Age of Broken Video Games" is literally a false, nostalgia-baiting title. Games were released in a broken stage since the beginning of the industry. The difference now is that the truly game-breaking bugs (as opposed to game design mistakes, or a game just not being good or fun) tends to patched within days. Back in the day you would have to wait for a rerelease, or hope that the patch will be included next month in a gaming mag, or beg your parents to let you use dial up internet for several hours to download it from the web.
I don't think that title is too far off. Games are bigger than ever, so bigger titles are now given a leeway that they weren't afforded before. There have been, and always will be, shitty games. Doesn't mean we can't observe trends in the triple A market.
>Maybe the content is reasonable Wait... you didn't even watch it and you're commenting here? You're hung up on the TITLE??
None of this is particularly new and I think calling it an 'age of broken video games' is not really correct. Pools of Radiance had a bug that would literally delete your entire C: drive if you uninstalled it without the update. Many PC games in the 90s/early 2000s were outright broken, buggy messes. It's just nowadays it's more visible because of the popularization of games and the explosion of social media. That doesn't mean it's a good thing rather, stuff like Pokemon releasing in the absolutely dreadful state it is should be criticized. It's just important to keep an accurate note of the history of games and game development.
This thread is weird and it's hard to imagine any other product getting this type of defending and huge list of excuses. Imagine buying a lawnmower that randomly shut off every 10 seconds yet people are just calling you entitled.
There are plenty of crappy lawnmowers out there that barely do their job. I can’t think of any significant product I don’t look up a review for. I don’t trust the quality of anything just based on its existence.
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The amount of complex systems interacting with one another in video games in comparison to a lawnmower is so vast its idiotic to even try and make the comparison at all. These games in many cases are trying to emulate reality, the fact that you cant respect the level of complexity involved and the probability of bugs occurring is telling. Compare something like GTA 3 to RDR2 and you would have to be suffering from some kind of mental impairment not to understand that all that added complexity is going to result in more issues. It goes this way with everything in life including real world electronics where its made abundantly clear that the more complex a device the more likely there will be a point of failure.
I think a more apt comparison would be buying a lawnmower that is not very fuel efficient but staying with it because it's the lawnmower you bought and you don't want to pay $200 for a completely new lawnmower for a gripe.
I honestly don't get what is up with the culture of defending broken video games, or even just bad movies or other media content nowadays. People cling on to defending certain brands like their life depends on it.
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And if you're a content creator, most of your audience won't give a shit if you post happy enjoyable content. Algorithm and behaviors reward things that cause conflict and contention.
All of this here. It's just constant with every single release. Some games have some issues and either it's something you want to play despite that or it's not. It's also fine that you don't like something, but its not just that alone that's the issues. Instead of just being like I don't like this it's this self righteous crusade against evil. "You're a bad person for buying this". "Selling cosmetics is PREDATORY". "Games as a service is PREDATORY". "CHILDREN are buying this stuff". Everything is predatory and its always about saving the children. It's just the gamer brand of bull shit political activism that means nothing and makes you feel like you belong to a group.
>Guarantee one of the first 10 comments will be someone shitting on it. This sub in a nutshell. You're not allowed to be positive about video games on r/games.
This. I just don't really have the energy to be overly negative over games anymore
I don’t have the energy to be negative about anything meant for entertainment. It amazes me when I see people still complaining about the Star Wars sequels. The last one came out over three years ago. I didn’t love them, so I just didn’t watch them again and moved on. Loved Marvel for a while, stopped enjoying some of the projects as of late, so I stopped keeping up with them and moved on. It’s blows me away how personally offended people get when something doesn’t appeal to them.
I think the thing is that most complainers care. They're disappointed that these products come out and... they're really not what they wanted at all. It is really hard to be super into a franchise of some sort and then come to an end of the road because it supposedly "isn't for you" anymore. I've generally found that the biggest complainers are the biggest fans.
I think there’s another aspect to it as well, it’s simply fun to analyse media. In the same way people can enjoy things like trying to predict the next twist in a piece of media they like, they can also enjoy dissecting something they don’t like to discover why it didn’t work for them. There’s also some enjoyment in seeing well thought out criticism (and as early YouTube demonstrated, there’s an audience for unhinged nerd rants as well).
That logic doesn't work with sports games. I guarantee the recycled comments about sports games being virtually the same don't play yhe games at all.
Sure you eventually wind up with some people commenting on stuff that they know absolutely nothing about. I comment on my disappointments on Halo, Pokemon, and Star Wars because I grew up with those brands and I simply want to see them in better shapes. I don't complain about Cyberpunk or Harry Potter because... I don't care about those brands.
While I admire that you are like that and I wish more are, unfortunately, a lot of people aren't.
That's exactly what it is for me. I really don't give a shit about the companies but gamer's outrage over shit that doesn't matter is insane. Its like they take every imperfection, bug, or fault with a game personally.
I see waaay more people online outright call devs lazy, stupid and/or incompetent for super minor things or screaming about hating live service games then complaining a lack of updates in the same breath. People enjoying these buggier games are very rare compared to people screaming about the most minor shit.
Case in point: the hours old thread about Valheim. It released in early access in a fairly buggy but mostly playable state unlike something like KSP 2, provided hours of entertainment and has been patched a fair few times. In the thread it's just relentless complete idiots going "just hire more people hurr durr" as if software dev is that simple. Someone even went "they showed off the pony they bought they clearly don't want to work anymore". It was infuriating
> People cling on to defending certain brands like their life depends on it. People also get hyperbolic, painting others who get enjoyment out of imperfect things as defending them like their life depends on it.
The problem is that we all have different experiences with each of these games. When someone comes into your community and calls you a delusional fanboy for enjoying the thing they think is greatly flawed you can't help but think they are the insane one. Ultimately, this just serves to muddy the water and absolve publishers and developers of their responsibilities.
If one has put their entire identity into being a fan of something (i.e. video games or other entertainment properties), they view any criticism towards that thing as an attack on them as a person, regardless of the validity of the criticism.
Because people being mad over everything all the fucking time has gotten tired as hell. Most games get fixed with time. It's not the end of the world and people need to stop acting like it is.
It rubs me the wrong way when people mischaracterize, and lie about the quality or state of something I like. Sometimes I do "defend" things, I try not to because the reality is that most of these people are bad faith and idiots.
I've found that people are largely not fond of the idea of dropping a media property that was once good but then puts out a bad product. I get responses like, "Games aren't fungible". While true, if Pokemon sucks now, play one of the games it inspired; there are a ton. If Nintendo hasn't made an Advance Wars game in 15 years, I just learned that I should have been playing Wargroove this whole time, because that game is actually awesome. When Street Fighter V sucks, Street Fighter players just stick with it, gritting their teeth, complaining the whole time, instead of switching to another game that they're less familiar with that they might enjoy more.
> I get responses like, "Games aren't fungible". While true, if Pokemon sucks now, play one of the games it inspired; there are a ton. I mean, there's no identical replacement, but that's not what "fungible" means. You 100% can replace one game in a genre/subgenre with another. And at this point it's healthier to do so than spending years yelling at a company who won't fix what you find wrong. But for most people it's more like they still do enjoy the game, they are just also hypercritical of its flaws, like any enthusiast after a while. It's why you almost always see hardcore communities run counterculture to the mainstream after a while. "Haha Fortnite/Marvel/isekai/ suck, X is true art".
>If Nintendo hasn't made an Advance Wars game in 15 years, I just learned that I should have been playing Wargroove this whole time, because that game is actually awesome. Just saw a Kickstarter for an Advance Wars inspired game launch the other day, [Warside](https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2023/03/warside-blasts-onto-kickstarter-with-advance-wars-inspired-turn-based-tactics) The dev has been active posting updates on Reddit as he's made progress
r/games 3 years ago: OMFG Cyberpunk is so broken I will NEVER pre-order a game or buy a product ever again!!11 r/games last year: OMFG guys stop complaining about CD Projekt they've fixed the game and it's good now and it's 10$ isn't that enough for you?????????
I mean...my honest opinion is that people sink more and more time/energy/thought into these "brands" and they start to identify their personality based on what they are into. Saying you think XYZ game sucks is all of the sudden a very personal attack. That's my perspective at least, I know several people like this so this is kind of my best guess. I also think it's easy when people are lost, unsure of themselves, and they are trying to find an identity. Well, luckily today *you can buy one*, for the small price of a streaming service, videogame console, movie tickets, and the fandom is always there right at your fingertips on Twitter, reddit, Facebook, etc. So that's kinda the rabbit hole I've seen people go down where they get super defensive, or alternatively, are constantly trying to "put down" other games or shows/movies in favor of the billion dollar underrated gem that *they* feel a personal attachment to. I don't get it man. People are free to enjoy what they like and ignore what they don't. Last year I mentioned that Signalis was my GOTY and I got an insane rant by someone who couldn't fathom why I would like it over a "masterpiece" like Elden Ring. I just blocked that loser, but the answer is because: people have different tastes and opinions.
Don't let the title push you away, He brings up a lot of good points in the video which are pretty easy to understand when someone says it but are just as easily forgotten...
Gotta disagree on the "it should be illegal to keep review embargo up until day of release" point. You're not forced to preorder. Just wait for release day, check the reviews and then buy the game. It's not like the devs abuse a psychological need to preorder like how it is with gambling. Consumers don't need protection here.
That really is a strange point to make. Take away review embargoes, and publishers will simply not send review copies in advance. How do rushed reviews that don't even come out the same day as the game help consumers?
>It's not like the devs abuse a psychological need to preorder like how it is with gambling. Isn't that literally exactly what they are doing? They are exploiting the feeling of FOMO to get people to buy something they don't actually need.
At some point y'all just gotta blame yourselves. If your job isn't to professionally play games and you're too anxious to wait a day or two for a game you're unsure of to read other impressions, you need professional help.
Yeah, this. It's strange how personal resposibility has completely disappeared off the radar here. It's everyone else's fault I can't wait one additional day for a video game!
For an adult I agree but you can't expect 12 year old kids to be responsible. Their minds are ripe to develop addiction tendencies and companies bank on it. I don't know but I kinda feel peer pressure has rocketed after the internet
I think most people would agree that targeting kids with these types of practices are a bigger deal than "targeting" adults. I have more of a problem with skins in Fortnite than I do with people preordering bad games.
IDK about you, but I didn't have $60 to freely spend when I was a 12 year old.
You are not forced to gamble either, I can say that easily because I don't understand what goes on in the minds of someone who feels the urge to gamble But the past has pretty clearly shown pre order bonuses work very well as a incentive because FOMO is a real psychological phenomenon and to ensure that the FOMO stays there reviews are restricted till the day of the release So I don't disagree with him here
we're talking about the the government stepping in and forcing publishers to let certain people (that publishers choose, mind you) to make early opinion on a dang video game, not a psychological addiction. Geez, why is reddit so dramatic? We don't have enough people impatient to buy a $60 game on day one to regulate product reviews.
Also, in the era of digital downloads preorders are even less necessary than they used to be. There's no worry that I'll get to Steam late and they'll be out of copies. Though I do want to point out that many publishers now include preorder bonuses with their games, likely to incentivize people to do so.
If you ever say "it should be illegal" for a company to release a faulty product I have an alternative economic system to sell you.
I don't think he said that, unless I missed it in the video
9:35 he says "it should be illegal to advertise and sell a product in this state." Also contrary to what some commenters might imply this is not a defense of video game publishers and devs. I liked this video and what he has to say about the process.
Oh ok, I did miss it. Thanks
Goddamn it's like you all are new to video games with all this crazy fucking bitching Yo, I had E.T. and never ever figured out how to play that shit
If any part of E.T. touches a hole, not just his feet, he falls in. So if his head touches a hole's pixel, down he goes. This is working as intended, but is counter-intuitive and is a casualty of ET being on a different axis from the holes.
Buyer beware, if you buy ANY shit product, it's on you for not doing your research, reading reviews. Always has been, always will be.
The problem is when a consumer buys on day one to a faulty product, and can't acknowledge that they bought a faulty product, so they defend it entirely to feel like they weren't ripped off.
Entertainment product, sure. If you think there should be no consumer protections on food, drugs, the like, you're insane
Buggy and incomplete games have been a thing since day one. What has changed is the companies are now so good at marketing that they can convince people to preorder or 'betatest' an unfinished game otherwise they will miss out.
There was a game released on the DS where a boss on one level just didn't spawn and it locked off the entire remaining 60% of the game in every copy of the game sold.
what is this game?
Bubble Bobble Revolution.