This article is from Tomshardware.Com He sums up my frustration with all the games I play.
"Pain with Patches"
We've become so accustomed to patches and fixes for almost every video game we buy that we're no longer even mildly cynical about the need to download patches on the day of a retail release. Tight deadlines are imposed by accountants and businessmen with no comprehension of what it takes to make a videogame. These lines in the sand, set down in order to meet some imaginary milestone in marketing minds, ultimately mean we find ourselves with dodgy games that can at times be so buggy as to be unplayable.
Some developers and publishers are infamous for releasing buggy games, and some are even more infamous for releasing patches that do more harm than good. We recently saw this situation unfold with EA and DICE, the developers behind the Battlefield series, with their first patch for Battlefield 2. In a depressingly familiar routine for Battlefield fans, the patch caused more problems than it solved, by inflicting massive memory leaks and leaving the game unplayable after a sustained period of play. That presumes that you're one of the players lucky enough to be able to launch the game in the first place, and make your way through the dodgy-since-release menu system.
The Battlefield series is the best example of market pressures and complete and utter incompetence combining to completely and utterly bugger up a game. When the original Battlefield 1942 arrived, it was as buggy as a derelict house - the netcode was unstable, and the game was prone to crashing. All kinds of actual gameplay imbalances and quirks existed that took the better part of two years to completely fix and bring the game to what it should have been on the day of release.
It was the same story with Battlefield: Vietnam, and now is the case with BF2, and it is the same with a ridiculously large number of other games being released today. All this begs the question, "What the heck do they be scratching down in the testing department?" Publishers have entire armies of game testing monkeys who are supposed to slave away at the pre-release code of a game, putting in hundreds of man-hours in order to find bugs, gameplay imbalances and features that don't work. These people then pass on reports to the developers who head in and fix the problem.
Or so goes the theory. One has to wonder, however, what actually happens when a game is released with so many problems that a four-year-old could tell you something was horribly wrong with it after ten minutes of play. And it's even worse in the case of a patch, considering that the same time constraints to release are not there!
I mean, how many ace programmers does it take to install a game on a couple of machines other than their high-end development workstations, to see how things go on a machine that's not running 4 GB of dual channel RAM? And what happens then when somebody does play the game with 4 GB of RAM and after two hours of play finds themselves running the game like a Skoda down the freeway? How retarded can a degree in mathematics from MIT make you?
A patch should make a game easier to play by fixing bugs, not put new ones in it! How much of a ride are we being taken on if a problem that would crop up after a few minutes of proper testing can make its way into a major release, which later requires the publishers to recall the patch and ask everyone to please reinstall the game? We spend hard earned cash on these God forsaken games and then they can't even be bothered to spend a bit of time testing their code?
I'd love to sit someone down from places like EA and DICE and ask them just what they're playing at. Of course I'd probably get the boilerplate answer telling me about their commitment to the highest standards in their thorough testing processes. Still, I think we can all smile, nod and roll our eyes when the released version comes with a menu system that's prone to crashing - should you have the audacity to ask it to filter out full and non-populated servers - and the first patch then causes all your RAM to go out partying and get drunk.
In the past we've been overly lenient with developers, blaming buggy releases on pressure to deliver. But when glaringly obvious issues slip through, both on a technical as well as a game play level, and then patches make things worse, I think it's time we stopped being quite so patient with developers and publishers. You have big testing departments, so use them! I shouldn't have to wait six months for the $50 investment I made to mature and become playable; if that's the experience I wanted, I'd become a wine aficionado.
Stupid things like the Battlefield 2 v1.01 patch simply shouldn't happen, and many of the stupid things that are in initial releases shouldn't be there either. We as consumers should stop being quite so accepting of patches. If a game comes out buggy to the point of excess, then we should wait until patches that make the game playable are released. We need to send publishers the message that hitting the right sales target at the expense of completion of design is no good if nobody buys the game. As for developers that release buggy patches, well don't ask me what to do that's not illegal...
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