cross-posted from: https://lemmy.today/post/55540150
Is it even possible this day? Haven’t like game sizes ballooned to like 100s of gbs?
I just want a digital copy of the game that I move between machines like normal mf files
Geforce Now replaying this meme as an ad
NO, NOT LIKE THAT
Ah, the good old days of PS1 and 2.
On PC, it was insert the disc, install (takes a while), keep disc in, run game, crash, troubleshoot, give up.
Patches are not the worst thing in the world. There was a Robocop game, I think for the NES. The developers didn’t have time to complete the 5th level, so they put a time limit on the 4th level that was impossible.
Imagine if Cyberpunk or No mans sky were final at launch.
The thing is, old incomplete games like that usually sold terribly. They are now either forgotten or worse: remembered for being terrible. Stuff like Superman64.
There used to be more pressure on developers to make good games first. Testing and QA departments have shrunk, or st the very least failed to scale with the increased scope of modern games. They instead rely on consumers to report the bugs.
So at the same time they keep raising prices, they are also pushing more of the work onto the consumers.
Imagine if Bethesda couldn’t fix all the bugs in their games.
Oh wait, they don’t anyway, modders do.
Imagine if Bethesda couldn’t fix all the bugs in their games.
Oh wait, they don’t anyway, modders do.
Hey, that’s a lie!
Not even modders can fix ALL of Bethesda’s bugs
I realize by your last sentence, you mean 'Imagine if Cyberpunk or No mans sky were left unpatched after release.", but it could also read as “Imagine if Cyberpunk or No mans sky weren’t released incomplete.”, which is way better I think. Just don’t release games that aren’t finished.
I want to agree, but have to acknowledge that, realistically, they won’t even know all the things that need to be addressed before the huge userbase starts poking it.
Back in the day games were limited and the gameplay was generally fairly constrained, making fairly comprehensive QA at least plausible. Now things are so open ended there’s no way a company hits all of that.
Though I’m not sure every game needs to be that open ended…
Sure, but it will be used for evil more often than good, so I’d rather not have it at all. Never once did I notice my ps2 game needed any sort of patch or update. And guess what, they all still work perfectly. And if the disc goes bad I can convert to SD or Ethernet .
There were 4 versions of smash melee.
Patches existed before, it’s not an argument one way or the other.
How did those patches make it to users?
New sales in this case, however other cases saw them included in magazines or mailed out without an extra charge.
New sales sound bad. But if they were mailed to the user for free, that sounds great. I’m assuming that was pretty rare though?
I think so, most people didn’t take advantage of it even when it was offered.
I went to look it up, evidently it was the Commodore 64.
But judging from the context, they wouldn’t have even bothered. They knew and made a change to just force an unsatisfying game over. They had ample opportunity to fix it even after release (logistics easier than NES roms), but didn’t bother.
The logistics would have depended on the medium used. C64 also ran cartridges. Though, even if it was a floppy disk release, distributing updates would have been challenging.
For instance, game magazines would distribute sample games as printed basic code that you had to manually type in and save to a blank floppy to use.
I think game quality started to really tank once online distribution became the norm. The hard cut off of the gold master meant a lot of quality trade offs that are made today would have been shipped forever broken and thus not done. The PMs of today have no such constraint any more and are free to cut corners knowing it can be patched later.
The worst thing is that this goes for EVERYTHING now, not just games. While Tesla got lots of praise for OTA updates, it was one of the worst things that happened to the automotive industry, because manufacturers no longer have to worry about expensive recalls for sometimes serious issues. They will ship things that are known defects, sometimes serious ones, and you can hand wave the consequences away with “Oh, it’ll be OTA’d by delivery.”
That being said, sometimes it’s a benefit, because there might be a major and a minor annoying defect, and we can now better prioritize getting the major one fixed before shipping and the minor one OTA’d, but it has still set a frustrating and dangerous precedent in the industry.
Fun fact: the Model 3 was shipped without any low-mu (ice/snow) calibration for its stability control system, and it was later OTA updated. Why was this allowed? They needed to get cars off the line ASAP, and they said “Well, all the initial customers are in California and it’s summer, so they won’t be driving in slick conditions.” Literally delivering to customers with known safety defects, but because it could be updated OTA, they didn’t care.
People who think owning a disk after the ps2 / GameCube / Xbox era means owning a guaranteed means to play the game forever are literal retards.
Probably same people who complain that $70 is too much for games when they were also $70 back in the 80’s 90s, 00’s, 10’s and 20’s
The fuck are you on about?
Having an actual brain.
Though you may need to reconfigure your memory managers and manually set up your sound card…
But then you are treated to the ultimate satisfaction of “YOUR SOUND CARD WORKS PERFECTLY”
“ENJOYING YOURSELF?”
Damn, core memory unlocked.
