Games now and games to come banter

Anyone else feel or annoyed with how games are currently being developed

As that I mean some things I like to point which I feel like a lot of players would prefere

lets go back to old days of nes/snes/genesis /turbo graphics 16/pc
In those days, games were made and defined and could not be changed on a weekly or yearly basis
Sure, some games may have add some addons or something you could add onto the game
but it was polished and stable before they could release it for the most part.

Now we come to games being created today and games to come
The products that are released are not tested enough or should not even be released
and then patched on release day or few weeks down the road.
You now also feel like you have less stuff in the game because it is called DLC or skins
which for the most part were originally unlockable by doing something difficult or just completing a mission or something that was a bit tricky and required some skill into reaching the end task/goal

now you just pay to have it. Its is getting pretty disgusting on how greedy companies are.

in the pipe dream, if you make a great game, have a bunch of stuff that is unlockable and not behind a paywall and you will truely just have a natural and loyal fan base

I feel like you could then hire more people to make even more amazing content
Not just people just trying to make dollars of garbo content

what are you hates and dislikes of current games

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Yeah i´ve also thought about it, several game producers have in recent years released games that in effect were half finished, unstable and seriously lacking in content.

I used to play games from a series called “Heroes of might and magic” i loved those, was completely hooked on the 5th game of the series and played it often with friends…then a few years later they released the 6th and i was hyped to the skies about it.

And so i bought it, and what did i get?

The story mode missions were bugged and crashed constantly, dialogue and audio missing making the story very confusing to follow and furthermore it was poorly balanced, extremely so, heck several things were even just missing.

They eventually got around to fixing all the bugs in like a year´s worth of time but then there was this tiny detail, in previous games there were a lot more factions taking part and they just were not there in that game.

What happened then? 2 of those factions got added in, separately,if you paid for them as DLC´s.

They werent cheap either, the base game already cost like twice or thrice as much as the previous game and the DLC´s themselves came out at like 15£ a piece ontop that, when i saw it i just felt scammed to hell and promptly dropped the game without playing more.

Worst part? The following game after that the 7th…had the exact same line of problems being unstable with frequent crashes&bugs + content that should have been there from the start being locked behind paywall DLCs, and this time they didnt even bother fixing it up to be presentable.

Ubisoft had evidently learned nothing, and now the series seems to be completely dead, laid to waste at the hands of incompetent and greedy devs, buggers did not even apologize once for it all : (

I´ve seen similar stuff from other developers which just left me feeling disappointed and kinda depressed about it, the only ones who really did not disappoint in any such regard that i played in recent years were CD Project red who are the guys behind “The witcher 3”.

Game crashed like once from start to finish for me, no real bugs or super broken stuff and a lot of actually nice content was added as “free DLCS” ontop an already very rich base game, all this gave me a really happy surprise.

On a side note, Vermintide 2 while buggy and often poorly balanced has been great in one particular area, communication, Fatshark hedge&julia are often both quick to respond to important questions and bug reports…the balance team while often a tad bit slow also tend to do a good job in the end.

Bugfixing team are also usually quick to sort any major bugs which is a important quality for a game to have any hope at lasting in popularity.

1 Like

I find the possibility of easily updating games both a blessing and a curse, though the blessing part is less… impactful. I’ve played video games since the 8-bit days, so I do have some perspective in it.

Story time: I started my gaming on consoles, because of various reasons. They were cheaper; they were easier to use (especially for a kid), and later on when I understood such, they didn’t really have loading times and upon buying (or even renting) a game I could just plug it in and start playing without needing to go through extra steps or worry about if I had space for it. Little by little, most of those advantages disappeared - optical media added loading times; HDDs included with consoles facilitated installing games, reducing the loading times but preventing from just playing them immediately; the consoles got more features and with them, a UI with complexity on par with any other piece of hardware… They got closer and closer to PCs without quite getting there. And a computer could always do more. Add that most of my friends are PC guys (and probably have been for longer than me, at least relatively) and I’m almost completely moved to PC nowadays. I do own a PS4, but I still haven’t got a single game on it that’d really make the purchase worth it - almost all the games that would be candidates, are available for PC too, and usually cheaper to boot.

The inclusion of HDDs in consoles brought up with it another feature that had been available in the PC world for quite a while already: The possibility of updating games. Before that, you were stuck with what you first got (I can remember a couple of quite game-breaking bugs from the old days that could never be fixed), possibly even on PC side - not everyone had regular access to Internet, and even if you had, updates weren’t necessarily made or could take ages to download. This, I think, is a double-edged sword: On one hand, if some bugs do go through, they can be fixed later together with updating some features of the game, but that can lead to the mentality of “we can always fix it later, just get something together by deadline”. Having the possibility of fixing parts of a game (or other piece of software) later on is good; having it be so easy kind of isn’t.

The worst show of the bad things easy updates bring is the multitude of games (including VT2) with day 1 or week 1 patches - because patching a game is so easy, you can just roll out a game and fix some parts of it immediately after launch - parts that really shouldn’t need fixing, at least not days or even hours after the game’s release. Game-breakers get through, because it’s so damn easy to just fix them afterwards, and functionally you can use the actual players as final testers - or the deadlines are so tight that release needs to be done now, even if some features don’t work right, that could’ve been fixed if the launch had been delayed for a day or two.

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witch 3 isn’t really my kinda game but I see that it got the dedication and work it needed…

other games i’ve played also include re4 pc, re5 dead space 1,2
with those games
there wasn’t really any pay wall behind unlocking content within the game I mean re5 had that dlc which actually added content but also you got it for free at some point
dead space, you could upgrade weapons within the games eco system

games these days take full advantage of gamers and making you pay for stuff that should be unlockable within the game.

DLC should add extra value and you know what you can then charge that extra few extra dollars
but skins as dlc is so blatant and unneeded in games.

then you dlc that is behind mini wall that is boxes another major disappointing mechanic introduced into games just sucking even more money out of gamers

wish they would just stop that garbage and start making games fun and enjoyable again.

Kind of. But I also sort of understand it. I think it’s important to take it into perspective. The gaming industry and world has changed beyond belief since the old days of Pong or Super Mario Bros. Back then, the market was small. People go to arcades and play on these enormous machines, playing classics like Pac Man. Then it shifted towards a home market on consoles like the NES.

We as consumers sometimes look back at games like that, which would ship “complete” and with minimal glitches/bugs (usually). Obviously “patching” a game wasn’t really within the realm of possibilities, because the internet was still in a state of infancy. Games were also tiny and insignificant compared to the modern marvels that we experience today.

The original Super Marios Bros was 31 kilobytes. You read that right. 31 kilobytes. The limitation of those old cartridges was 256 kilobits, so there wasn’t a lot of room to play with. Super Mario Bros had a little over 16,000 lines of code. Modern day games are unbelievably different. They’re truly technical marvels in comparison. A single modern video game rock(the model) today will probably have more data than the entire Super Mario Bros game. Then you have something like Witcher 3 sitting at 51 GB. It’s about 209,000 times larger than SMB. Then you have over 1.1 million lines of code for Witcher 3. That’s about 69 times the amount of code. All of that data has to make sense and work together.

The gaming industry has changed. We see a lot more “business” and “suit and ties”. Prime examples are companies like Activision just milking the Call of Duty series. Malicious practices like real money gambling/loot boxes, gating, and manipulation are a disease that currently exists. Mobile games especially are plagued by this absolute epidemic and it should be purged. They have so many of these bad practices it’s sickening. I know, I’ve gone through dozens of mobile games and they all do the same thing. This video actually highlights it really well, about 10 seconds in:

So typically when a game is made, they have their initial sale, and of course that income wanes over time. It begged the question, “How do we make this more profitable and sustainable”? Expansions and DLC’s eventually became a solution. Maybe some merchandise such as T-shirts, trinkets, or plushies. Now, it’s stuff like MTX and cosmetics. There are different approaches to it and some are more consumer friendly and reasonable than others.

I like to see the gaming industry evolve. I want it to evolve in a positive direction though and for the disgusting practices that exist to be snuffed out. I like seeing games be bold and give me an experience I haven’t had before. Vermintide 2 did something like that. It took this very simple design (Left 4 Dead) and absolutely owned it. VT2 continues to evolve and become better. As the devs try new things, get feedback, and move forward, sometimes it leads to us as players getting cool new and evolved experiences.

It’s awesome that we get to enjoy the immersive visuals, audio, gameplay, and so on. The amount of time spent on things like audio for games is absolutely mind blowing. Some of the best songs were created specifically for video games. I do desire having better game quality (like less bugs, more features, more development of the tech and features, etc.) but I also try to have some understanding when things don’t come out quite right either. I’ve always been interested in the technical side of things so maybe that’s where part of my patience and tolerance comes from when I am confronted with those kinds of issues (not the malicious ones, but the technical ones). I do think things should hit the market in acceptable states of quality though.

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yeah I get the expectations are higher than normal
but you also have to take into account, they make millions if the product is solid and has replay value
off course you will have those players that will beat it within a day and you have others that will play it casually.

even in the playstation, xbox, nintendo console wars when those more advanced consoles came out, there wasn’t really any dlc for those games either and everything within the game was earned.

now sure it takes a bit more time to develop more advanced visuals but at the same time there is less effort in actual in-game content and when did that start becoming more and more obtuse in determining when skins should be unlocked only by paying for it or unlocking a cross-hair overlay. Yeah, its gotten to that point in games where its being abused to such extent and players still shill out money for such things which is beyond my mind why someone would spend money on such frivolous things.

for example as silly as boarderlands was with the in-game loot box system, it was overloaded with in game skins/guns and whatever else to keep you occupied with. am not saying every game needs to have such an amount of content but you can easily tell that it can also be done within reason
especially for triple A titles

Fun thing, though: Even if real DLCs didn’t come until actually downloading them was sensibly possible (and certainly simple cosmetic or other small things weren’t available), paid add-ons did exist before. PS2 at least, and I think PS1, had some games (Dynasty Warriors come to mind) that had purchased add-ons that more or less needed the original game to work, and even Sega had Sonic & Knuckles in the 16-bit era. They were usually constructed so that they worked as stand-alones too, but if you wanted the content of both the original and the add-on (which was often enough priced like a full game, but didn’t have as much content by itself), you needed to own and use both together.

yes that is true, but that had legit content within itself after you bought it. I had no problem with those additions. well worth the cost for those addons. what am getting at is, what you get now vs what you got before is just lazy content that should just be in the game and not behind a dumb pay wall.

The kinds of DLCs that bring actual extra content to a game are quite fine in my book, but there certainly are some that really shouldn’t be paid stuff. A good, relatively recent example comes from a big publisher that I generally have liked in the past: Namco. The most recent installments of both Tekken and Soul Calibur had some of the old, familiar characters (and in the case of Tekken, some of my own favourites) locked behind paywall. What’s worse, in SC it was Tira, one of the more iconic characters of the franchise, and she was available at launch. That together with a general disappointment in the game caused me to abandon it completely.

On-launch DLCs in general, and of such significance as Tira is in particular, is really a sign of very greedy behaviour, and not worth supporting. Countering them is difficult, though - the only real way of protesting them is through our wallets, and it tells the publishers nothing of the reasons. A lot of boycotting is also needed for it to make an impact - as long as they gain a significant amount of money from these practices, they’ll continue doing these, and that amount comes easily from the more casual buyers who don’t know better or don’t care and the most diehard fans who’ll buy everything. I think it’d really have to be a worldwide movement, most likely from both customers’ and developers’/publishers’ sides, to have a real impact.

omg lets not even go to fighting games. that is the biggest slap in the face
looking at you capcom…