Before I start, this isn't a hate piece. I like the games mentioned. It is more an observation piece.
So we have just had the Spike VGA awards. Looking at the winners from this year and previous years I notices something, arguably, bad when it comes to the winners (especially Game of the Year). The last two years have had some buggy games.
Taking a small trip down memory lane to 2010 the winner for game of the year was Red Dead Redemption. Red Dead Redemption isn't a bad game and defiantly should be recognised as a good game. But Red Dead Redemption was a really buggy game. I advice doing a quick search in google if you haven't played Red Dead Redemption and you know what I mean. There are bugs raging from poor loading and sometimes not loading at all of textures to the ridiculous gun slinging dog. With a game that focuses on a mature theme having a gun slinging dog defiantly stop you being immersed in the game
Jump back to the present day. Game of the Year is Skyrim. I again think Skyrim is a good game. But again this game is extremely buggy. This game is so buggy to the extent that a lot of PS3 users are finding this game unplayable. The game is plagued with frame rate issues.
It isn't like Skyrim and Red Dead Redemption are against other buggy games. Red Dead Redemption was up against Call of Duty: Black Ops, God of War III, Halo: Reach, Mass Effect 2. Skyrim had stiff competition to. It was up against Batman: Arkham City, The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, Portal 2, Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception. Now for me there are less buggy, equally good games in the 2010 and 2011 nominees for Game of the Year
For those of you who are unaware the Spike's VGA are voted by the industry not by the public. This is where my problem lies. How can industry professionals give Game of the Year two years in a row to games that are seriously faulty. I have heard some people haven't experienced bugs in these games but these people seem few and far between.
I am not expecting Game of the Year to be perfect. But I just feel that bugs are being over looked in games. As we progress through this generation the amount of games being released with bugs has increased. Should industry professionals really look past these bugs and give a game Game of the Year when there are equally good games with hardly to no bugs in them.
Again I stress I believe these games are good games and deserve some recognition but they also deserve criticism. Game of the Year means it is the best game in that year. So in theory buggy games can be the best game in that year but isn't the whole part of a great game is to be a smooth experience. Its just not setting a good precedent for future games
Shuhei Yoshida is all about Reach.
Chains of Lukomorye comes is a haunting third-person shooter that explores love, grief, and the thin line between fate and free will. The game will be playable solo or in online co-op, "as you descend into an alternate post-WWI world where Allied experiments shattered reality itself."
SEGA has made a mistake on one of their PDF forms which has inadvertently disclosed full sales numbers of some of the company’s key software releases.
We come to expect bugs in games as large as skyrim.
It has become the norm and we just go with it.
It deserved GOTY for the things it did right.
Good piece though.
I've been playing for a while now and only minor bugs crop up. Nothing game breaking and nothing annoying. Just because worse bugs are happening to OTHER people doesn't mean that I should feel the same as them when it's not happening to me. GOTY for me, so what if it's buggy for others, it's not for me and that's what matters.
Oh and Red Dead wasn't buggy AT ALL for me, and it was my GOTY of 2010 too.
Also, I see your comments on Skyrim are from the PS3 version, but PC and 360 players do not experience the framerate issues you're talking about.
Thank you! I have had this in my head all day coincidentally (and in general over the past couple of years, but particularly today in reading a topic on the N4G forums about Skyrim). It's pathetic what we put up with as gamers in regards to broken or unfinished games. Red Dead Redemption was buggy and had other issues in things like loading times. Fallout 3 and New Vegas were buggy and would for a lot of people drop in framerate once getting to a point of around 40 hours in or so, and the same issue is happening with some Skyrim players as well as the other issues with the game. Battlefield 3 online was a mess in the first few weeks for me on PS3 and I didn't even play it that much - every time I got into a game with friends we would be split up, and voice chat didn't work, and still I'm having some of these issues although nowhere near as much. Then there's the bugginess that seemed to be prevalent in Dead Island as well, and other examples are about too.
And what do we say to this? What do we say after waiting months or years for a game to come out, after we have paid something like £35-£45/€50-€60/$55- $65 - full price - for the game and then we find it to be way too buggy and clearly unfinished? "I'll just wait for a patch." It's absolute nonsense, you pay full price (which for a lot of people is a lot of money) for a game on release and it's not even finished and you have to wait weeks and in many cases months for the game to be "finished" through online patches so you can play the game properly, yet this is no bother. That's not even to mention those players that don't have internet connections at home or who can't get online where there consoles are: what are those players to do? They can't wait for the patches, they just have to deal with an unfinished game for the duration of their ownership of the game.
We have rights people, at least where I am the Sales of Goods and Supply of Services Act states that all goods must be off merchantable (good) quality, and must be fit for the purpose intended. If you can't play through the game properly without being stopped or without the game freezing, or if you can't play online properly because the online system is a mess, or if you can't even progress through your game, you have rights and you are covered and you can march on to wherever you bought the game and demand a refund and they can't say some rubbish like "just wait for a patch". The laws might be worded differently here and there but I know that the laws that apply here are almost the same everywhere in the EU and I can't imagine many other areas around the world are that different.
I know it can just be the case of a couple of bugs or glitches here and there but when it's more (which it often is) we shouldn't just accept it and wait for it to be fixed after paying full price. If you pay full price you should get a finished game; otherwise we shouldn't have to pay as much on release while waiting for patches if the problems are bad. I know in games like Skyrim and Fallout the general size of the game and amount of variables in them mean that you ought to expect at the least minor issues but if they stop you from playing the game then the game shouldn't be released like that.
Bugs are easier to swallow if the rest of the game overshadows it.
Both RDR and Skyrim were, IMO, pretty good games. Yes, they had their share of bugs, but when the scales are weighed, the good trumps the bad by a big margin.
The bugs are also easier to excuse when you consider the scale of both Skyrim and RDR.
It should also be noted that not all bugs are due to software. Most large open-world games tend to have their share of bugs, and some of those issues could be due to hardware.
(That doesn't mean that all bugs are due to hardware, so the developper still deserves a few scathing words)
Why don't all games run a month private/public beta - giving players a limited access to the game to not spoil anything but a large enough amount to give decent feedback.
It's not hard - but company's like activision refuse to put a quick beta that will improve their game and save them time in the future. It will also improve their credibility and reputation.