Wrong: http://themushroomkingdom.net/bugs/89
Every game known to man has bugs somewhere
Wrong: http://themushroomkingdom.net/bugs/89
Every game known to man has bugs somewhere
Unfortunately, this is the norm nowadays rather than the exception. Skyrim had heaps of bugs too at release, look at the praise that gets. Didn't some of Bioware's recent outings have some nasty bugs at launch too? Companies get lax on making sure everything is fixed for launch because they know they can just patch it. Go look at older console games, they didn't have that luxury, games had to be relatively bug free because there was no recourse otherwise. If your game was a buggy mess, it'd get trashed by critics.
When you're talking about crashing/freezing bugs, save-deleting bugs, or bugs that make it impossible to progress forcing you to start over, that shit should be taken care of beforehand. No reason for that to make it to a launch.
Its funny, but this past weekend my nephew fired up my old Snes and we played SMW and we never came across any strange or hindering bugs. Back in the day I wouldnt have noticed it, but these days I would have in a heart beat, but yeah, we beat it without much problems other then my nephew being a noob.. lol
We are suckers for buggy games. When a developer releases a game with bugs in it everybody tells you to wait for the fixes and then it will all be ok. Its also what makes you return to a game.
That is the sad truth and I wish Diablo 3 had been a lot more polished at launch, I wish the game had not been built arround the AH but instead the other way arround. Unfortunately that is not the case.
Games in general have gotten more complex. There's so many variables in newer games (hardware and software wise) that it simply is impossible to get it out completely bugfree.
D3 was pretty harmless aside from the server issues. The only one I can recall is the bug that locked you out of the game if you gave the templar a shield before killing Jondar while playing a DH.
And a multitude of OP/UP abilities, which I don't really counta s bugs.
But yeah, older games were so much easier to program, because they only had a couple of lines of codes, whilst a game like Skyrim or D3 probably has millions.
Same goes for Indie titles, which for all the entertainment and quality we all get out of them simply can't compare to the complexity of blockbuster releases (in terms of pure coding).
Bottom line: It's virtually impossible to expect a completely bugfree game. The only thing that has absolutely no place are completely gamebreaking bugs that also have a high chance of appearing, ie they can't forsee bugs that only appear if you press five keys on your keyboard while doing the macarena.
Compared to many other launches I've seen, Diablo 3 is not very buggy - at all.
Around the time that a certain network made distributing and applying patches as hard as picking your nose. In software engineering there is no such thing as a finished product, only a product that the developing company sees finished enough for release.
Pure gold. Maybe when you grow up and enter the real world you will figure out why companies exist.We do not exist to serve companies, they exist to serve us, in case you've forgotten.
Infracted. Keep it civil
Last edited by Darsithis; 2012-06-15 at 09:14 PM.
The ease of fixing bugs is certainly a reason. The fact that games have become exponentially more complex. As far as Diablo 3 goes. It's one of the smoothest launch ever. (I am not counting the networking issues some people had for a day or two).
From day 2 I was logged in and playing.
My official title at my company is Software Test Developer. I am a quality assurance developer and I do a lot of bug triaging. One of our process's is to decide if a bug is important enough to delay the release of our product. Ours is a lot harder to patch then the video games (more like the patch is harder to get pushed out). The only bug I would say should have been caught is the shield one. The work around is easy and was communicated, and the percentage of players affected would have been really low. On my list, this would have been a High priority, High severity. The rest were all mediums and not important.
There is no software that is bug free. None. The trick is to release your software when it's "good" enough. Some companies have higher standards then others. Blizzards typically are a lot higher then Bethesda (for example). That is verifiable by the amount of high severity bugs each company allows through it's releases.
While I agree that the consumer shouldn't let organizations walk all over them and they should be able to act as a watch dog to make sure organizations follow social protocol and guidelines, the expectations of the internet mob are bordering on the surreal.
Things get blown WAY out of proportion, people expect perfection and instant gratification and think that's reasonable when in fact it's not realistic at all. A single hiccup can already lead to a lot of raging, a few hiccups and it's FFS THE GAME IS COMPLETELY BROKEN 100% UNPLAYABLE SLAP IN THE FACE KNEE JERK REACTION WTF. I mean, REAL game breaking bugs will be fixed whether people rage about it or not, but calling something you don't agree with "game breaking" doesn't mean it that is in fact the case.
Alas a lot of people have this very narrow minded stance on how things should be, completely disregarding anything they don't care about, only seeing their side of the situation because, after all, I'm right and they're wrong. GC explaining how they listen to the community but won't agree with everything they say because they don't want the forums to design the game and people literally feel insulted. Others feel, and I quote, "disgusted" that Blizzard is trying to make money off people when it's a company and that's what they do.
Most people aren't even defending the product or the company itself, instead they get annoyed about this attitude because those people DO see the other side and understand the mutual workings of this system.
a) cause the game isn't buggy ( i did not encounter a single bug that would make me go "woah, it's quite a bug", which i've seen tens in skyrim and swtor for example.
b) cause it was playable on release
c) cause it can be considered an MMO, therefore it evolves, therefore it gets patched as it goes.
This is just a general statement and not necessarily pertaining solely to D3, but as we can see just about the entire entertainment software market is like this. The only conclusion I can come up is excellent marketing, some consumers have been conditioned to accept anything. On the plus side to all this, one can go into business for themselves and make a killing off the consumers who will buy and accept just about anything. Quality is not much of a concern anymore, and this goes for a wide range of products, not just software.
Last edited by Demithio; 2012-06-15 at 09:52 PM.
Because D3 isn't and wasn't unplayable. I played on launch night, an hour after launch. I only experienced errors a couple times, and even then... it was a video game launch, I expected rough servers. Blizzard, and Diablo, are both huge names. I expected overloaded servers and tons of stress, whoever didn't was kidding themselves. Just because a game had to sort their stuff out doesn't get me up in arms and want to burn corporations, just be patient. It's a virtue. D3's launch wasn't that bad. But hey, you are just going to disregard this post as OMG FANBOYISM WHY DONT PEOPLE UNDERSTAAAAAAAAAND, so whatever. Diablo is, and was, definitely playable. Again, I played 3-4 hours of Diablo ON LAUNCH NIGHT.
And EA is just greedy as hell.
I never seen any bugs that prevented me from playing the game or having fun (besides the network issues, but that is a whole other can of worms)
Buggy at release is accepted except for some obvious ones like IAS on diablo.
People should be a lot more pissed off about bad servers from a multi millionaire company like blizzard on a single player DRM heavy game