Why are games broken?

This season has been a pretty disastrous one for my faith in new releases.

As an excited new console owner since Destiny launch (had a fair hiatus from gaming since GTAV) I have been pretty invested in new games coming out and testing the capabilities of my system (PS4).

I even joined Giantbomb!

If it's not Driveclub's complete meltdown or Destiny's gaping content holes, it's Assassin's Creed's doughy uncooked centre. We're even seeing a whole host of problems with Halo.

These were all highly anticipated games, not just from myself but a lot of gamers.

I may be misremembering the past but I don't recall such a concentrated period of fuck-ups across the board.

What's the fucking deal, man? For everything the industry has become good and bad, it was at least supposed to be more professional.

I don't even consider myself to be one of those entitled weirdos that expect everything and everything now, I just want things I'm spending a lot of money on to function as promised and find myself increasingly disillusioned.

My mom got so pissed at me once she threw my Dreamcast against the wall and it broke. Thats why games are broken.

I don't think Destiny or AC can be considered broken. Content issues just means they didn't create enough content there. AC has some performance problems, but I don't know if they are game breaking or not.

10 years ago, games were simpler and most didn't have the same emphasis on multiplayer, with some exceptions. Now, all the online stuff is common place. It's just the era we are in where games have tighter deadlines, smaller budgets, and bugs make their way in. I don't think it's going anywhere. That doesn't excuse it, but it's just the truth. Games will ship with issues, it's a fact we have to live with.

I still have no understanding how borked Driveclub still is. I can get launching broken (people just have very tight schedules and more often than not run out of time) but not really having online in your mostly online driving game months after release is absolutely bonkers.

They're huge and massively complex things., more so than ever before, and they're on tight schedules, to boot.

I mean isn't that sort of obvious?

My "why are games broken?" is deliberately hyperbolic to make the point but I know what you mean, especially RE: Destiny and content.

It just seems to be a trend and that this first year has been one of the worst of a "new gen" I can remember for gamer's enjoyment and technical problems appear to be a huge part of it.

The game is a mess. I excused it for so long because I had hope they would fix problems but it seems just as bad as launch week. The last patch was 12 days ago...

Big name games have commonly been busted for a long while. It's been exacerbated recently from a combination of games just being more complex and the fact that day 1 patches are pretty standard, but it's not really a new thing. Well -- I guess it is on consoles, but on PC things have been that way for years.

Online stuff in general has always been really, really hard to get right on the first go. It's just easy to forget a bad launch when they go back and fix things -- like, World of Warcraft was a total clusterfuck for the first few months.

@big_jon:

They have always been huge and massively complex things for their eras. My point is quality seems to be regressing when it should be progressing.

It's still early in the life cycles of the consoles, but I don't remember the software being so ropey the last time.

Because making videogames is hard, that's why. And I don't understand how being professional has anything to do with broken games. Sometimes the reality is that projects don't come together in a timely manner. Sometimes it's because of poor management, but often it's just how it goes.

They're way more complex hen they have ever been, game dev teams are literally in the hundreds now, everything is higher fidelity, multiplayer is a huge component, and the systems are just way more complex.

That's probably why Battlefield 3 and 4 launched in such messy states, because the technology and systems powering them were so beyond anything before, and again, tight schedules.

@big_jon:

So is flying too close to the Sun a valid approach?

I dig the ambition but they have to back it up!

This thread was mainly to break my GB virginity but yeah, my general first impressions of "current gen" ain't so hot.

@johnnymcginley: Ey remember Battlefield 4? Diablo 3 when it launched? Those are just some of the other examples of games themselves not being broken but a component of said games were not functioning properly causing games to be virtually unplayable. The other duders on the thread have been able to articulate better than I but as games continue to try and get bigger and bigger, there are always problems that would be encountered along the way because of that. That's why the further democratization of game development has brought us even more games from smaller developers (or even just one developer) that are simpler and back in the day would have probably been huge hits on their own right but now, we can all just enjoy them and have a good time without worrying if it gets borked if it were a more complex game.

To be honest, im actually surprised games aren't more broken than they are.

@johnnymcginley: I'm with you 100% Just because something is complex doesn't give you the right to release it broken or unfinished. In most industries this wouldn't fly at all, but for some reason with video games it's to accepted and even defended by some people. It's not even just the AAA developers. I refuse to do any more Early Access purchases after I got so incredibly burned by Double Fine's laughable Spacebase DF9 launch. "Oh our preorders have started to dry up so we're just gonna say that development is finished without actually giving you the features we promised." It's a garbage way of doing business and why I'll never buy anything that company ever puts out again.

@johnnymcginley: It's unfortunately a valid approach until it stops making them money. While I agree that the right thing to do would be to cook the games until they're done and not announce release dates three years in advance it's just not going to change until it starts impacting sales. These companies have plans based on expectations, and these games now cost hundreds of millions of dollars to make, so they put the games out when they think they'll sell the most. It's not like they're wanting them to not work at launch but really, if the dev says hey we have these bugs, the publisher is probable going to say ship it, and fix it in the first couple weeks because that's the norm. they'll also have to submit the game for certification a month or so before release too, and often in that time will start working on a patch to fix what they know is wrong.

And the other thing is that launching something on the Internet is hard, it can lead to completely unforeseeable things happening.

My hope is that the next Battlefield game will reflect that point early into its life.

Games are large, complicated, and often times on a schedule. Not every game can afford to delay and delay until everything is correct. Sometimes, even with lots of money and effort, a game only makes financial sense to be released. Otherwise you're only spending so much that you could never recover it all.

In reality every game ships broken and older games are probably more broken both upon release and to this day than current games are. A game now can be printed on disks while the developer works on a day 1 patch fixing bugs. In the age of instant communication however any bug is amplified and voiced over and over. Delays and mishaps are no longer industry news but rather internet news. In 1996 would you have heard about DriveClub's delay? You might have wondered where the logo on the PS4 box went but you wouldn't have had headlines and discussions about it.

Even though you're not coming from a similar perspective, I can see why one might be a little confused as to how these consoles, which were supposed to be much simpler to develop for than the previous gens, are somehow producing a higher percentage of technically flawed games. I also know that making games is incredibly hard and that any dev reading this comment would hate my guts. And poor syntax and grammar maybe.

Appreciate the opinions :)

Easy. They are broken because of marketing and timelines. The Internet has made it possible it hit marketing deadlines and fix whatever didn't make it later. So, they hit the release date that that marketing department set. Then they sale and promise to fix it. Sometimes they do and it all works out. Other times it's a year later the game sold great and it's still broken...I'm looking at you battlefield

There are more games out then the ones you listed. I guess you just need to broaden your horizons.

And I didn't really see ACU as highly anticipated so much as just another AC release- let's see what they do with this one. I think i'm going to skip that one as I only recently finished AC4 and that game was pretty good but I'm good for now on AC games.

Games being broken isn't a new thing either. Painkiller was broken on release for example. It's just business as usual for the game industry as there are certain milestones and deadlines they need to make to meet shareholder expectations for the quarter.

But still. There are more games out then the ones you mentioned. Most of them aren't "broken."

Oversimplification: Bugs are inevitable in something so complicated as games. I believe that for the most part developers work hard at crushing the big ones, but the reality is publishers set dates and at a certain point a game is coming out even if it's a hot mess. With the advent of broadband and connected consoles they can extend QA on to the end user and rely on day one patches or hot fixes.

The real truth though? Games are broken because we allow them to be. As with a lot of entertainment, games are most relevant when they're first released. People want to go out and buy it day one week one while everyone is still talking about it. It's the same with opening weekend movies or tv show premieres people want to be a part of the zeitgeist. As long as that need exists people will keep preordering and publishers will keep releasing unfinished product because they know those people will buy it regardless. When that changes or starts to dissipate then you'll see a return to shipping a game when it's ready.

There's a bit of a vacuum on the game front for new consoles and I think a lot of developers are rushing games out to fill it. This generation is only about a year old and people are still learning the hardware. I predict more actually-good games will start appearing sometime next year. They've already shown some improvement over the launch lineups.

Getting shit to work is hard. Especially when you have hundreds of people working on a product while trying to account for thousands and thousands of theoretical online players.

I hope it's a temporary phase in the industry.

I think its the expansion of discussion of games on the internet. If you play a game in an isolated setting you have to count on you seeing the bug to know it exists, and even then some bugs are obvious as bugs. When people get out and discuss them online their existence becomes obvious.

People like to complain a whole lot more now. Games aren't really any more or less broken then they've ever been. You just hear about it more often.

@mbradley1992: Fair enough, but Destiny did have multiple problems for the first several days in regards to server issues and disconnects.

To answer the thread question: people purchase on day 1 because gamers have zero memory whatsoever. They'll bitch at length for days when something is broken at launch, but the second the sequel is out they are back in line for it. There's really no changing it now, companies know stuff is going to sell anyway so there is little incentive to guarantee that things go smooth at launch. They'll just fix it later, because that know there are no real repercussions for doing as shit job of preparing their game.

Worst offender in recent memory I can think of is BF4, and I bet when Hardline is out it'll still sell a boatload.

The Driveclub thing has gone from funny to kind of sad. Halo MCC being screwed up is quite a disappointment, expected better from MS for what should be a flagship game.

I think there's probably pressure coming from the publishers to get games out to capitalize on the 2014 holiday season for all these people who own new consoles and have nothing to do with them, and there may be some pressure from the device manufacturers to get some stuff out so their systems will sell, as well.

I think it's an interesting question exactly why the games aren't ready. I'm going to say that it might be due to the lesser incremental improvement of the new consoles that devs need to display better mastery of the hardware earlier in the cycle than they needed to in past generations, where the improvement was much more obvious and immediate. So the devs know they can't get away with shitting out something that uses a fraction of the PS4 and XBone's capabilities like they could have done with launch games in the last cycle, or even moreso, the PS2 and Xbox era.

Turns out doing that takes more time than they were given, I guess.

@big_jon: Not valid excuses to release games that are not performing up to par then make your customers that spent $60 to wait while you patch the thing.Yes, games are getting more and more complex, which means they should have longer development time.If it doesn't reach a certain deadline, delay it.Releasing games in the condition they are in (Mcc, As unity, Driveclub, Sim City, ect) is un acceptable.

Day One Patches.

That's what I attribute a lot of this on. Before day one patches and you released a game with the issues we see so prevalent today, they would be considered just plainly as bad and likely forgotten about as quick as those games in the past were. I'll be more lenient on games like Assassin Creed Unity because that's a new game from the ground up but games like the Halo collection. There is absolutely no excuse. We have companies like Blue Point who have a proven and excellent track record of doing this same thing. This collection just stinks of issues like Climax and their botched Silent Hill Collection(Sadly this collection of 2 games took longer than Team Silent took to make all of Silent Hill 2...).

Because games are more complex, it sucks but that is what happens. The more complicated things get, the more likely they are to break.

Two reasons contribute to this:

1. Games need to be released in a certain time window.
2. Games are incredibly hard to develop.

That's pretty much it.

There are any number of reasons devs need to hit a certain release date. Continuing development until the game is perfect is literally impossible. They have to release the game before all the kinks are out. They are also getting a lot harder to develop for, which makes a lot more problems occur.

*shrug* The modern video game is a complex piece of software. You are forgetting how wonky and broken last gen games where.

@bigboss1911: Evidently it is valid to the companies releasing these games.

For some reason a bunch of people still think it's a good idea to buy a game before anyone's even seen it, so maybe it doesn't matter as much how it launches if they already have a bunch of sales.

I dunno. I grew up with cartridges and very few of those were broken. I can't recall a game ever crashing on me over thousands of hours and hundreds of games throughout the life of the Atari 2600, NES, Master System, Genesis and SNES (a Turbografx-16 too, but let's not talk about that.) Unless maybe someone kicked the machine or yanked out a cartridge while a game was running. Sure, there were lots of shitty games, but they always worked. I didn't play that many PS1 games because of university, girls, music, booze and other substances, but of what I did play, the games ran perfectly well as bought and would continue to work even with a scary amount of damage done to a disc. Ditto the PS2/Xbox generation. It's really only with connected consoles that we've seen a major decline in release-day quality. I imagine the increasing complexity of games, ease of patching and bad development due to corner cutting on horribly bloated budgets are all responsible for the current state of things.

I don't think the problem is as big as people are making it out to be. Yes, with the internet developers can implement patches to fix known problems that the game was shipped with, but out of the hundreds of games released this year, very few were actually broken. I guess you could say Unity is a little messed up with performance issues, but people can still play the game. I think of a broken game as one that is unplayable or doesn't even load. I can't think of any games released like that this year. Some may say Unity is unplayable because of the terrible framerate at times, but from what I've seen, it looks like people are playing it.

I really think people are just looking for things to complain about. Games are better than ever now days, so as cynical gamers, we have to find shit to complain about.

There's a really really REALLY long answer, and there's a short answer.

The short answer is because video games are HARD FUCKING WORK.

For programmers in the field, it's one of the most demanding jobs you can do AND it's one of the lowest paid.

Add to that the general need to have programmers on staff permanently over artists who can be let go as soon as their assets are completed (that's right folks, 3 month rolling contracts are a standard in this industry and have been for a long time) and you end up with a lot of managers and designers deciding that using lots and lots of middleware and keeping as few staff programmers as possible is a good idea.

It's important to remember something, a lot of people in this thread don't really understand the difference between "a game is a large complex piece of software!" today compared to say, 10 years ago.

10 years ago if your piece of software was a buggy piece of crap, that quite often meant it didn't work. Period. Everything was often home-made and fragile as balls, so easy to make a mistake and then BOOM black screen, no game. And if a game made it to ship date like that, it didn't ship.

Nowadays, everything is so crammed full of middleware, that a lot of programmers time is spent just trying to get those things to play together nicely (and not crumble under the strain of all the special effects and shaders the artists/designers want to use)

Generally this means that games are, on the whole pretty robust. But the individual pieces that make them up have gotten so much bigger and more complex than they ever were before that just trying to get them to play nice together is a struggle. A serious serious struggle.

A large complex piece of video-game software 10 + years ago meant a tight group of developers, often no more than 50 and those were considered very large teams, working together. Often no more than 10. Nowadays? It's hundreds of people collaborating from all over the world, working with tons of different kinds of software and tools, a lot of programmers time nowadays is spent just getting all that shit to play nicely and not crap itself, all while another 300+ people are making changes to the game every day.

So a lot of the time, if the AI system interacts fine with the Pathing system 9 times out of 10? And the 1 in 10 results in the AI glitching through the floor instead of crashing the game completely, that's a fucking win as far as the dev-team is concerned.

Games used to be small enough that one programmer could take responsibility for one system (audio, graphics, AI, whatever) and would know it inside and out. Nowadays, there's no possible way a single person can know the complete ins/outs of even a single system, there's just so much code flying around.

Yeah you can call it laziness or whatever you want, but the fact of the matter is they have to make do with a budget, and a lot of game developers work 50+ hour weeks (I personally know a guy who was often doing 16 hour days and sleeping in the office for the last few MONTHS of a major title that came out recently I won't name) so laziness isn't really the problem.

Fact is, there's a certainly amount of bugs and glitches that are considered 'acceptable' considering the alternative (which is the game doesn't work at all) and that's fine.

People can stamp their feet and shout "But it was sixty dorrah!" all they want, no game is ever gonna be glitch-free. It's very rare we see a legitimate game-breaking bug these days, just a lot of smaller interactions that go haywire sometimes.

Lack of content is another discussion entirely, but I'll say this, the smaller the scope the more bug-free games tend to be. You want more of something? Quality's gotta give. Just like anything in life.

The long answer is literally a thesis.

Also, as a final note of caution, people really like to forget just how many shitty games there was back in the day. Sure, games might not have been as visibly glitchy (especially if we're talking about stuff like the Atari 2600, which has it's collision detection built into the hardware, so it's kinda hard to fuck stuff like that up) as they are now, but a huge chunk of them sure as hell fucking sucked. A terrible jump arc in a platformer for example, might not be considered a 'glitch' but you can bet bottom dollar it's there for the same reasons. Back when game engines didn't do gravity and all that fancy stuff for you automatically, programmers had to be very clever about things like gravity, velocity and anything other than standard box collisions etc. Making a game feel nice was really hard back then. Today it's a lot easier but getting all the background components to play nice is hard.

Console gaming atm must be an absolute shit show, I feel sorry for console only gamers. Maybe my perception is skewed but unlike the PC I dont see consoles having the benefit of a huge indie scene being able to offset the over-hyped disappointments. And good luck to you if you sold of your old consoles to fund your new next-gen/current-gen console......yeeesh.

Hence why I think all this talk of "OMG y is gaming so bad now guys" talk is a tad hyperbolic, if all you have to look forward to are games publishers tell you to look forward to then yeah it must seem like your favorite hobby has betrayed you somewhat. Its just the usual suspects upping the ante to create a perfect storm of holiday season shit-fest.

@thehbk: lol

@kanerobot: You know, I never actually had any of that, so I guess I just didn't know about it. That certainly doesn't help that game's image right now.

Bleh, interesting indy games on PC are few and far between nowadays. It's an endless ocean of blend derivative stuff, straight up bad broken garbage, unfinished games you get tired of well before they get to 1.0 with a few islands of good but often limited experiences that come out on PS4 anyway. Hell, most ''indy'' or smaller games I'm looking forward to were announced at the Sony press conference and some are PS4 exclusives.

And let's not talk about those ''fine'' PC ports that seem to break 1/4 of games for a number of people but are totally fine on consoles. Every time I look at these forum I see someone complaining this game or that game was unplayable on their set up.

hehe, what we need is a time machine, for just even slightly 7 years ago. Nah, lets go back to Diakatana release.

But yeah, a lot of these developers can't keep up with the scheduled release dates set up by publishers. And then on top of that they don't have enough man power or money to patch it up AFTER it's release, a great example if just recently Batman Arkham Origin. Those guys probably have 4 or 5 other projects lined up after patching that game and they did what they could moved onto something else that their scheduled could handle.

@pyrodactyl: Idk. Unless you're on the PC you dont really get a sense of what indie games there are on the platform. You get the occasional indie darling on the PS4/XOne but most of the gems are not as popular to insular gamers. Heck even the games out on PC dont get as much coverage till they get announced for consoles. Used to be console first then PC but now its PC then console so it makes sense in a way but thats changing now I think. Point is the indie scene is so fast and expanding that there is always something thats bound to interest you. I, personally just cant imagine gaming consisting solely of AAA games and not having a few indie games or hell, just games that arnt AAA.

Point is the new consoles just dont have the games atm to make up for the AAA disappointments, lack of backwards compatibility dosent help either. When the library expands and more games are released then the mid-tier games can help soften the need for big budget games to fill the market. Not looking to turn this into and indie VS AAA rant(which sadly seems to happen the moment anyone mentions "indie" nowadays), just saying more games, more varied genres will benefit everyone.

@igniz12: If there's so many gems in the indie PC scene it shouldn't be hard to name a few. Bonus points if they're PC exclusive, not early access and if you actually need a gaming PC to play them. There aren't many of those. Nowadays indie PC games are all early access, most come out on other platforms and you can play them on the old regular PC everyone has instead of an expensive gaming PC.

In your own words, try to explain to me how me saying having a good mix of AAA and indie games suddenly turned into a pissing contest about how PC has no mega bucks exclusive games? What exactly did I say that is so wrong that you needed to be defensive here?

The fact that games work as well as they do blows my mind every day.

With all due respect, if you aren't looking at games as a magical wonder you just don't know enough about what's going on under the hood. End of story! :D You can throw your Consumer Rights at me all you want, but that's how I feel about it. No one is owed perfectly flawless games. No one is owed anything really. Do your research. Never pre order. Never buy Day 1. If you educate yourself, manage your expectations and hell - maybe even make a game or two - you may be so lucky as to join me in my reality, where this year has been awesome! I loved 2014! So many great games and we are just barely into the new gen. Try not to confuse Internet Reality with Real Reality and don't let the constant negativity get you down. I think games are doing just great right now and there's tons to be excited for.

''Console gaming atm must be an absolute shit show, I feel sorry for console only gamers.'' You were being antagonistic and I was just asking to elaborate on what makes you think the PC is less of an ''absolute shit show'' than the new consoles.

Because publishers push deadlines on ever increasingly complex pieces of software.

They are bigger and more complicated than ever.

And now everyone can record every bug, pretty much on their own, means a lot of the problems that 99.9% of players will never encounter suddenly appear to be "widespread."

Because games are incredibly hard to make, require cooordination between hundreds of people, and publishers don't give developers enough time to finish the game itself let alone check it's not busted.

This is a pretty good answer if you want more info.