Releasing a game too early
By frostburn 15 Comments
Decline of quality in today's games:
With console games becoming more popular and PC Games becoming a small section of the market, little attention has been paid to the ports from Console to PC. It is a shame because the processing power on most modern PCs well outclass that of the Xbox 360. HUDs normally don't have an upscalled version so we get stretched out blurry HUDS in our PC games now instead of the crisp HUD on the console version. They don't seem to optimize the games very much either, when you have 3-4 times the graphics and processing power of the console game you shouldn't have any issues running it at a full 60FPS with most settings on High.
A recent example of this would be Battlefield Bad Company 2. The game looks great on PC, the framerate however is not something I'm happy with. Most telling of all however is the rushed job they did porting the game to PCs and just how unfinished the game truly is. They released this game about 2 months too early and it shows. The list of issues in the game's official forums keeping growing, they didn't seem to do much testing at all or just couldn't be bothered to make large changes to the code before release.
Now over a month since its release there are still huge issues with the game. I for one don't have PINGs showing up in the Server Browser. I've tried running the game and/or Steam as Administrator with no luck and to be honest I SHOULDN'T have to bother with that anyway, no other game has this issue. That might be well and fine if I could use the "Play Now" button and get into a game that way except it doesn't work right now... Not to mention, when it did work half the time it would try to put me in a game that had a Password or was already full because the server browser can't tell if the server has reserved slots so it may say 30/32 players but when you try to join you can't because it's "Full" even though it really just has two reserved slots for members of the clan paying for the server.
I could rant all day about the issues with this game. The reason I care is because I enjoy the Battlefield Series and up till this game there have never been so many glaring issues to take away from the fun. I WANT to play this game but damn if EA/Dice is doing everything in their power to make me hate it.
TL; DR:
Game developers are releasing unfinished games far too often, mostly on PC but also on consoles thanks to the easy patching built into the modern systems.Battlefield Bad Company 2's PC port is pretty horrible given all the bugs they have and they publicly act like nothing is wrong when these bugs should have been caught in the testing phase.
Now that PC Games is such a small overall market for developers and publishers alike, they don't take the time to make QUALITY ports and it shows, sad for us PC Gamers.
/rantover