When Should A Game Be Described as Unplayable?

So all the complaints about frame rate and other technical problems on the console version of Fallout 4 are just unfounded, including Jeff's when he mentioned it in his review? Problems that he found so significant that the game got two different scores?

@mike: and when Arkham Knight came out on PC Vinny played the entire game with 0 problems. What's your point, besides calling me a liar?

Whoa, calm down there dude. I'll just end this conversation now, it's clear you are way too emotionally invested in this whole thing and are just lashing out. Have a nice day.

@mike: lol, I'm not mad or emotional, I just had no idea where you going with that besides saying I was making up any/all of what I said. I mean, based on your owns I just couldn't see any direction other than that. I guess if I said making it all up that would sound "nicer" than using the word liar. Also, no comment on the Vinny part about Arkham Knight when it was near globally panned so bad that they pulled the game from Steam? :|

So all the complaints about frame rate and other technical problems on the console version of Fallout 4 are just unfounded, including Jeff's when he mentioned it in his review? Problems that he found so significant that the game got two different scores?

This thread is starting to seem a little much.

Sure, unplayable is an exaggeration, but video games should be held to a technical standard. Sure, maybe you're OK with something below that standard, but that doesn't mean the standard should be lowered just because you, or even most people, are OK with it. Maybe you don't think a drop from 30FPS to 25 is even noticeable. Others think that 25FPS actually takes them way out of the game.

My little brother used to be unable to tell when VSYNC was on or off, but I found screen tearing so obtrusive that I just wouldn't play a game without it on. Same thing applies to any aspect of performance - everyone's perception of it varies.

@sammo21: No - of course people are going to have different experiences with PC games because of all the different configurations out there. Consoles are all the same and performance should be the same across the board, except in edge cases like when some people are running games off of an external hard drive or a faster internal replacement SSD or something like that. You're reaching.

@mike: Consoles are mostly built the same but but perform differently based on issues with hardware versions, faulty pieces, etc. When I owned a PS3 I had frequent issues at the end of the generation with games like Uncharted. I had the worst screen tearing I've ever seen in my life. Happened that there was a loose piece on my motherboard and it was loose in the system. I bought a "new" PS3 (same model) and it worked perfectly fine with 0 screen tearing. Not to mention the issues with Fallout games add up over time, like with New Vegas. That game could start off bug free but because of issues like memory leaks you would get a significantly worse experience the longer you played but some people never experienced an issue...all while being on the same version. I never claimed Jeff's review was wrong (not that it matters but I agree with the scores he gave the versions), in fact this thread has never been about reviews at all.

@sammo21: Ok, well I'm glad you have a better PS4 than most people that doesn't experience the same issues, then. I guess you got lucky.

Guys, don't fight.

It seems as games get more and more complex, people's experiences are varying more than ever. From busted-ass ports to inconsistent frame rates, I'm starting to skim reviews to see if anything is truly broken in a game rather than the smaller details. PC's can be all over the place, so historically I've mainly looked at console reviews to be fairly reliable. But @sammo21 brings up an interesting point with varying console experiences. Even Jeff has said things like "this runs like crap on the office Xbox, no problems at home." From different versions of console or game software, to clearing the cache, to different versions of hardware, that variability is starting to creep into the console side of things, too. It's weird.

Contra: Hard Corps always looked great, no matter whose house we brought that cartridge to. My friends are mostly PC gamers nowadays, so it's interesting to stop by different houses to see how Heroes of the Storm looks by them (or WoW, or even Warcraft III before that). They each have their own expectation and standard. Hell, I had a friend that played Neverwinter Nights 2 at one frame every 5 seconds.

So typing that out, I don't know when a game should be considered unplayable. Everyone has their own standards, as demonstrated by Brad or Jeff's expectations vs. mine.

@sammo21: Arkham Knight worked for some people. For others, performance issues were too much and for many, the game simply didn't work - crashes, bugs, etc. Some were able to play it, though.

The bizarre thing for me is that 30fps is difficult to play with on PC, whereas if I play on console (and the framerate is steady), I barely notice it. I was really surprised to learn that KH2.5 ran at 30fps.

@adequatelyprepared: It may have something to do with frame times. More info:http://techreport.com/review/21516/inside-the-second-a-new-look-at-game-benchmarking

Huh. I apparently arrived in this thread after the conversation took a very different direction.

Anyway...

The Simpsons: Bart's Nightmare is unplayable.

Arcanum was unplayable on release.

ET: The Extraterrestrial is unplayable.

The Witcher 3, Fallout 4, and Just Cause 3 are all very playable games, and I know a good many people who have put in dozens of hours into each on a PS4. Then again, the Top 10 GOTY debate has turned into political theater, with Brad being the king of hyperbole and filibuster, so I don't take a lot of things he says there very seriously. It's like when a friend says that the latest episode of his favorite show is unwatchable. You know he's just being hyperbolic to make a point.

ET: The Extraterrestrial is unplayable.

Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith emulated on my horrible laptop is unplayable.

Bloodborne on Nintendo 3DS is unplayable.

Fallout 4 and Witcher 3 are in no sense of the word "unplayable." Wish they ran a little better though.

A lot of people have semi-psychosomatic problems with framerates (and resolution, and gold A/V cables, and wine quality, and a lot of other things). On PC, where you can easily show current FPS, you're more likely to see 28fps or whatever and assume it must be crappy, so you think it is. Whereas you might not have ever noticed if you weren't aware of that number, hwich is what happens on consoles.

Before people jump on this I am in no way saying framerate issues are made up or that people can't distinguish between 30 and 60, etc. Some people are more sensitive to it than others, just like how some people can see the screen flicker under 60hz and some cant. And lots of people who can't, say, see the difference between 30 and 40fps, or tell at a glance what a framerate is iwthout a side by side, convince themselves they can like a reverse placebo effect.

PC also has the thing where you are often a foot away from the monitor, so slight imperfections in framerate might be more noticeable than compared to a console experience where you might have four - seven feet between you and the TV if not more. This isn't accounting for people who sit close to their tvs (my own tv is maybe two feet from me)

Also, I want to say TVs are better at smoothing out slight framerate variations, so that might also help, but I could be dead wrong about that.

I was still renting games from a corner store the last time I thought a game was unplayable I think..

Framerate does matter but at the same time I've put over 300 hours into some of last year's most derided games (performance wise) and had an AWESOME time with them all (W3 & F4 esp) on ps4. I have no serious complaints. That said, I always appreciate the smoother games when they come around!

I've had a really good gaming pc for ages but it started dying suddenly about 8 months ago and can't be trusted to run intensive games for long.

When a game has a detective vision but instead of making enemies visible through walls it randomly makes them completely invisible fuck you Syndicate 2012 also why do you constantly dip below 20 FPS on my 970 GTX?

To actually answer the question in a thread that I've already posted in, a game should be considered unplayable when due to framerate issues, glitches, or unreliable player controls, a game cannot be completed with regular consistency by someone who knows what they're doing.

For example, the 360 retail version of The Wolf Among Us has such a poor framerate, and such awful skipping that I believe it would be impossible to constantly perform the required QTE sections successfully. Beyond that, it stutters so badly that it seriously harms the storytelling and the overall experience. It's a broken and unplayable game.

Games with game-ending glitches should also be referred to as unplayable, and not just concerning the main quest. After putting in over 200 hours into Skyrim, I ran into a glitch that made me unable to complete the warring factions quest. This was my last major quest string available. I went back to the game over a year later and found that the problem still hadn't been patched.

I enjoyed Skyrim quite a lot, but for me, it became unplayable at this point. If your game has game-ending glitches, I feel people are justified in calling your game unplayable, at least when it comes to their personal experience.

Lastly, if a game's controls are so unreliable that no one can have a consistent experience when playing, I feel that should also be referred to as unplayable.

That's about it, really.

Yeah, well, "unplayable is hyperbole most of the time".

"Unplayable" in terms of technical performance for me means that the performance of the game is so bad that it actually affects gameplay to a point where you have to account for or just lose because of bad technical performance.

Or, you know, game breaking bugs.

Just Cause 3 on PS4 is a bit of a borderline case, not because of the loading times (that severely impacted my fun, but have since been patched to be somewhat less annoying) but because of occasional massive framerate dips that basically make the game run in stuttery slow motion for more than a few seconds, but i feel like its still on the good side of the border, if barely.

Quantum Rush Champions on XBox One is unplayable for me, as it is a futuristic racing game with such severe framerate problems that i found myself occasionally crashing because i could not account for sudden changes in controller latency.

Afro Samurai 2: Revenge of Kuma from what i heard was unplayable in a sense that game breaking clipping issues and cutscenes occasionally not pausing the actual game while in Cutscenes can make you "lose" your game undeservedly.

(Also, Fallout: New Vegas surprisingly is unplayable on my current PC because it crashes 10 or 20 minutes in regularily.)

@frybird: http://steamcommunity.com/app/22380/discussions/0/522730700736948013 is pinned to the Fallout: NV steam page, it's a list of various mod/fan patches that largely fix NV's worst bug issues, including random crashes/broken questlines etc. It sucks that Bethesda can't bugtest their games properly but hopefully these get the game working for you. (incidentally, the existence of these patches are why I found Brad's "these games HAVE to be broken" argument ridiculous. Might take more time, more effort, but they certainly can be fixed if you put enough time/effort into it)

@dystopiax said:

Thanks for the Info.

And yeah, the whole Fallout 4 Discussion and Brad's arguments were mind-boggingly infuriating for me.

I'm with Jeff on this one, it's not about delivering a perfect, clean game, but with the Budget and the Scale of Bethesda you'd expect that there are at least incremental improvements. GTA is also a series with lots of interlocking stuff and big worlds, even if not quite as big and complicated as Bethesdas. Yet with each (numbered) installment you see big improvements to the scale and features of the games while, abeit being glitchy, rarely having major technical problems or game breaking bugs.

If you are an industry professional who makes a game with several game breaking bugs so often that it becomes almost expected, you are still doing a shitty job. And if it's not due to "lazy developers" (which it rarely is), than it is due to bad planning, budgeting priotization and/or negligence.

(P.S.: From what i heard about E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial over the years, i wouldn't call it "unplayable", by the way. As far as i'm aware, most of the cryptic and weird things that make Youtube-Videomakers angry are actually explained in the manual of the game (And there are several early Atari games that cannot be played without a manual) and while the game seems to be still pretty dumb, bad and tedious, as far as i heard it's actually not that hard if you can endure it.)

@frybird: Another example is Dwarf Fortress. Ofc there are differences- don't have to render graphics the same way and the gameplay style means you don't get some issues like clipping or whatever, but that's a game with more complex interlocking systems than maybe any other game in existence and it's not horribly broken. Again, DF took a lot of time to get to that level of polish and complexity, but it just proves that making complex worlds with interlocking systems is possible without those complex interlocking worlds being complete messes.

@frybird: ET isn't unplayable but it is a terrible, terrible, terrible game.

@spaceinsomniac I do find it interesting that while they had the discussion about Bethesda dropping the ball over and over but no mention of Tell Tale Games. Their graphics engine is terrible and even on PC has weird stuttering at times or awful animations in heavily animated scenes. The Wold Among Us and Tales From the Borderlands are two of the best games they've made (and my favorite) and even they can look and run like garbage which is unacceptable. They aren't unplayable though.

1. Rife with game-breaking bugs (progress-stopping or game-crashing)
2. Consistently less than 17-20 FPS (unless you're a champion of patience/experienced with low FPS/playing a game where it don't much matter in which case the minimum's ~10, don't be crazy)
3. Relentlessly and extreme variable frame-rate (see #7)
4. Non-sensical control scheme
5. Impossibly difficult
6. Severely inept 'interactability' (jank-ass character movement, demon camera, other in-game failings of the like)
7. Causes illness (motion sickness)

The frame-rate is probably the most subjective of the bunch. I grew up playing games with a low FPS count, so I can tolerate a pretty terrible frame-rate, but it also depends on the type of game. Of course it's still well below reasonable standards, but i wouldn't call it unplayable.

I guess that's the biggest distinction to be made here. Something technically being playable doesn't mean it's within the acceptable standards. It's fair to assume when someone says a game is unplayable when it's clearly technically not, they're just saying it fails to meet their particular set of standards and don't want to keep playing.

So, basically, opinions. Maybe someone enjoys playing an impossibly difficult game, maybe some else doesn't but wouldn't call it "unplayable." The way it's used seems to mostly speak to standards, rather than an objective appraisal of whether or not a game is actually playable.

I mean, that's debatable I think. I don't suppose Cities: Skylines would have been so well liked if it had conistently slowed down the more you played it, until eventually it basically just stopped altogether.

Dwarf Fortress is a special case really, and I don't think you can use it in support or opposition to any comment about any other game. It has a pretty unique approach to what it's doing that leads to unique problems. It's also technically still in alpha so as fans we're sort of ok with the fact that there hasn't been work put in to deciding on the correct balance between playability and simulation. I think if Toady were to release DF as an actual product, the least you could ask is that he implemented a system to scrub xsocksx from the map every so often to maintain framerates.

As a guy that has played all 3 of these on a console at some point I think only Fallout belongs. I say this because the low frame rate makes it extremely more difficult to shoot small enemies accurately without the assistance of Vats. I would argue the gameplay of the witcher and Just Cause don't suffer to the same extent.

Edit: I should mention the Witcher and Fallout were on the ps4 and Just Cause on a Xbox

I think it's all subjective really. When it comes to the Giant Bomb crew you are talking about folks who generally have access to multiple consoles and rather high end PCs. Their set ups are not exactly the norm for most gamers and have to have some impact on the way they compare a console version to that found on a PC. Personally? I have a rather iffy computer from Best Buy that is by no means a high end gaming rig, so I have to run most games at low specs to get decent performance. My PS3 looks far better than what I get out of Diablo or WoW. I am sure if I was rocking a high end video card with a massive monitor I would feel differently, but that just isn't the case.

Brad isn't lying or anything. He is just giving his opinion based on his personal situation.

Oh no, I'm not talking about telltale games, I'm talking specifically about the 360 RETAIL port of The Wolf Among Us, not the digital download. It goes FAR beyond the usual telltale issues into completely broken and unplayable. Unfortunately, I can't find a video on you tube, but trust me. It's way, WAY worse than what you're probably thinking about.

When it comes to certain aspects of games, specifically frame rate, I tend to avoid criticizing people that call things unplayable because I know I have a pretty high tolerance for bad a frame rate. In fact, I am more likely to notice and appreciate good frame rate than notice and be bothered by bad. Unless we're talking slide show levels.

I once played Star Wars: The Phantom Menace on a PC that could not handle it. The majority of the experience was estimating what would happen from the lag and distance and inputting commands like some kind of turn-based gameplay to see what my actions would do. That lag was unplayable, crashing constantly is unplayable, gamebreaking bugs are unplayable.

Frame rate issues? Man unless its 10 or less I'll take what I can get. Its probably a very personal standard but the GB guys are blessed with good tech to run things on so their standards are probably higher.

I'm a very lenient person when it comes to games being shonky. But I'd say load times and framerate are the two most noticeable issues to me. Playing Bloodborne now is so much more pleasant than at launch, especially when dipping in and out of chalice dungeons every five minutes, because of the much faster load times. If I was playing Witcher 3 on console I'd have had to abandon Blood & Broken Bones because of the load times, whereas on PC I'm back within about 5 seconds.

The thing that bothers me about framerate is when people put out games which regularly fluctuate, especially if they frequently dip under 30 as that's when it starts to become particularly noticeable. It bothers me because I just don't understand it - if your game can't run smoothly at least 95% of the time, just turn down the graphics options slightly. No-one will notice if the light bloom isn't as vibrant, or if trees aren't rendering in from quite such a long distance, because it'll be consistent across the whole game. But a fluctuating framerate stands out - even if it's not a big deal to many people.

If you really have some weird commitment to making it look that little bit better at all costs, at least offer up a basic "smooth framerate or optimal graphics" option on the consoles. I mean, if Battle Arena Toshinden 3 could do it back on the PS1, then so can you today.

That's the part that gets me. There are games where a portion of the game has terrible fps dips (blighttown) and that's bad, but if a game is running at sub-20 for large parts of the game across almost the entire thing then surely someone must have noticed and gone "eh, what if we turn down the lod or reduce particles or something so it doesn't play like shit?".

And they still shipped it barely playable. I'm the first to admit I'm maybe less forgiving of low framerate than most, I'll turn any game's options down until it looks like quake 1 if that's what it takes for it to never dip below 30, but I'm always surprised by how many people say things like the performance in fallout 4 is fine when it so clearly isn't.

Progression bugs, Arkham Knight on the pc was unplayable for me until I downloaded a mod and upgraded to windows 10. Before that i couldn't play 20 minutes without it crashing because of memory usage.

I am going to say this is completely subjective beacuse I have honestly never played a game on any console where the frame rate or even graphics have bothered me.

Constant game crashing, and a frame rate at or below 15 fps. Basically if it looks like the game is a flip book being animated instead of a game...it's unplayable to me.

I'm going to avoid starting any arguments and settle for saying: I'm largely graphics and frame rate blind, so I don't see the problems most people seem to have.

My personal answer for what's unplayable is Morrowind. The incredibly bad animations and particularly ugly art direction are too distracting for me to get anywhere.

When the framerate or framedrops get so bad it affects controls and ruins me in games, that's unplayable. GTA5 PS3 was not unplayable, because apparently both drive and HD were healthy enough to keep it running fine, even online, until late November 2013 when geometry began chugging in online together with seconds long pauses in everything.

Or when it's a Bethesda game.

@jonny_anonymous: yeah i agree with this.

hearing people describe far cry 3 on the 360 as unplayable was crazy to me because i played that entire game on that console and never really noticed anything