One thing I dislike about PC games (mostly new) And now sadly console games. Is that the final product when released always seems to have bugs/flaws in it. I'm not talking about the random glitch that happens every now and again. But large glitches that happen repeatedly, crashes, or just plane bad game mechanics.

I remember a time when a computer game would come out, it would get a patch or 2 and that would be that. A console game needing a patch or tweak was unheard of . (I think the console patches piss me off the most) Take for example star craft 2. Like the game, didn't encounter any major glitches/bugs. Never had the game crash on me, but once a month or so the update it to rebalanced the races. Ie shorter build time, more damage etc. Now some of the re balancing was necessary others not so much . But I miss the time when the needs to tweak the games were taken care of in the beta stage, so that the finished product was that, finished.

Now with computers, having some bugs with a game and needing patches was\is somewhat expected. (not every one having the same hardware, software, etc).One of the main things I liked about the consoles was that I would never have to worry about buying a new game and finding it fatally flawed. A random glitch that would only some times affect the game was the biggest problem I would have with them. It kills me today when my stupid PS or Xbox needs to download a patch for a game! That was a computer problem, now it seems to be a developer problem that affects all platforms :(

So its to the point wear I generally don't buy a game until its been out for a month or more just to avoid the headache of falling into flaws that were missed and or not dealt with before the release date. To be fair I'm also really really cheap, so that also contributes a great deal to the rarity of my purchasing newly released games. :p

I was wondering if anyone else has the same annoyances with gaming as I do?

P.S My lawn...Get off it.

I've just had an annoying experience with a console game, namely Ratchet & Clank for PS3. There's a bug in the installer of all things. What it means is that if you have the "wrong" amount of free space on your HDD, you cannot install the game. Note that the "wrong" amount does not mean "not enough space", it means "certain arbitrary ranges" of free space, which, due to a bug in the way the installer calculates free disk space, means that the installer will conclude that you don't have enough space available, and refuse to install the game. The only workaround is to add or remove data to/from the drive in an attempt to reach an amount of free space which the installer will accept.

How it is possible to ship a AAA console title with such a glaring bug is beyond me.

On the PC side I think part of the problem is the explosion of the hardware and software side of things; simply put there are more and more possible combinations out there and that makes it ever harder to build a stable, new age game that will run smooth without faults - because upon release there are bound to be a whole slew of combinations of software and hardware that the designers just could note feasibly test for (even with open Beta testing you need a big open beta across several regional areas to really beat this).


As for the consoles I'll say its down to poor porting of titles cross platform to allow a bigger potential market coverage; and thus more profit. In the past a console game was made for one single console - very very few were cross platform. Today cross platform is becoming more commonplace - hence the increased problems when games are ported fast and cheap (worst is console to pc ports where they dont' change the control visuals - press the square button does not help when you don't have one on the keyboard :P).


I would also say that there is more of a move now toward faster development of titles and release - further groups like EA prefer to do a quicker product turnaround - release - update - move on; rather than sticking it out with a single release for a longer support period (makes some sense for the company, since games are like films in that the initial release is normally its peek and thereafter sales fall away fast - as too does the market price).


In addition we have a new wave of developer ideas (mostly Stardock and indy games) which are deliberately released incomplete and then worked on as the game is on sale. This creates games with a high release bug problem - but which in time can be very solid performers.
It is a minefield however - get it right and you get something like Sins of a Solar Empire - highly popular and well made. Get it wrong and you get Elemental War of Magic a release so full of bugs that it flopped and failed to impact and limps on to either be abandoned or present a serious loss on the part of the developers (they are giving away their first expansion to all owners of the game - a big loss of potential earnings there).(oddly though this game, dispite its many flaws, has remained high in Impulse's top sellers list.

Just out of curiosity, have you ever tried programming? If you manage to make a complicated and bug free program, let me know how ;)

Sometimes glitches are a bit perplexing, like the first time I played Mass Effect 2, I fell through the floor almost at the very beginning. A few hours later the character suddenly jumped through the roof and got stuck. In Crysis 2 multiplayer, I fell through the floor and people called me a cheater after I power jumped back into the map. Usually I just laugh at the bugs I encounter and load an earlier save (or in case of multiplayer, say "NO U").

As I rememeber it, old games, too, used to have a lot of glitches and bugs (some critical), both pre and post patch, PC or console. I haven't seen any really critical bugs in a while, other than performance issues.

Which is tough to deal with, a surprising number of "bugs" are really the result of poor quality hardware or drivers. And the game developers have no way of dealing with that.

Blood 2 was completely unplayable on my GeForce card, but now that I'm using an ATI card I can get it to run pretty well without a whole lot of crashes.

Bugs used to be WORSE with PC games. Try playing some of the 90s Dungeon and Dragon games like Darksun 1 and 2.

Ya'll forget about DaggerFALL? It wasn't the lichs or vampires I feared, it was randomly falling through the dungeon floor into oblivion. This is a game released in 1996. Before widespread internet access.