Official SE5 release date announced - September 12

[Captain Kwok]

I agree for the most part with Ragnarok on this one. Games these days are more "bugged" than the past and it is partly due to cutting expenditures and rushing titles. Although I will also contend that the games are much more complex and have to be able to run on some many different system configurations that it will be difficult, if impossible, to achieve bug-free releases when releasing to the mass market. Perhaps in this case an open-beta could help.

[DarkHorse]

Would you buy a car whichs brakes arent working, in mind "oh well they will work in 2 weeks.".
Or maybe "oh well they MAY work in 2 weeks" ?

There is no way to argue about that.

You've obviously never had a car recalled.

[ToddT]

funny i named 3, you references past 10 years, the First comand and conqueror game had several issues patched after release, one bug actully allowed a player to place a building anywher on the map, well beyond ones on base.
sevearal other of the C&C games also had patches, just because you may not haave problem with game doesn't mean its bug free. just means you have not don anything to trigger it.
i remember a game near the end a certain spot, would be termeminal , would load a previous save and it would still happen, called it in gave the info and that it repeated. believe it or not they called back an told me the couldn't reproduce it, didn't surprise, since then i had learned the dead spot was random. When you first entered area was when it set, so if your save was before that, the spot would move, after that it was fixed, so if what you needed was not affected by it you would never know it was there.

Hmm TOP games only based on the names you listed that rules out SE

[Phoenix-D]

Ragnarok-X said:
People, it wont help you naming one bugged game for all 3 years. I was explicitly asking for TOP games.
Top as in 2005/2006 = Civ, Homm, TQ, Sacred, Vampire Bloodlines etc ++.
EVERY game (with a *FEW* exceptions, usually shooters) these days is bugged.

Dude, I could do this all day. All I did was grab some quick examples.

Are you seriously arguing that Mechwarrior 2 and Quake weren't top games? Because they were both bugged. Fallout might not be considered one based on sales, but it is incredibly favored by the players. Also bugged.

X-Com had a fun little bug where it'd give you all flares to defend your base, and a slew of others.

How about Civilization 2? Auto-settlers would hang the system, using help would sometimes crash the game, lockups under high windows resolutions, AI problems, problems scrolling between cities, autobuild issues, unit abilites that didn't work, population that would reset to zero when it got too high, incorrect turn date tracking, sound card related crashes, and more.

Command and Conquer Red Alert: Patched up to version 1.08. Can't access the patch list, but I know 4 player multiplayer was added in a patch.

HOMM:2 - can't find a patch list but a search turns up numerous bug complaints and crashes, including the choice comment from someone playing a port: he played it to level 9, it crashed twice, and he was VERY PLEASED since it was much more stable than the PC version..

Is that enough examples yet? The only reason to claim older games weren't buggy is nostalgia. Yeah, some of the newer ones are worse than some of the older ones, but it works the other way around as well.

[Xrati]

Keep in mind that there is a big difference between a game being released with bugs as compared to a game that has hardware conflicts. With all the vendors out there trying to keep from violating patent laws they are force to "THINK OUTSIDE THE BOX" which forces a patch to attempt a fix. ANY game that has been properly playtested should be relativly free of (large) bugs. There is always going to be someone who'll tinker with a game and find bugs. That's because you just can't determine what everyone will end up doing with a game engine. Those are really the people you'd like to have as playtesters. I guess it's like a version of the ink spots. Everyone will see something different/

I believe that SEV has a good group of playtesters and will be released relativly bug free. When you expand the amount of people that get introduced to the game there will be bugs found and patches made for them. Life goes on!!!

[Ragnarok-X]

Phoenix-D said:

Dude, I could do this all day. All I did was grab some quick examples.

Are you seriously arguing that Mechwarrior 2 and Quake weren't top games? Because they were both bugged. Fallout might not be considered one based on sales, but it is incredibly favored by the players. Also bugged.

X-Com had a fun little bug where it'd give you all flares to defend your base, and a slew of others.

How about Civilization 2? Auto-settlers would hang the system, using help would sometimes crash the game, lockups under high windows resolutions, AI problems, problems scrolling between cities, autobuild issues, unit abilites that didn't work, population that would reset to zero when it got too high, incorrect turn date tracking, sound card related crashes, and more.

Command and Conquer Red Alert: Patched up to version 1.08. Can't access the patch list, but I know 4 player multiplayer was added in a patch.

HOMM:2 - can't find a patch list but a search turns up numerous bug complaints and crashes, including the choice comment from someone playing a port: he played it to level 9, it crashed twice, and he was VERY PLEASED since it was much more stable than the PC version..

Is that enough examples yet? The only reason to claim older games weren't buggy is nostalgia. Yeah, some of the newer ones are worse than some of the older ones, but it works the other way around as well.

You should consider the amount of money involved in this. A current game has a budget *several* times higher than the budget of our all beloved oldies.
All of the bugs you mentioned i cant remember. I have played every game from your list, and i dont remember patching at all, especially not to make a game work at all. Of course they are a few things, like the well known fallout, which had plently of bugs. Then again, it is VERY complex, and open. At that time, the industry was not "perfect" enough for such stuff.
Those days i wasnt even able to patch since i didnt had internet and i believe there were many who hadnt.

Just FYI, the games you mentioned were of the top games, but they werent released within a year. You are merely naming a few blockbusters, released over *several* years. As of now, ***every*** major game is usually bugged, and thats considering the market for computergames has grown by a LOT, and with it, the money involved.


Oh, and just as a sidenote, how comes PC-games are bugged all over, while console games usually (99%) arent ? I tell you why: The developer knows pc games can be patched, while console games cant.
So he takes the RISK of distributing BUGGED software by PURPOSE, because it will mean a win in both time, and logically, money.
Your money, and my money.
I seriously dont understand your point of view. You appear to find it okay to buy broken stuff. If so, would you like buying my car ?

[Fyron]

Rag-X, you are splitting hairs here... It doesn't matter if the random samples are all in the same year or not. There were fewer games released each year 10 years ago than today, so how is this requirement even relevant?

Forgetting about bugs is just more evidence pointing to nostalgia. I remember a lot of bugs in Civ2 that either required patches, or were never fixed.

Console games have always had plenty of bugs. It's a myth that they are 99% bug-free. With a console game, features tend to be dropped wholesale to make the deadline, rather than be left in slightly buggy, since they can't be patched or improved in an expansion.

Also, P-D never implied he likes buying broken things, just that games in the past were no less broken than today.

[Phoenix-D]

..Rag. Do I need to go through and do EVERY released game with a list of bugs, or what? I'm not aruging that bugs aren't a bad thing, only that your perception of older games having drasticlly fewer bugs isn't right.

Console games have bugs as well, just not as much- and a lot of the difference is directly due to the fact that a console has ONE set of hardware, which the dev gets more or less direct access to.

EDIT: and you're changing your argument.
"Examples ? I cant imagine a single decent game from 10 years ago which, in relation, was as bugged as todays games."

Now, unless you want to take the buggiest of today's games unless the LEAST bugs of 10 years ago, that doesn't hold water; I've given you plenty of examples to show that.

And with that I'm out.

[Will]

Tell a strapping young developer of 20 years to work on a game, and turn it in when it is done and free of bugs, and he will die of old age before submitting for distribution. And what that developer leaves behind will still have bugs.

And re: console games supposedly having fewer bugs. Consoles all have the exact same hardware, with the exact same OS configuration, with the exact same drivers. The majority of big showstopper bugs for PC games only affects a few players, and can often be fixed by uninstalling, upgrading drivers and libraries (DirectX/OpenGL), then reinstalling. But gameplay bugs will always exist, in console and PC games. Law of diminishing returns says eventually you will have to release the game, otherwise you will never recover the costs of making the game in the first place; that's why we will never see a bug-free game worth playing.





(and by worth playing, I mean a tic-tac-toe game, where the game has very few numbers of states that can easily and quickly be enumerated, doesn't count)

[Ruatha]

I remember my PC Zone magazine that arrived each month in the later part of the 80:s and the 90:s, eventually it started having floppys and later on CD:s on the cover.
After a while they had two floppies, one with patches and one with demos. The Cd always had a patch section.

About cars.. I have my car at service every year, sometimes to fix bugs ("This is a known bug with this car, the contact is substandard and often glitch", etc"