this post was submitted on 02 Dec 2023
772 points (93.1% liked)
Technology
60080 readers
3354 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Not much of a gamer lately, huh?
Updates are always an option now, so games are no longer released in a very stable state. And by not very stable, I mean "crashes immediately with X company hardware", "frame rate drops to 1 frame/s in certain areas", or "quest line is bugged and incompletable"
Day one updates generally aren't optional... With a publisher who values polish like Nintendo? Generally they're playable, but a bit rough. On average, they're literally impossible to play through. It's a real problem in modern gaming
Ok, but that's Yakuza. Their team is great and cares a lot about quality. They're hardly a representative example, but...
I just scanned through their update log. A week after launch, they fixed a crash when you deleted a picture from the photo album. Another couple weeks later, they fixed one where the game would crash intermittently. A few weeks later, they fixed a bug where the game wouldn't boot if you unlocked all the achievements. And it keeps going, more than a year later they fixed a crash during a quest if you have an inconsistent frame rate
There's a lot more, but I just scanned through looking for crash fixes - there're also many issues with graphics that would make the game unplayable with certain setups
Also, I noticed the first patch is 1.02, making me believe the "unpatched" game actually included the day 1 patch
Maybe the release version worked for you, but it didn't work for everyone (or maybe your version included patches you're unaware of)
And again, this is an example of a highly polished game - most games are far, far worse
Old games had crasher bugs too, and even had new versions :o. 99% of games release in a state where 99% of people will never notice an issue.
Most games are not "far worse", you are looking at the high profile exceptions and extrapolating rather than looking at the actual real landscape of releases.
It's entirely possible that we play very different games, but I'm a gamer programmer, I read patch notes and listen to retrospectives recreationally
I never said games are far worse, I think that's true for AAA gaming (for different reasons), but modern indie games beat the crap out of the bargain bin games from a couple decades ago
My point is this - OTA updates change how software is developed. It used to cost a lot of money to fix if you release it with breaking bugs, and there were several system builds to test on.
Now? There's an infinite number of configurations you can support with one engine and minimal porting - hell, Nvidia regularly patches their drivers to support specific games better.
The cost of extensive qa has skyrocketed, and the consequences of bugs at launch has plummeted.
If that doesn't convince you, go pick 5 random games released this year on steam, and look at their update logs. All 5, maybe 4 if you're lucky , will have patches around release time for major issues.
It's not because they're lazy or bad devs, it's because QA could take months or years to tell you what user feedback would get you in 48 hours after launch
You can make a patch, does not mean you need a patch. The vast majority of games work absolutely fine at launch. I know you're a little obsessed with patch notes, but if you think that games having patches indicates that they needed patched then you're missing the point entirely.