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The Way Forward, an update from the team behind Cities: Skylines
(forum.paradoxplaza.com)
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this post was submitted on 18 Apr 2024
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Games
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Remember when games used to be a finished product on a cartridge/CD? You just bought it at the store for a base price of a video game and that was it. Any bugs found in the game became widely accepted, and maybe even exploited by competitive gamers. But there was no patching, no updates, no DLC. You paid for a game up front and that was it.
I miss those days.
idk if this is a stupid opinion but I feel like us, the consumers are to blame. If everyone just waited a week and read reviews before buying games then publishers wouldn't be able to get away with this shit.
Honestly, I always felt the $60 price tag for games (now $70+ for AAA titles!) was way too much, so I usually wait about a year or more, then buy it on sale.
So I get to sit back and watch the shitshow when people pre-order games and then get screwed when the game is garbage.
Dragon's Dogma II was super hyped up recently, and even I got the free character customization demo to pre-build a character. Then it announced day-one microtransactions the day before release and pissed off the gaming community.
No, the consumers are never to blame for stuff like this!
This is something that is just that we get told by the people that are lying about and hyping up a product, putting up manipulative incentives for buying it before letting us inspect it. Then releasing trash, but still appealing on our empathic nature and promising that it might get fixed later. And when things turn to shit, then it is our trust and empathy, willingness to support them, that is to blame for it. No!
If the industry exploits our good and trusting nature, then we need to fight them with regulation and laws. Our civilization and the human nature is built on trust, and that should not be undermined by short profit oriented, exploitative companies or business practices.
I do wait, and the publishers don't get away with selling me unfinished games. It's great.
I wait at least a month for any game, 8 months for a Bethesda game.
I waited a year for cyberpunk, until everyone was saying it was all fixed, and I hated all the bugs and some bad design decisions. Nothing major, but it felt like death of a thousand cuts.
I shudder to imagine how that game looked at release that this feels like a polished product to people.
Hah, yeah I also played cyberpunk quite recently. I really liked it for the most part, I'm considering playing it again with a totally different build.
Yeah, I saw some early gameplay videos from cyberpunk... I think it has indeed come a very long way.
I can't say I didn't like it. Quite the opposite, but for a supposedly fixed game, there were still too many annoyances.
It's preorders. Stop preordering, and either the products will improve or studios will collapse.
To be precise, the new generation is to blame, who constantly preorders a game, and spends a lot on mobile games. Companies realize that bad products sell, so why would they improve?
The new generation? I remember this stuff happening 15 years ago. People were camping outside before big game releases and had an incentive to ensure they got a copy of the game. The new generation that only buys digital is not to blame for the practice taking hold.
Yeah, that's what I meant. I didn't define the new generation, but in my mind people since the 80s are the new generation to me (I'm old). And you're right, camping a store to buy something you never saw is of course the issue. And in my country, people buy a house before it's even built, and that's also an issue that is common in this 'new generation'. So, this new generation tends to accept that buying something without seeing it is alright, and the gaming industry reflects that.
In relation to who you were replying to, I think 'new' is in the eye of the beholder. Time is relative.
"The new generation"
So there are no 40 year olds who blindly pre order the 15th CoD game because that's all they play? This is a general issue in the gaming community as a whole.
Instead of getting hung up on an actual age number, consider it as older society versus the current newer society.
We can all argue the details, but today's consumer who purchase games seem to be a lot more willing to accept an inferior product, than those of the past.
lol new generation. It’s millennials, gen x and boomers that spend $500 on Candy Crush without noticing, not Gen Z & Alpha.
I remember a few cases where a rare bug softlocked my game and I had to reset my entire progress. It wasn't all that good I would say. They definitely had some standard of quality on release though.
It wasn't all sunshine and rainbows. I remember losing hundreds of hours of progress on games due to memory card corruption. Or game cartridges/CDs no longer working, requiring you to buy a new copy. Or consoles getting straight-up bricked.
Hell, a ton of people have memories of blowing into N64/SNES cartridges to get them to work since they had notoriously unreliable connectors. But even though it was something that didn't work great, everybody has fond memories of doing it since there wasn't this amalgamation of voices from every direction telling you to be upset about it and clamoring for retribution. If something was broken, you got frustrated about it, complained to your friends, and then moved on with your life since there wasn't anything else you could do.
Want the blowing for NES?
Games were also significantly less complex then. It takes teams of 100s of people to make a AAA game now. But don't kid yourself, there were definitely game-breaking bugs back then. And in the pc world, patches arrived much, much earlier than in the console world.
FF7 and supreme commander were complex. And devs then didn't have the tools we have today, not to mention game engines (there were, but not like today). And ps3 was a pain to program for. And, and...
At the end of the day it’s apples to oranges. The behind the scene development is so different that we can’t really judge them properly, we just have other modern games to compare them to.
Speaking of FF7, I am just about finished with Rebirth and all I thought was wow I didn't see a single update and it played flawlessly. Just shows it can still happen, just super rare.
Arguably, patches started even earlier. It wasn't uncommon to release another whole title that was basically a bug/balance patch. See Japanese Pokemon Blue, and all the various Street Fighter 2 versions.
Cart version revisions weren't uncommon either. But they would only be for new purchases.
A lot of games were significantly more expensive bc back then too
Actually there were update still cause the games were only little less broken. It's updates were so much harder for everyone. Hosting them, finding them, knowing there were updates, having to apply updates in specific orders.
Steam has been a good send for that.
Maybe I'm just old
Not old enough, heh. The cartridges/CDs this commenter are talking about had to have rock-solid code because patching wasn't possible. You'd have to make an entire new print run, and very few games of that era ever had those.
And guess what? They still had multiple versions! Ask any Link to the Past speedrunner. 1.0 is broken as hell!
Ya, Nintendo first-party was certainly one of the exceptions. Benefits of your games having ridiculously long tails.
Yeah. Good ol’ Pong.
You don't have to! Pretty much all of those games are available, and you can play them for free if you're willing to pirate.
But let's be honest, modern games are better which is why you won't do this instead.
I've tried time and time again to enjoy "modern" games, but nothing released after Oblivion or The Witcher 3 was worth my time.
Plenty of old games however have an extremely high replay value, thanks to their immersive missions and bugfree gameplay. Recently played Thief: The Dark Project again (from 1999), and it's a bloody masterpiece.
You're one of the few. Pretty much everyone else complaining about how modern games are bad and the time you speak of was some magical time for gaming, are at the same time only be playing games from the last decade or so.
Having been a game since the early 80s, I would argue gaming is better now than it has ever been. It has its own set of problems, but nothing better than throwing a game I'm interested in into my wishlist, waiting for it to go on deep sale (which happens long after most of those annoying first bugs have been ironed out), checking the reviews at that point, and then downloading if it still looks good.
Generally speaking, games are so much better looking and have the ability to be far more intricate and interesting. Like I played hundreds of hours of civ I. But if I'm going to play civ now, it will be 5 or 6.
Why do you miss things being permanently broken and unfixable?
The thing is, it forced the people making games to release them as a finished, working product, with the bugs (mostly) stamped out.
Today it's just push something out the door now, and we'll ~~patch it~~ soak them for even more money with DLC later.
Yes but this comment is generic to the game industry overall, and has been made thousands of times with slightly different wording. I’d rather use this thread to celebrate the rare event of a company admitting a mistake and actually making customers whole.