ETPC

ETPC

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video games | anarcho-communism | depression | blm | acab | trans rights are human rights | he/him/they/them | like 30 or 40 | movies | Senior Social Media Lead/QA for Mighty Foot Productions | runs @dnf2001rp

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ETPC
@ETPC
amydentata
@amydentata
amydentata
@amydentata

There's this common thing where a publisher forces a game to get released before it's actually finished, and the only vocabulary anybody has to talk about it is "bugs." An unfinished game could be bug-free, and still be noticeably, obviously unfinished.

It isn't about bugs. It's about gameplay being completely implemented. Systems balanced so that all the gameplay features are actually used and feel meaningful. Cruft that seemed like a good idea, but isn't working in the finished product, being removed entirely. Tightened gamefeel. Polished UX. There are so many things that go into a game being finished that have nothing to do with bugs, and are often more important than squashing every little bug.

When Cyberpunk was released unfinished, everybody talked about how buggy it was. My own experience with it was almost completely bug-free, by pure chance. I could still tell the game was unfinished. Now that the game is very low on bugs for most people, it's still unfinished (combat is hilariously unbalanced, the cyberware mods should have been gutted and redone from scratch partway through development, the crafting system is bizarre and nonsensical in context), but it's at least a great game when you stick to the main story. I'm having a similar experience with Redfall now. Lucking out with missing the bugs, but I can see every bit of the game that is still raw dough.

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apocryphalmess
@apocryphalmess

Wolfenstein: The New Colossus was pretty stable and bug-free at launch, but IMO is clearly an unfinished game. It has that feel of a collection of levels that were chosen because they were in a usable state about six months before ship date, and then heavily polished and a plot line assembled to fit the levels they had, but it feels like it’s missing a good third of the main plot, several subplots, and at least two major game mechanics that they couldn’t get working in time so which were just scrapped. A massive disappointment compared to New Order, which felt much more coherent.

Doom Eternal also has the “these are the levels we had time to finish, and we adjusted the story to match them” feeling, especially if you count the DLC levels that had to have been in development alongside the base game, but DE is much less story-driven and the game mechanics don’t feel like anything is missing, so it’s not quite as obvious what happened IMO.

These were both from before Zenimax (and therefore Bethesda/Id) got bought by Microsoft, so I don’t know related this is? It’s just a problem with AAA titles in general, more likely.

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amydentata
@amydentata

AFAIK it's a combination of AAA being too expensive and slow for their deeply-ingrained release schedules, the tech treadmill pushing everyone to try to go bigger and harder with every new release, economics pushing everyone to waste money on creating microtransactions/special editions/other "extra" elements to the game that feel like they came from a marketing department, and publishers/execs thinking they can just deadline a game into existence.

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Behemoth
@Behemoth

Yeah, I had the same experience with Cyberpunk. Never ran into very many bugs, it just wasn't a good game. So many of the systems felt like they were slapped together at the last minute without any testing or care. Like the thing where you got an ability to throw your knife, and it would permanently destroy the knife you threw. Presumably because the ability was designed before they made knives an equippable item, so there was nothing to destroy.

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