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Arguments spring up on this forum about the ultimate consequences of the advent of online connectivity and generous hard drives, both of which have really taken off this generation with consoles. Some here insist on sticking to the disc-based releases when they can get them (I count myself among that number) for fear that one day those digital downloads will all go poof. Others are more open to the idea of DLC, and the possibility of extending the life of a retail title for months or even years, but draw the line when you have to buy the game new or purchase a voucher to explore all the content that was actually pressed on the disc. Once again, you have my sympathy.
But there's actually another, perhaps even more troubling issue that has been bothering me as of late. To demonstrate my concern, pop a game into your Xbox 360 that you haven't played in a while. Make sure you're signed into Live, be it "Gold" or "Silver." Before the game boots, you're probably going to get prompted to install a software update for your game. If you refuse, you can't play it online. No multiplayer or leaderboards for you then.
But that's not so bad, is it? The ability to patch your game online gives the developers the opportunity to iron out bugs that slipped through testing, right? Well, sure, that's absolutely right. But as the recent issues plaguing the PS3 version of Skyrim have painfully reminded me, bugs are getting more common, and they're getting worse.
Why is that? Is it because today's games are simply bigger, assembled by larger and larger teams over longer and longer development cycles? Yeah, that's part of it. What's really happening, however, is that the once-immutable shipping deadline for developers and publishers has become porous. If it's the 11th hour before the holiday deadline and the game is "mostly" polished, is the company going to hold onto the game for another month and miss the busiest sales week of the year? Or are they going to push the game out the door as-is, and just patch the game over the internet when the consumers complain that they've paid 60 dollars for a broken game? If you are one of the few that doesn't connect their console to the internet, and you buy one of these broken games, you're boned. Nowhere on the package is there a warning that says "Game may or may not work." It's becoming a culture of procrastination, a culture of half-done. We'll get around to it. . . if sales are strong enough and we decide it's worth our time.
I'm not saying anything new here, but it nonetheless boggles my mind where the industry is going these days. In simpler times, if a game was dead-on-arrival, it stayed dead. Imagine if Pac-Man on the 2600 could have been patched? Atari could have written and published their games one line of code at a time, and the customers would get the short shrift.
Oddly enough, I find myself defending Nintendo here. The Wii, with its rather spartan online features and its humble 512 megs of onboard storage, is the one console that remains largely patch-free. True, popping a recently released game will often prompt you to install the latest update of the Wii's firmware, but the games themselves are finished and work as-is. I'm not talking about DLC (which they typically don't have either), I'm talking about patches. When you play your original, unpatched New Super Mario Bros Wii, the Koopas don't bug out and fly around backwards. The game doesn't slow to 3 frames per second as your advance through the worlds and your save file bloats to 9 megs. Do bugs happen in the house of N? Absolutely. There are entire websites dedicated to showing you how to break Ocarina of Time and cause all sorts of mayhem. But at Nintendo alone, it seems, games are either done, or pushed back until they are done.
Edited by MagitekAngel, Tue Dec 6, 2011 3:47 PM.
