Not sure why we’re arguing this quote with the same two games over and over. Nms and cyberpunk are great games, but they’re a rarity.
Game Dev crunch is a plague in th industry, we suffer as consumers who cop bad releases on release. The whole industry could learn from its roots and delay things for a better initial product.
Defending the current practice of redevelopment in post is almost consumer gaslighting.
Plus, the base game itself should be good. It shouldn’t need updates. Post-game launch updates should be enhancements, not fixes.
Seriously, we need to return to pre-internet console mentality. You put out an N64 game, it better be goddamn finished. Companies rely way too much on “ehh can just patch it”.
I mean, modern games are many times more complex so the idea of putting out a “finished” game these days is more like “this is an acceptable level of bugs/most players won’t hit this.” The problem is that the acceptable level has shifted way too fucking far in the wrong direction to the point where in some cases we’re barely getting an alpha, much less a beta. In general, I have no problem with companies putting out good games that get better, like tuning for performance so you get better FPS, it’s player on lower spec machines, etc. I don’t like the idea of paying to be a beta tester for two years, and not getting the good game until way later.
I’m not arguing in favor of companies putting out shoddy gamesor the practice of games needing patches to fix glaring issues, but suggesting that the 90s and early 2000s were the days of totally flawless games seems like a result of survivorship bias.
We remember the great games from those days, but there were mountains of shovelware games releasing with all the problems we see today.
Even many good or great games from those days have problems that either remain unfixed, or have only been fixed years later by fans.
I would even say NMS is a good example of this sentiment. The game has been good for years now and has had tons of free updates. There’s a lot of people out there who just don’t care and you can see this in forums whenever the game makes news. People still show up to decry the game for how terrible the release was.
Public sentiment on the game and the studio is still pretty mixed
I think a big difference with both is that they’re not big multiplayer titles that are looking to make money with cosmetics.
If a multiplayer focused game is shit at launch, it won’t get a good user base and then it’s as good as dead.
Both Destiny and Destiny 2 had really poor launches. Then they cleaned up their act and we’re very successful and had thriving playerbases. Light fall and this past year notwithstanding…
I’m not defending the need for post-launch patches to fix glaring issues and I’m not defending crunch, but suggesting that buggy releases and crunch haven’t been with gaming since the earliest days of the industry seems like putting on rose colored glasses. There is a lot to damn about the current industry, but painting the root days of the industry as free of those same issues just to make the comparison seems unrealistic.