Posted by Kyle Prahl | 11 Comments
Has the Internet Ruined Gaming?
Let’s take a trip back in time. The year was 2002. A bright-eyed eleven-year-old named Kyle had just received a Game Boy Advance game called The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. Never one to turn down a Middle-Earth experience (or video game, for that matter), Kyle eagerly popped the diminutive cartridge into his Nintendo portable. While far from perfect and often a bore, Fellowship of the Ring nevertheless held his interest as a companion to the book.
Until it froze.
With two-thirds of the game complete, Kyle hit a game-breaking glitch that caused Fellowship to freeze at a crucial doorway in the Mines of Moria. Confused, he shut the system off, reloaded his save, and tried again. Same result. With varying tactics and movements, Kyle tried to make his way through the doorway without causing a freeze, to no avail. Kyle even went as far as to replay the game, starting from scratch on multiple occasions in case the file itself had become corrupted along the way. Every time, at the same doorway, the game froze.
At that age, it never occurred to me to look up my problem on the Internet. Living in rural Wisconsin doomed me to a dial-up connection, and I had never experienced a situation where a game I owned was simply unable to be completed. Thankfully, Fellowship of the Ring for the GBA was a rather low-profile release, but its unfinished state garnered a blitzkrieg of negative reviews. As I found out recently, this game-breaking bug was never truly addressed or remedied – with the game on store shelves, and no way of patching or re-releasing it, Black Label Games could only give gamers who were hungry enough to search online a flimsy workaround. To this day, I’ve never finished Fellowship of the Ring - it was a fundamentally broken game in a time where such a product was condemned for even existing.
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim has shipped over 10 million copies since release. Nearly two months out, PS3 players patiently wait for a fix that will make the game playable.
What have we come to? Millions of people own this game and are experiencing the kind of problems that simply shouldn’t be there. Broken quests. Frequent freezes. Corrupt save files. There may not be a consistent theme to Skyrim’s problems, but they are no less apparent or game-breaking because of it. If all of Skyrim’s Achievements can’t be earned because an NPC has disappeared, the game is broken. If it’s impossible to play for longer than 30 minutes before the framerate devolves to slideshow levels, the game is broken. And yet, Skyrim has garnered Game of the Year awards and nominations from nearly every major gaming press outlet.
When did this become OK? It’s now customary practice among gamers to advise each other against purchasing a game on release day because a fair number of bugs and problems are expected. The ubiquity of an Internet connection for home consoles has allowed publishers to force deadlines upon developers, with the knowledge that any issues still present can probably be ironed out later with patches. As gamers, are we really OK with buying a game and knowing that it’s not going to work?
Allow me to pose this question: if the very first boss of Shadow of the Colossus had sank into the ground and disappeared for 70% of players, would the game not have been crucified? Would it have even come close to being the legendary artistic hallmark in gaming that it is today? Imagine that the moment of Aerith’s death – an emotional milestone for many gamers – had been ruined when a placeholder cutscene with stick figures was loaded instead. Crono never travels through time because the pillars of light don’t function. Solid Snake never saves Meryl; the torture scene glitches and sends the player directly to their cell. Red can’t defeat the sixth Gym Leader. In the eighth castle, Princess Peach is nowhere to be found.
These may be sensational examples, but the logic holds true today. Developers and publishers operate on the assumption that every console gamer has access to a fast and stable Internet connection. Here’s a hint: they don’t. For nine months out of the year, I attend Uni and enjoy one of the fastest wired connections the country has to offer. The other three months? A 3G Verizon signal is converted to Wi-Fi and powers five devices simultaneously. Ever tried updating your PS3 firmware or downloading an XBLA game on a 3G connection? How about participating in the Uncharted 3 multiplayer beta, or downloading the 170 MB (!) day-one patch for Battlefield 3? Before Battlefield’s release, DICE’s David Goldfarb stated that this day-one patch contained “all the final stuff,” including game elements the developer didn’t have time to include before Battlefield 3 went gold.
You read that right. Battlefield 3 went gold before it was finished.
I understand that Battlefield 3 has always been marketed and developed with a multiplayer focus. I get that. Maybe the day-one patch had nothing to do with the game’s lambasted single-player campaign. For anyone who has experienced an unpatched game, this argument holds no weight. Enemy NPCs in Uncharted 3′s co-op campaign literally vanish. Black Ops killstreaks don’t work in splitscreen multiplayer. Textures for the Xbox 360 version of Skyrim look awful when the game is installed. Scripted events in The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword fail to trigger and the game can’t be completed. Without mailing Nintendo your Metroid: Other M save data, a crucial door may never open.
Most can deal with these issues, but what if the problems went deeper? Shepard can’t recruit Rex because his NPC behavior is programmed incorrectly. The period of time in which a Deus Ex boss is vulnerable never initiates, and the game can’t be completed. When GLaDOS’s first audio file as a potato plays, Portal 2 freezes. These games may be more complex than those of generations past (and cost a whole lot more money to make), but the pressure to innovate and ambition needed to do so were just as powerful back then. Don’t believe me? Look no further than Andy Gavin’s fantastic series on the development of Crash Bandicoot.
There was a time when games were finished and polished on release. Games like Fellowship of the Ring were an exception, not the rule. Now, in light of the Internet’s ability to artificially extend deadlines and correct mistakes, we excuse the outright laziness of developers who fall back on the crutch of patches. Before having an online console was expected, game-breaking glitches and bugs would have changed the landscape and history of gaming. Now that day-one patches and unfinished games have become the industry standard, the trajectory of gaming history is changing.
In my review for Vivid Gamer, I gave Skyrim a 9.5. I reviewed the game, not the product. Despite the unbelievable state it was shipped in, Skyrim manages to be an excellent game. Bethesda’s latest is a technological marvel; its world is huge and its systems complex. Still, given the hardware and expectations of the time, there’s little doubt that Metal Gear Solid and Ocarina of Time were greater achievements. Both of those games, alongside countless others from before the age of patches, have ascended to the absolute pinnacle of gaming’s hierarchy. They are classics. As good as Skyrim is, I’ll never be able to call it a classic.
The difference? Metal Gear Solid and Ocarina of Time worked. Nearly two months out from release, I can’t say the same for Skyrim.
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Good for you Kyle – well written, cogent article.
I stopped reading when you called out people for picking Skyrim for GOTY. While you’re free to have your opinions… you reviewed the ps3 version yourself giving it a 9.5 and I find that to be a tad hypocritical.
Oh my I wasn’t going to point this out (though I did think it when reading through the post), but I don’t see why Skyrim is even an example. Fallout 3 and New Vegas suffered from many problems in the “game breaking, slow down, unplayable” field too. These were also highly praised games and published by the same company. Overall this just tells me Beth needs to demand more quality over internet is their saving grace…
I think the issue today is rushing products out to meet a fixed deadline. QA may identify certain problems but these get ignored or relegated to a patch release because they dont want to miss their release date. Back in the days of NES games, the games had to be perfect, because there was no patching. But now, the developer thinks thy can always go in later with a patch.
And they can! That’s the root of the evil.
in my opinion if game is like skyrim ,then it is an exception in terms of having bugs and new patches , because on my 150hr playtime of skyrim i only encountered 3 bugs ,so bethesda did what it can for bugs not every bug can be found by their team of testers ,it requires many players.so yeah skyrim is a legendary game.
Most points have already been made on this, but let me add my two-cents.
First of all, I do think that games of the NES and SNES era in particular were “simpler” in the sense that they were generally far more linear games. In other words, even where the games gave you some more options than just “go right,” the openness of a game like a Grand Theft Auto or one of Bethesda’s titles was not there. It just wasn’t possible, from a technical perspective. As a result, the possibilities for bugs were fewer.
From what I understand, part of the issue with some of the bugs mentioned in your article result from a combination of player-made decisions, and only if all of these conditions are met will a bug appear. With a game as exhaustive in content as Skyrim, I imagine it would very difficult (if not impossible), not to mention expensive, to eliminate all bugs pre-launch.
However, that doesn’t mean we should excuse the enormous amount of bugs found in games like Skyrim (or some of Bioware’s games, where glitched quests made the game almost unplayable at parts). Major bugs such as glitched quests (especially in a smaller game) should be found before launch. Unfortunately, I think the fact that publishers put pressure on developers to get games out as quickly as possible (and as cheaply as possible) means that the time and money needed to make sure these larger and more complex (in the sense of combinations of instances that can lead to bugs) games do not get the Q&A that they need.
I also do think that in the 8- and 16-bit generation, it was very possible to produce a complete, polished product in as little as three months with only a handful of staff. Now games take several years and hundreds of different staff, costing millions of dollars to produce. As a result, it’s not surprising that many publishers would like to decrease development time as much as possible to try to rein in that initial cost and produce profits as soon as they can. The fact that they can “always patch it later” is probably a big point of it.
So has the internet ruined gaming? No, I don’t think so – I do think while some devs/publishers may use the ability to patch as a crutch, I think it’s a good thing we do have the ability to get issues fixed. I mean, look at Nintendo and how clunky it is for them to fix their mistakes. Or think of your experience your recounted, where the game was simply forever broken. Obviously, some games never get patched, or never get patched sufficiently, but all we can do as gamers is call developers and publishers out when they make gross mistakes.
Maybe we should be more harsh as reviewers if games have huge bugs. Maybe if we did, we’d see developers and publishers more eager to try to fix their mistakes before, instead of after, launch.
Great Article Kyle!
As someone who’s been around long enough to remember a time when games weren’t released in beta (some practically in alpha condition), I know exactly what you’re talking about. The increased size of games is no excuse, and neither is the larger budget (much of which is spent of cinematic touches, such as big name voice actors). If anything, Bethesda should have gotten better at this by now, since, as you pointed out, they’ve been using Gamebryo since 2002. But they haven’t. Skyrim has more game breaking bugs at release than Oblivion did, and that’s saying a lot. There’s so much pressure to hit deadlines these days, and publishers know they can get away with patching it later (or not at all), than most dev studios are afraid to delay the product.
Remember when we used to get mad at developers because they would delay games we were excited about? Just to deliver a better product! Who has the cajones to do that now? Maybe Valve, on occasion.
And of course, on top of all of this, the unjustified price point increase for Pgames over the last decade is insult upon injury. I used to pay $40 at release for a polished and finished product that I didn’t even think to patch, and certainly didn’t need to. When developers did release patches, they often included new features, and free small bursts of content (Look at Bethesda’s free official plugins for Morrowind, or the variety of free maps that used to be released for multiplayer games).
Now, we are asked to pay $60 at release for products that by all accounts should still be in beta. If the games are patched at all, the patches often introduce more bugs that need to be corrected by subsequent patches, and then they expect you to pay ridiculous prices for tiny increments of content that would have been free ten years ago. Some of this content even ships with the game, or is in development along side it.
I’ve even known a few studios to leave glaring design flaws in their products and ask you to pay for full priced expansions to fix them (looking at Paradox Interactive here).
But I’m getting off topic. My point is that while I recognize the added complexity of developing open world games with a much larger team and a much greater budget, the fact remains that studios such as Bethesda have a great deal of experience with this process, and Technology in gaming in general has not improved enough since the current generation of consoles were released to warrant such problems. While the number of moving parts has gone up, along with a slight increase in the overall landmass, the overall size of the content in Morrowind when compared with Skyrim is comparable, and yet their levels of completion at release are not. The sheer number of cells, hand crafted dungeons, cities, etc. are about on the same level, and the number of guilds, side quests, and overall gameplay value has drastically decreased since TES:III.
As content decreases, bugs increase, as does price. Where does it end?
[...] have a lot of sympathy for the idea that developer expectation of post-release patching has done a great deal of damage to gaming culture. I’m not really sure that gets to the heart [...]
almost as big as my penis?
I’m so sick of you FANBOYS making excuses for developers being LAZY releasing games HALF FINISHED. I guess if they can charge full price on a half finished game then I guess we all can leave work at lunch and tell the boss we will make it up LATER. You would get FIRED! What developers do now is bad business and WRONG to customers. PLUS now developers put out open betas having us do their jobs FOR THEM. But you idiot kids think its candy and don’t realise its BULL*HIT laziness on their part. If I hadn’t invested so much money into gaming alreadt since the 360 and ps3 launched and knew this patch crap was going to be a lazy developers standard I’d of stopped gaming. I have too much invested now to up and stop cold turkey but my game buying has reduced drastically I’ll tell ya that.
Stephen: I am interested in your Letters in the Mail subscription. I am a high school English teacher, and I thought this might be a good way to get my students to write responding to the letters. However, I have to be certain that the topics of the letters will be appropriate for my students 9, 10, and 11th graders. Will you please comment on what the topics will be in general? Thank you.