One thing that has continually frustrated me time and time again has been the output of design studios, game manufacturers within the past decade. There has been a steady decline of quality from all outlets, as games are pushed further, deadlines are cut, and developers (both hardware and software) are pushed to the brink of their respective physical, mental, and emotional limits. With a myriad of issues surfacing more and more each day, those limits are either beginning to be realized by consumers, and ignored by the offending companies.
From a hardware standpoint, there has been a massive speculation about Microsoft’s latest console, the Xbox 360. With varying reports saying that their latest console showing anywhere from 16% upwards to almost a 60% failure rate. When the Wii launched, it’s update service was bricking a small number of consoles. There were a few recalls/fixes for some major game accessories as well – Nintendo sent out a batch of straps and wiimote sleeves for added protection, and Rock Band’s guitars were suffering from issues with the whammy bar. I’m sure I’m missing a few on this list, and I am only going back a few years in terms of hardware issues.
I guess I should give some slack to the issues that have spawned up in the manufacturing process, as there will always be a small failure rate for any mass produced product. Bad CDs will be made, and defective consoles will get out there, and it will normally be a small majority (with the exception of the widespread issues with the 360) who have the bad luck and inconvenience to deal with the problem, and get a replacement.
However, I’m not so quick to hold my tongue on software releases, as there is a bit more involvement of putting together the game from start to finish, then declaring a product gold, and sending it out for mass duplication. From conception to gold, it’s all input: the development process, the investors, the studio, and your distributors.
For instance, I searched Kotaku for “bugs”, and “issues”, and I came up with a few recent games with some slightly annoying to fairly serious issues:
GTA IV (PS3)- Crashing/Freezing and multiplayer issues
Castle Crashers – Online play issues causing players to lose their entire save files
Bully: Scholarship Edition (360 Port) – Freezing Issues
Guitar Hero III (Wii) – Mono sound in a music game
The list goes (The Orange Box (PS3), Saints Row, Rainbow Six Vegas, Battlefield 2), and I only went back a few pages for each search to get a broad idea of what’s come up recently. Some of these issues are near unforgivable, so glaring that it would seem that any competitent programmer/tester should have been able to see the issue from a mile away, and have made note of it before this was released to the masses. When you look back, how many consoles had recalls, or huge defects, or games went out so buggy that they were unplayable? While it wasn’t something that I noted when I was that young, it seems like the rate of failure and growing issues post-release seems to be coalescing at an alarming speed.
Before I piss off any game studio employee that may be scouting this blog to check me out for employment, I don’t outright question the quality of the employees that are creating and testing these products. In one hand, the problem lies on the gaming community. Gaming as a socially accepted hobby has become much more mainstream than it was twenty years ago. The competition between genres, studios, and product sequels is so fierce as new features, upgraded graphics, larger environments, and hours upon hours of gameplay are crammed into the products that it is forseeable that losing sight of anything is not possible — but probable. And why is there such a frenzy for all these additions? Consumers flock to the shiny, new features that are released. Media tends to highlight games with something new to offer, rather than focus on simple design and elegant gameplay. Because of this, studios can’t ignore what is inevitably required of them, and the laundry list of things to add piles up fast. The involvement of people in one major game release jumps into the hundreds, development cycles jump into multiples of years, IP and projects change hands as publishers, producers, marketing and corporate execs clash heads over features, content, the release timetable. And none of this aids in speeding up the release of the game by any means.
All of this is beyond me, and far removed from my biggest issue that has been plauging the industry lately. When it comes to games released in the past five years, I have grown increasingly sick of companies using the internet as a crutch for their development cycle. It seems that games now have a release schedule that extends far beyond going gold, and the definition of “gold” is almost unquestionably turning into “beta”: A studio finishes a game to get as complete as they can, to get as close as they can to the wishes of their higher-up’s for both the feature set and the timetable requested. The game is then packaged and sold to millions in its released locations. The developers then field the mass of bugs and issues that come up with the game, and release a patch over the ‘net shortly thereafter to fix what has come up. With PC games, this is okay – you can’t expect a developer to be able to test every driver, every setup that exists out there. But consoles? Come on.
As much as I am giddy for LBP’s release – they are only going to be releasing the online “create” functionality down the road. While their marketing spin on it almost makes sense (give the gamers time to actually learn the tools before you go working with others), it doesn’t remove them from hitting the principle problem.
Don’t rely on the internet to release an unfinished, unpolished product. It’s your job to keep your feature set managable in the time that you require to finish it in, including proper time to thoroughly test the product.
