When I lost the agreement between publishers, releasing broken games or simply unfinished? And no one does anything about, and it is ok after a year fix the game? (BATTLEFIELD 4).

Daaaaaaad how did you find my favourite website?

But issues like this will definitely (unfortunately) will be talked about in the GOTY deliberations. This sucks so much for all the people out there who bought this in good faith.

Yup, broken game is a lock for that category. Driveclub, Unity, Halo: MCC and probably a lot more. This shit needs to be called out as much as possible.

Ultimately, their critiques could just be summed up by posting a Quick Look as an Unfinished video.

It's sad, really, to see this happening. From reviews I've seen, the single player games are done great justice, but the multiplayer is so busted as to be useless. Unfortunately, the whole of a game must be considered, so while this is no Unity (where EVERYTHING is beyond fubar), I can't see Halo: MCC being talked about much in GOTY...

Looking forward, I want to give you a high-level cadence of the latest updates we’re currently working on.

I have never heard cadence used that way. Is that being used correctly? It seems like she's going for 'overview', or maybe 'flavor', but those are both a really weird stretch.

Careful with that auto-thesaurus!

@patrickklepek I would love to see a deeper dive into the increasing prevalence of these issues. I know you're tired of writing these articles but they need to be written and I'm sure it's not because any of these developers want to release a game in such a state.

Let's unearth some of the reasons why these issues are cropping up, shed some light on the difficulties of shipping a game. I would love to better understand why it is obviously so difficult to develop a game, it has to be more than just time constraints. I imagine there are a lot of moving parts to these things, even when it doesn't' seem like it.

I would love to see some more articles like that which help give these situations some real context, because I'm with you, it's getting depressing. But I feel like a large source of why all of this is so frustrating is because people on both sides don't understand each other. We have the fans/players who don't understand the development side and we have PR people who clearly don't know what to say or aren't allowed to say what they should. When something doesn't work I feel a lot better knowing why/knowing more about the situation other than "we're working on it."

Some things need to change in how things are handled in this industry and it extends beyond just shipping a game that is perfectly polished and bug-free. Understanding needs to come from both sides.

Yes, it's vacuous exec-speak isn't it? I guess what's she is saying is, 'I want to give you clear and regular updates on the game fixes we are working on.' Except she needs to sound very earnest and important so regular words just don't cut it apparently.

Don't forget NBA 2K15!

I bet the punchline in all of this will be that everyone will get Halo: Spartan Assault/Strike. I'd like to imagine 343i know that would just antagonize the fanbase even more, but something makes me doubt that.

What an utter disgrace. Microsoft is pushing away their most loyal Xbro fan base with these blunders. Not even MS apologists can find a way to spin this in some positive light.

I feel weird for saying this, but should we all be "slow-clapping" Activition for releasing COD:AW in a working condition?

Man, Microsoft just cant stop tripping over its own two feet. Lets not forget that 343 is straight up owned by MS, if anyone should be able to get a game running smooth on Live, you'd think it would be them. Guess not.

Destiny is the front-runner for the disappointing as hell but for fuck's sake, at least it worked on launch category of 2014.

Remember when MS was telling us that the power of the cloud (and Azure) was going to make every Xbox One game better?

Hell, they can't even get Halo to work!

2014's Worst Trend: Games broken at launch. Calling it now.

@hollitz:

??? 4 was great. maybe you ate the wrong burger?

Erhm, Bonnie but testing your games a little more instead of releasing them in this state, wouldn't be better than apologizing? Really, now developers skip the beta testing entirely?

Another big issue with developers getting away with releasing broken and unfinished games is enough people keep buying those broken games. Eventually a developers priority ends up being releasing their game ASAP then patching when needed.

I was thinking "More Press Releases Than Patches" - Title might be too long though...

As for the game itself: If it contained Reach and ODST I would have grabbed it in a heartbeat. It's good I didn't in retrospect but I actually enjoyed the games where you didn't play as Master Chief at all...or at least not the whole time, like in Halo 2.

Here's hoping it gets ironed out soon. In a Dragon Age or something I can forgive it to a point but, come on, this is Halo we're talking about here! Multiplayer needs to work day one!

They already had Worst trend as Post Release apology's. They even had a Worst Apology category.

I kind of hope they don't do that category this year, last year had such a negative tone. There were i believe 5 negative categories. Hottest Mess, Worst Game, Worst Trend, Biggest Disappointment, Worst Apology. Not all of these were necessary.

True enough. I'd say "Worst Game" and "Biggest Disappointment" should stay or maybe be rolled into one if it fits the nominees. The rest can get tossed. Even without the category, we all know it's been a bad year for buying a game at launch and having it, well, work.

Not sure how that equates to free stuff....

Ignoring the problems doesn't make them go away. 2014 has been a mostly piss poor year for big videogame publishers and GOTY should represent that.

yea back then they just told you to buy a new version of the game

GOTY stands for Game of the Year, as in best game, a celebration of games, lumping in a bunch of shit with it just sours the mood.

Broken game stuff gets enough coverage from all the news stories anyways and publishers take note of it i'm sure. Ubisoft probably isn't sitting celebrating Unity's launch right now as a huge success, and if they were i doubt a GB Hottest Mess award would change anything. Write articles paste them to the front page, but giving out awards for bad things is kinda dumb in my opinion, in fact i feel it just turns the situation of bad games into a joke. Sort of like the Razzies, people actually show up to accept awards, because they find it funny that they made such a bad movie.

GOTY especially on GB has always been representative of the entire year in gaming, not just the good parts. The bombsquad isn't giving out "bad" awards because they hope EA or Ubisoft will take notice or that an official from either company would come by to accept an award on behalf of the company. They're giving them out because they're an important part of that year. This year nearly every mayor release shipped was fucked up the wahoo, to the point where some of them was nearly unplayable. To not represent these issues in a summation-of-the-year type list would be to give a false representation of 2014.

Really? Besides Halo, Driveclub, and Unity i can't think of many other games that were shipped somewhat broken. I don't play PC games so i'm not sure about bad PC optimization of games but on the console side the games that have come out this year have worked well.

A couple days after release, someone asked me what they could do to make this up to me, or if I wanted a refund. I told them that honestly, all they needed to do was just fix the damn game so I could play it. Now, I don't even know if I want to play it anymore, as a huge, huge Halo fan. I'm not even interested in the beta for Halo 5 anymore at this point.

Exactly. I can understand if every last game was broken, but off the top of my head...Dragon Age, Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare and Farcry 4 work perfectly well for me (and, really, everyone else). I'm not counting the "stutter" issue for FC4 on PC either - That is minor bitching from people looking to hate on Ubi because that is what they dream to do. The game runs fine.

The GB staff has made more than enough comments about the state of Unity/Driveclub/Halo/Etc. I think we can put that to bed. I know Patrick is still reporting on it but that's his job: Everyone else? Here's hoping it doesn't take up much of the bombcast deliberations this year. I would rather hear the positive stuff because Every. Single. Site. has been ramming the negative news down our throats for months.

Speaking of the positive - Never Alone is a great game (just finished it), iffy controls be damned!

I've been playing MCC for a week now and haven't had any problems with the single player portion and as of the weekend haven't had much problems getting into MP games. Every now and then there is a long wait, up to 5min but since I'm watching shit on my tablet at the same time it doesn't really bother me.

Remember when games had to be finished before going gold? Good times...

Still not getting an xbone...

I hate video games.

It's stuff like this that makes almost excited when games are delayed now (aka pretty much everything being released in early 2015). It gives me hope that they won't be broken.

Thinking ahead to end of the year stuff, Releasing Busted Ass Games has to be a shoe in for "Biggest News Story of the Year" and the "Please Stop" award.

I absolutely love the Halo franchise and I've spent countless hours to that end.

That said this game should not have passed certification. This is unacceptable. Nearly everything in this package was released once before with little to no problems. The multiplayer experience was classic and showed people how to do it right. Now we have the flip side to that coin, "How to do it wrong"

They said in the press release they did not find the issue during their internal QA.

Hey guys, a new patch is out and my friend says it's........actually a huge improvement.

Anyone else try it yet?

Everything I've read tells me the single player is sweet. I'd probably get the game anyway when/if I get an Xbone since I don't give two shits about Halo multiplayer and already have PS+ (I'm not buying both these services at the same time, fuck that).

However, if a game is going to have multiplayer at all, it should have it ready to go, especially when the multiplayer isn't even fresh or new.

Is anyone able to connect to a multiplayer game?

How about this generation of consoles huh?

*slow clap*

Come on, now, let's not act like consoles have never had problems or shit games in their early days. Did we all already forget how fucked up PS3 online was? Or how everything was jagged as all fuck on the PS2?

We aren't seeing anything new - we're just not used to it because it's been a while since the last hardware launch.

@yukoasho said:

This has been the most unenthusiastic I've been about a console generation in a long time. All three consoles had really mediocre launches and have had pretty subpar first years, Wii U is hitting it's stride now 2 years later. I'm hoping PS4 and XBO follow suit too, all the games I wanted for my PS4 have been delayed until 2015 anyway.

Still, I can't help but feel incredibly disappointed by all these issues developers/publishers are having. Especially Ubisoft, who were one of the most vocal about wanting new hardware, are now the ones who seem the least prepared for this cycle of consoles.

Dude, it's Ubisoft. Quite frankly, on the few occasions they put out a game worth giving a shit about, I throw a fucking party. Ubi and EA are the most out-of-touch, shortcut-taking companies in the industry. They don't put nearly the amount of effort in their games as Activision, Namco, Nintendo, Sony, MS, and then wonder why no one likes them.

As for the launches, I dunno, launch years tend to be shitty. My first games for the PS2 were Eternal Ring, Ridge Racer V and Orphen: Scion of Sorcery, which were a flawed dungeon crawler, a trainwreck of a racer and a shit anime licensed game respectively. Say what you will about the launch of the PS4, it's been better than THAT...

New update just now. Game runs better, but still not well.

Watch Dogs.

Convinced a Microsoft support rep to give me a refund on this. Such a shame, I was so looking forward to this game.

2014's Worst Trend: Games so broken at launch that makes Battlefield 4 seem OK.