All Glitches Should Be Scrutinized Equally

Game developers have been under heavy scrutiny lately for releasing incomplete and unpolished work, but this is far from new. Assassin’s Creed Unity and Halo: The Master Chief Collection are the most recent examples, and just like some of these releases, this has become a yearly pattern. Last year it was Battlefield 4, but not all games are criticized for their lazy design as they should. Many sports games specifically fall in this category.

[XtraTrstrL]

That's what happens when you have HDDs on platforms and devs can just do updates, patches and hotfixes. The negatives seem to far outweigh the positives of it. Back in the day you'd get games with massive content packed into the cartridge/disc and compared to today's standards - very low amounts of bugs/glitches. Now games get broken into parts during development, they release the game in segments as $DLC, and claim those portions were on a separate DLC budget - even when it's Day-1 DLC. They rush to make time budgets and put little importance on the game being polished at launch, based on the ability they have to patch it at a later date. Then, even when you have a game that is embarrassingly riddled with bugs, they still are more focused on nickle and diming you to death with ridiculous $DLC that should obviously be free.

[JoeMcCallister]

Good point on the fragments - there are 10 Ubisoft "branches" that worked on Unity.

10 cooks in the kitchen. One might say...too many cooks.

[Ripsta7th]

"very low amounts of bugs/glitches"
Hahah good one, very funny

[starchild]

The double standards are a real problem in the gaming community. People tend to hop on bandwagons and focus their hate on one or just a few particular games, while other equally glitchy games basically get a free pass.

To give one example, AC Unity gets an extreme amount of hate, while games like Far Cry 4 and Dragon Age Inquisition get mostly praise, but in my experience FC4 and DAI have given me more issues overall than AC Unity. I have stutter in the latter two games that I can't resolve. Unity on the other hand runs at a solid framerate for me. I've seen plenty of glitches in all three games. But if I can't get a solid, steady framerate even if I cap at 30fps it has a huge effect on my enjoyment of a game.

[JoeMcCallister]

Nice write up - I think it comes down to how the company itself handles the issues. It's the cool thing to hate Ubisoft right now, and though they most certainly don't do everything, and really a whole lot at all the right way, they're just the ones with targets on them.

The Madden example is a good one, EA had fun with it, featured Kirksey in Ultimate Team if I remember right, then patched immediately.

I wanted to check out WWE, and was really bummed to hear it's just stripped and nearly every single review has had glitch issues. But they do deserve some heat for putting out a full release that clearly needed more time to bake.