Re: Stupid gamers, expecting games to work!

On Mon, 4 Nov 2024 11:52:19 +0100, H1M3M <wipnoah@gmail.com> wrote:

Spalls Hurgenson wrote:

 
Deputy CEO at Paradox recently lamented that modern players these
days have too "high expectations" and are weirdly less trusting that
 developers will fix problems in their games.

>
I "miss" the times when games came in Read only cartridges and cds, with
no option to patch the game. Developers were pretty worried about game
breaking / crashing bugs as once the game released, there was no fixing
unless the game was considered for a reprint. Running into a bug that
destroyed your entire save (Zelda: Twilight Princess Cannon room save
glitch) was reputation ruining.
>

I can't say I really "miss" those days --there's a lot to be said for
the ease of digital downloads-- but there is definitely something to
be said about how the difficulty of patching games forced publishers
to put more focus on Q&A _before_ a game got released. Or just to
ensure that a game was actually feature-complete when it was sold,
rather than "Oh, we'll add that later... maybe even as a paid DLC!"

But it wasn't only the changing of formats that permitted this; the
legal landscape also changed in publishers favor as well, with
numerous cases indicating that end-users had little recourse if they
purchased (sorry, "licensed") buggy software, especially if the
publishers eventually got around to fixing it.

OR maybe that's all nostalgia bullshit. it's not that games had less
bugs, but that the information did not reach further when just a few
could afford access to usenet or a BBS before internet became common.
Mortal Kombat 3 on snes crashed all the time, and I have heard the
Ultimate version was even worse.

Microprose used to have a reputation for extremely buggy software (I
think "Darklands" (1992) went through ten patch versions before they
called it a day (and it was _still_ buggy after all that). Origin had
issues with software quality too (famously, "Wing Commander" always
crashed on exit. Rather than fix it, they edited the error message to
say 'Have a nice day' so users wouldn't notice ;-)

Still, I think that it's not just an issue of end-users not being
aware of the issues so much as that modern video games are just _much
more_ complex than what we played with twenty or thirty years ago.
They're moving a lot more data, and they're doing a lot more with that
data.


(I wonder if there's a study that shows the ratio between bugs vs
lines of code in video games. I'd wager it's remained fairly steady
over the years -perhaps it's even gone down!- but the sheer volume of
code is overwhelming everything else)

There's just so much more opportunity for things to go wrong with
modern games. Then there's the problems that crop up when games are
multiplatform, and the larger variety of hardware (and software) that
games have to support. In the DOS days, your games had to do
everything and you could control exactly what it was doing; nowadays,
you got DOS, and Linux, and Mac, and innumerable bits of software
running in the background, and it's just a tangled mess.


TL;DR; complexity costs.  ;-)