It's not about the type of game. The new standard should be about releasing a finished game. Not a buggy mess with day one patches.
this post was submitted on 07 Sep 2023
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Day one patch is fine. It's just an odd remnant of buying physically as the discs have to be pressed and shipped several months ahead of launch while the Devs carry on working. Digital owners just download the latest build on launch.
If there's a patch and the game is still full of issues, thats another story.
So pressing unfinished games on disks is fine for you? They should release a finished game. What if the console shop or server goes offline? How can you play it then? For preservation, day one patches are a nightmare.
I'm glad to see the trend of releasing more games for pc beside their console counterpart rising. It makes preservation easier.
Even if you press finished game, you still find tons of issues to fix before the release. It should be treated as bonus polishing time though, not time to finish the game.
Pressing unfinished games is a trade-off and a lesser evil than instead choosing to distribute games digital only. One alternative would be to delay all launches until multiple months after the game is considered “ready,” but that would likely impact revenue streams in a way that the people making those decisions would never agree to. It would also upset the 80% of the market who buy games digitally - why should their release be delayed?
Would you prefer for physical releases to not be available until 3-6 months after the digital release (and more frequently, for there to be no physical release at all)?
BG3 has plenty of bugs, some of them game breaking. Look at the litany of fixes they delivered in each patch. It's not about that. It's about releasing a game that isn't a "service", and just a purely high quality game - tactical combat that works well, characters with good writing, a solid plot hook, a distinct graphical style, phenomenal voice acting and mocap (which matter more for this genre than they would in, say, a third person shooter).
Every game has bugs, that is not really what a 'finished game' is about. Its more about consistently working features, delivering what you promised and working on fixing things you know arent working correctly.
What’s the problem with day-one patches? I’d much rather have a game with a day-one patch than a game that needs a patch 1 year after its release
Game + day-one patch is essentially the initial state of the game
As usual, people have no idea of the complexity of software. Games are extra complex. Games that are meant to run on an infinite variety of hardware combinations are worse. And it's not any game, it's an expansive RPG with hundreds of hours of gameplay and paths.
It's impossible to ship this kind of product bug-free, and it's quite probable that it will never truly be bug-free. A day-1 patch is obviously expected, and bugfixes in the following weeks mean that devs are closely monitoring how it goes, and are still working full-time on it. That's commendable.
Day one patch means they released an unfinished game. They haven't done enough testing before physical production. Also fucks over the people with a slow connection.
A patch 1 year after release is fine. Some people found a rare bug which can be fixed. If the game gets patches 1 year or longer after release tells me the developers have love for their game and/or community for fixing it long after they had any obligation to.
A day-one patch is the day of the release, so it counts as included in the release in my books.
It doesn’t mean « they haven’t done enough testing before physical production », it means they took advantage of the inevitable several weeks or months between start of physical printing and release.
And of course a patch 1 year after release is fine. What I’m saying is that I prefer a broken game that is fixed on release day over a broken game that is fixed 1 year later.
What about a working game instead? They could just delay the launch until they've finished what would've gone into a day 1 patch before going gold.
If they did that, they could:
- start working on an expansion
- give the dev team vacation time as a celebration for going gold
- start work on the next game
- do a bunch of play testing to reduce the need for patches a year after launch (i.e. catch more bugs)
In other words, a studio shouldn't go gold until their TODO list for launch day is done. That should be the standard, and it seems to be what BG3 did.
BG3 had a day-one patch, and is at its 6th hotfix now. Does it make it a broken game?
With the scale of modern AAA games it is inevitable, if a studio had to wait until every bug in a game the size of Starfield was fixed to release it, it would simply never release. You have to decide at some point that the game is in a releasable state, and at this moment you start printing discs, then you keep working on it and fixing bugs and that constitues the day-one patch. And don’t worry about the expansion, they started working on it long before the release.
Having a day one patch doesn't make a game broken, but it is a symptom of a bad internal process. Here are the patch notes for BG3 Day 1 (not sure if 100% accurate, but this is the best source I could find). To me, that doesn't sound like anything game breaking.
I'm not saying BG3 is the gold standard for AAA game releases, I'm merely saying it's what we should expect for an average AAA release with some being a little better and some being a little worse.
I'm not saying every bug needs to be fixed. Even older games before SW patches were a thing had a ton of bugs. I'm just saying, the game should play well even if users never patch the game. This is really important for game preservation, so you should always be able to take the game disk and install it offline and play through the whole game and have a great experience. That's not the standard many AAA studios hold themselves to.
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my only problem with them is that they can tend to be a bunch of extra data to download, rather that including it in the first download
Sad that we went to unfinished games by moneydevouring publishers and all its errors that come along with that (overworked staff, bad salaries every here and there).
When did we leave the path that finished games should be released around the clock?
When people kept pre-ordering and purchasing unfinished games. If it wasn't profitable they wouldn't do it.
Basically, capitalism can be traced back as the reason for most decisions corporations make. Although the fact people will complain and do it anyway is something else.
I think I read another user said "they treated the time I have to spend on video games with respect."
And that line has stuck with me.
So while I don't expect anything close to BG3's scale or polish but every few years, I do expect not to buy a game and have the game hold its hand out for cash.
Games respecting my time is something that I've definitely come to value a lot more. Quantity for quantities sake, inane things like overly restrictive save points or busywork for people who don't pay to skip.. I just can't really be bothered with it.
Save points stopped being an issue when game suspension/quick resume became standard. I've left my Series X mid game before, powered it off at the wall and gone away for a week, the game loaded back exactly to the point I left it still.
Yeah I love suspend/resume on my steam deck. I definitely don't think it's stopped being an issue for me though, sometimes I want to turn the device off or if I'm playing on PC I want to quit the game and do something else or just turn it off.
It's just frustrating because saving the game is not a technical problem and hasn't been for decades, it's a design choice and I shouldn't need to lean on a technical solution to get around it. Maybe I'm just stubborn though
saves are also important for archiving and sharing game states, maybe i want to preserve this specific game state so i can relive it for the rest of my life? or i want to download a save from someone else to experience something specific they found or made
Yeah and also, sometimes (very rarely of course) I actually die ingame and need to load. I don't want to waste a bunch of time when that happens.
That is SUCH an amazing way to put it. No grinding, no waiting for timers to run out, no traveling back and forth to savepoint, no insanely hard challenges or unlocks. Just experiencing it, and (for the most part) even failing forward.
Just scores of empty containers to check. I know they can't all have something but respecting my time would include minimizing having so many empty containers. That's about my only complaint so far though in that regard so it's not that bad or anything either.
So many empty containers but yet I still have a compulsive need to check each and every one.
I may be a loot goblin but my party has about 1300 spare camp supplies in Act 1 on tactician mode so I've got that going for me which is good.
Hold left alt and the containers worth looting will be highlighted.
Lol my pinky gets tired holding down the alt key all the time. I need a mod that permanently enables those highlights and I need it to highlight everything including plates, cups, bottles, etc. Because I'm gonna take it all!
The standard argument here is that you're not supposed to look in every container for loot. However yep everyone I've seen play this game including myself is an absolute loot goblin. What if this rotten fruit basket has a +2 greatsword or boots of elvenkind!
I think there's a mod that adds a button you can click to "loot the room" - characters make perception rolls and "find" anything of value and put the items into their inventories. Haven't tried it but might be your jam.
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I mean it should and they didn't set a new standard, they just brought back a old standard of having a developer and publisher actually giving a fuck about making a good, complete game.
This is the perspective that is totally forgotten and missed by most engaging in the discussion. Not to diminish Larian's achievement, but they literally busted out the old playbook. Credit where it's due, but BG3 shouldn't be controversial - it should be the standard because that's what the standard used to be.
That's what the standard used to be, because it used to be much cheaper to satisfy. For indies, if you try to do a quarter of what Larian achieved there in production value, and your game doesn't sell, your studio is dead. For AAA, you'll have to fight execs/management endlessly trying to shoehorn microtransactions and/or dlc to "justify" the costs.
I'd love it to be the new standard, but this only happened because Larian is basically a huge indie imo. Which unfortunately is an anomaly.
The only reason this is still a discussion is because game journalists have nothing else going on and half of them are AI by this point
There has been such a furor over this.
The way I see it, there are enough quality indie games, retro emulators, and titles on the average Steam backlog (to the point that it's a tired joke) that gamers can afford to only pay for unmissable quality. People know what they like, and they talk.
Economically, money is scarce. So is free time, for a lot of us. We don't care what you tell us to "expect" from you, game publishers with hot takes on BG3. If you can't release finished games at game prices, maybe you're not the beating heart of the game industry.
That might be the way it works in your head, but the reality looks different.
AAA games make the most money on PC. And even those games despite micro transactions, DLCs and so on are easily overshadowed by mobile games.
My favorite games are indie games, but indie is simply not feasible in some genres. Take MMOs for example, every stab at it has burned to the ground or was abandoned (or a scam).
Criticizing the big publishers is the only thing we have, because obviously voting with your wallet doesn't work. You might not buy it, but several million other people who saw a shiny cinematic trailer did. And they will continue to do so, even when Call of Duty 23 sucks they'll go and buy 24 next year.
I wanted to stick to my I Statements a little more than I did. I cede mostly to your points but reserve that it's bullshit to tell me not to expect quality just because someone proved it can still be done. It tells me the bigger gaming industry has gotten too large and dreary to be much use to me.
Wasn't RuneScape an indie MMORPG?
"not always possible for other developers", mostly because they're busy shitting out rubbish, buggy titles riddled with micro transactions (or whatever nonsense they can get away with to nickel and dime their customers)
People took note of how great BG3 is because it's just a good game, you're not be treated as a resource they can squeeze to get extra cash
What devs see is "all those other devs are too lazy to make a good game".
What players mean is "all those other games are full of micro transactions and sell missing content and features as dlc", which is not the same thing.
What players want to be addressed is the bad influence investors have on the products. Publishers aren't interested in publishing good games, they only care about money.
Devs don't go about making a game only for the money. Most of them would rather do it the same way Larian does it, focus on quality and provide a good gaming experience, but their hands are tied.
So the message gamers try to get out goes to the wrong recipients, and it's obviously being taken the wrong way.
Pretty obvious and epic communication fail.
And that's why I generally prefer indie games. Many indie games are made with passion, with money being down the list of priorities. AAA games are made with money first, though there is certainly passion as well, it's just not the top on the list. As studios and budgets get bigger, so will their expectation of profits.
So if you want better games, buy from smaller studios. Show them that you value passion over high budget.
But when a game like BG3 comes out, with all the stuff no indie studio can afford to do and it has this level of passion without sticking its hand in your pocket, it absolutely reminds us that AAA doesn't have to be like it is.
As good as indie RPGs are, Disco Elysium was only able to afford voice acting after being a giant commercial success. No small budget team is going to be able to have mocap work on the level of BG3. These things cost a lot of money and involve paying a lot of workers. BG3's Kickstarter got to be carried by the name recognition of Baldur's Gate and Dungeons & Dragons in general, following a huge popularity surge for the latter thanks to the rise of real-play podcasts and such.
Do games need hundreds of voice actors and incredible mocap to be good? No. But it's something that only AAA studios have the ability to add, and it's a shame that it's all going into the next fifa/COD/whatever other money pit GAAS the industry is shitting out.
Agreed. But I'd much rather sacrifice AAA features like mocap, voice acting, and RTX if it means a higher chance of playing a game with a lot of passion put in. Those are nice to have, but not the reason I pick a game.
Yeah. BG3's exceptional because it doesn't need to sacrifice that stuff.
Yup. And I wish more AAA titles took more risks in gameplay and storytelling, but those seem to be few and far between.
Starfield is a fantastic example. If you asked me to describe a Bethesda game set in space, it would look a lot like Starfield (but I probably would've missed the procedural generation). Usually AAA games are pretty much as expected, with one or two surprises on the side, and that's it.
BG3 basically delivers on Cyberpunk's promises (branching storylines, mocap, great visuals, etc), and it did so on launch, which is really rare.
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