Step into the boots of Tier 1 Operatives Rabbit and Deuce in this modern take on EA's long-running Medal of Honor series; the game features separately-developed single player and multiplayer modes.
I feel like I've said this a million times on the forums but broken is an amazingly abused word. It does not mean bad, it means downright unusable, it means the game is literally unplayable. So no, the game's not broken, whether it's a glitchy game or a bad game is another issue.
" I feel like I've said this a million times on the forums but broken is an amazingly abused word. It does not mean bad, it means downright unusable, it means the game is literally unplayable. So no, the game's not broken, whether it's a glitchy game or a bad game is another issue. "
" I feel like I've said this a million times on the forums but broken is an amazingly abused word. It does not mean bad, it means downright unusable, it means the game is literally unplayable. So no, the game's not broken, whether it's a glitchy game or a bad game is another issue. "
I'm not sure that's quite an accurate way to classify a "broken" game. Just because the machine recognizes the disc and can load the game up after the start menu doesn't mean it isn't broken. I have apparently reached a scripted point early on in the game that is simply broken. There is no way to progress. I have restarted the checkpoint and it doesn't behave any differently. It would seem the only way for me to press on will be toe start the entire level/mission/whatever over again -- and hopefully have a different outcome at that point.
Even if it allows me to press forward after that, I would not exactly say the title isn't broken. Walking through a door as if I didn't have to obey the laws of physics and matter is a glitch. Having the game grind to a halt and require one to start over a big chunk of everything they just played through, because your game had a panic attack would seem like "broken", to me. If I were filing a bug for it, I would certainly use the word "SHOWSTOPPER" in prioritizing it and wouldn't let it out the door until that was addressed.
@Branthog: What point are you encountering the scripting error at? I encountered several during the campaign, but dying and going back to the last checkpoint always reset things for me.
" @Branthog: What point are you encountering the scripting error at? I encountered several during the campaign, but dying and going back to the last checkpoint always reset things for me. "
I actually posted a thread on this in the MoH forum, here, hoping it was less a scripting issue and more a "player being too daft to see the obvious path" issue.
I ran into the problem right after you take out the mortars and go through the boneyard. There's a warehouse that you're supposed to take over, but the first time I went through, I was stuck right outside of it. Two of my guys were with me, standing around and being of no use.
Since the checkpoint was literally a few seconds before that, restarting at the checkpoint accomplished nothing.
I eventually assumed it was a scripting issue, restarting the whole mission (about 15-20m worth). The first restart wound up with the same problem. The second restart (and third time through, if we're still counting), a third AI came along right behind us and opened the door to the warehouse, allowing the game to progress.
I'm not sure if your squadmates can die in the game, so perhaps he did die and therefore wasn't around to get us into the warhouse the first to times. Or perhaps he got stuck on something in the massive boneyard. I have no clue. It was definitely frustrating, though.
As far as I know, your teammates can't die. The guy who was supposed to open the door probably just got stuck along his path somewhere, this happened to me at least three separate times during the campaign. Once was during the very first mission after going through the rollup door - while walking down the hallway, my partner decided to just stop. I had to reload to the beginning of the mission to get him to move. Not even shooting him in the face got him to budge out of that spot.
Another time, one of my teammates got stuck on some rocks and was flailing wildly about. Had to restart from the beginning of the level.
In that level where you have to flank a machinegun and end up on the roof which caves in, if you run really fast up to the roof, one of two outcomes happens: One, the game hangs and you get stuck in an area where you can't retreat from and you have to restart the game, or two, your teammate magically warps to the area with you from way across the street and the event triggers.
@MB: That's not too unlike what I had to do just a few minutes after the warehouse problem. About ten minutes beyond that point, I cleared a hallway with a machine gun behind a barricade halfway through it. There was nowhere to go, after that. My guys were all standing outside of a door that seemed the obvious next place to go through and two of them were in "breaching" stance - but nobody was breaching and it wasn't expecting me to do it, either.
Eventually, I shot the third guy in the face at point-blank range with half a belt of M-16, before he stood up, turned around, went to the door and then kicked it in.
" I feel like I've said this a million times on the forums but broken is an amazingly abused word. It does not mean bad, it means downright unusable, it means the game is literally unplayable. So no, the game's not broken, whether it's a glitchy game or a bad game is another issue. "
Thank you so much for saying this. I can't tell you how irritated I get when someone says a game is broken, when really it just has some technical problems. I've played broken games, and Medal of Honor isn't one of them.
" I feel like I've said this a million times on the forums but broken is an amazingly abused word. It does not mean bad, it means downright unusable, it means the game is literally unplayable. So no, the game's not broken, whether it's a glitchy game or a bad game is another issue. "
I'm not sure that's quite an accurate way to classify a "broken" game. Just because the machine recognizes the disc and can load the game up after the start menu doesn't mean it isn't broken. I have apparently reached a scripted point early on in the game that is simply broken. There is no way to progress. I have restarted the checkpoint and it doesn't behave any differently. It would seem the only way for me to press on will be toe start the entire level/mission/whatever over again -- and hopefully have a different outcome at that point.
Even if it allows me to press forward after that, I would not exactly say the title isn't broken. Walking through a door as if I didn't have to obey the laws of physics and matter is a glitch. Having the game grind to a halt and require one to start over a big chunk of everything they just played through, because your game had a panic attack would seem like "broken", to me. If I were filing a bug for it, I would certainly use the word "SHOWSTOPPER" in prioritizing it and wouldn't let it out the door until that was addressed. "
Sadly in actual game development I think there are a lot of things that the developers would rather not let out the door but are forced to let slip through because of financial restraints and deadlines. I still don't think what you've described makes the game broken though, let me explain what I mean with an analogy. Say I have a laptop and the laptop's webcam has a problem with picture distortion, that could be a pretty big issue if I'm using it and one component of the laptop is certainly broken but to say my laptop is broken would be misleading because as a whole it still functions fine.
" I feel like I've said this a million times on the forums but broken is an amazingly abused word. It does not mean bad, it means downright unusable, it means the game is literally unplayable. So no, the game's not broken, whether it's a glitchy game or a bad game is another issue. "
I'm not sure that's quite an accurate way to classify a "broken" game. Just because the machine recognizes the disc and can load the game up after the start menu doesn't mean it isn't broken. I have apparently reached a scripted point early on in the game that is simply broken. There is no way to progress. I have restarted the checkpoint and it doesn't behave any differently. It would seem the only way for me to press on will be toe start the entire level/mission/whatever over again -- and hopefully have a different outcome at that point.
Even if it allows me to press forward after that, I would not exactly say the title isn't broken. Walking through a door as if I didn't have to obey the laws of physics and matter is a glitch. Having the game grind to a halt and require one to start over a big chunk of everything they just played through, because your game had a panic attack would seem like "broken", to me. If I were filing a bug for it, I would certainly use the word "SHOWSTOPPER" in prioritizing it and wouldn't let it out the door until that was addressed. "
Sadly in actual game development I think there are a lot of things that the developers would rather not let out the door but are forced to let slip through because of financial restraints and deadlines. I still don't think what you've described makes the game broken though, let me explain what I mean with an analogy. Say I have a laptop and the laptop's webcam has a problem with picture distortion, that could be a pretty big issue if I'm using it and one component of the laptop is certainly broken but to say my laptop is broken would be misleading because as a whole it still functions fine. "
Except it's not one component. It's the game. At no point in the game should it become impossible to proceed further, unless you have died. And certainly not unless you have done something wrong to reach said state of failure. When the game has ground to a halt due to itself, that is no longer one thing breaking and is essentially the same as the game hanging or freezing.
Software development is unfortunately a world of compromises, but those compromises are prioritized. Software is frequently let out of the gate with problems. Some even fairly big. But being able to at least use the software in a functional state should never be one of them. If you developed a word processor that always froze after writing one page of content, you would classify that as a show-stopper. A bug that must be addressed before you released the software (especially since you don't want the lingering impact of a very negative customer experience). Your word processor may offer 200 fonts out of the box and exceptional grammar checking and conversion to and from every document format known to man -- but if it can't make it past one page of text, none of that matters, because the core of its functionality is dead.
Now, to be fair to the game, I'm very near the end at this point and have not encountered problems in quite some time. I initially feared (as suggested by both my own experiences and the experiences being reported elsewhere) that the game would be plagued with these problems throughout. At perhaps the 80% mark, I can say that it has been largely a problem-free experience -- so in my experience so far, I would describe it as a game with "some broken AI/scripted events". Enough to suck and reflect poorly on the game, but not enough to perhaps qualify it as "broken". It's just unfortunate that those two problems were very significant and will leave a bad taste in the mouths of many players, who will remember MoH as "that game with the broken scripting". Hardly the perception you want of your game.
" I feel like I've said this a million times on the forums but broken is an amazingly abused word. It does not mean bad, it means downright unusable, it means the game is literally unplayable. So no, the game's not broken, whether it's a glitchy game or a bad game is another issue. "
I'm not sure that's quite an accurate way to classify a "broken" game. Just because the machine recognizes the disc and can load the game up after the start menu doesn't mean it isn't broken. I have apparently reached a scripted point early on in the game that is simply broken. There is no way to progress. I have restarted the checkpoint and it doesn't behave any differently. It would seem the only way for me to press on will be toe start the entire level/mission/whatever over again -- and hopefully have a different outcome at that point.
Even if it allows me to press forward after that, I would not exactly say the title isn't broken. Walking through a door as if I didn't have to obey the laws of physics and matter is a glitch. Having the game grind to a halt and require one to start over a big chunk of everything they just played through, because your game had a panic attack would seem like "broken", to me. If I were filing a bug for it, I would certainly use the word "SHOWSTOPPER" in prioritizing it and wouldn't let it out the door until that was addressed. "
Sadly in actual game development I think there are a lot of things that the developers would rather not let out the door but are forced to let slip through because of financial restraints and deadlines. I still don't think what you've described makes the game broken though, let me explain what I mean with an analogy. Say I have a laptop and the laptop's webcam has a problem with picture distortion, that could be a pretty big issue if I'm using it and one component of the laptop is certainly broken but to say my laptop is broken would be misleading because as a whole it still functions fine. "
Except it's not one component. It's the game. At no point in the game should it become impossible to proceed further, unless you have died. And certainly not unless you have done something wrong to reach said state of failure. When the game has ground to a halt due to itself, that is no longer one thing breaking and is essentially the same as the game hanging or freezing. Software development is unfortunately a world of compromises, but those compromises are prioritized. Software is frequently let out of the gate with problems. Some even fairly big. But being able to at least use the software in a functional state should never be one of them. If you developed a word processor that always froze after writing one page of content, you would classify that as a show-stopper. A bug that must be addressed before you released the software (especially since you don't want the lingering impact of a very negative customer experience). Your word processor may offer 200 fonts out of the box and exceptional grammar checking and conversion to and from every document format known to man -- but if it can't make it past one page of text, none of that matters, because the core of its functionality is dead. Now, to be fair to the game, I'm very near the end at this point and have not encountered problems in quite some time. I initially feared (as suggested by both my own experiences and the experiences being reported elsewhere) that the game would be plagued with these problems throughout. At perhaps the 80% mark, I can say that it has been largely a problem-free experience -- so in my experience so far, I would describe it as a game with "some broken AI/scripted events". Enough to suck and reflect poorly on the game, but not enough to perhaps qualify it as "broken". It's just unfortunate that those two problems were very significant and will leave a bad taste in the mouths of many players, who will remember MoH as "that game with the broken scripting". Hardly the perception you want of your game. "
I do think if a game has many points at which it becomes impossible to progress, forcing you to restart from previous checkpoints or at the beginning of the missions then it can definitely be argued that it is broken and if this is the case with Medal of Honor then the game probably does have a broken single-player experience, but this wasn't what you originally said. You originally said that you encountered a single instance of this issue happening in the game and in the event that this had been a one-off glitch then I would have stood by my statement that in that situation the game wouldn't have qualified as broken.
I've finished the game and my experience (I understand this varies from person to person, depending on the peculiar circumstances that trigger various scripting failures) and am happy to say that I only ran into real problems in that one area and the area ten minutes beyond it. The rest of the game was smooth.
Also, I didn't really run into "invisible wall" problems all that often. The areas you were battling in were mostly open enough to let you do what you needed to do.
do you think when they signed up the repawned guys...that they said to these guys..ok...just release it how it is..and we will now go with these guys..just keep going on what your doing..but we are not giving you any more money..
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