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.
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 .
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.
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.
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.