Here's my question for the day: in terms of the number of defects and their severity, are the titles being released by the gaming industry getting better or worse? I have to ask because it seems to me like things are getting worse, not better, and that makes me fear for the gaming industry specifically, as well as for the software industry as a whole. I'll provide a few examples of what seems to me the contrast between the software of today and the software of a few years ago. Hopefully, somebody will write me and explain why my conclusions are wrong.
Roughly five years ago, my gaming hours were filled with Quake, Quake II, Civilization II, Starfleet Academy, Starcraft, and several other interesting games. In every one of those cases, the games were released largely in their final form. They were not perfect or at least defect free, of course; I am claiming only that they worked more than well enough to play them. That is, they were functional and essentially complete.
Yes, numerous patches were released for the two games in the Quake series, but these were typically to fix various minor bugs, many of which were necessary because of cheaters trying to gain unfair advantage in on-line games. Civilization II and Starcraft were also patched several times, but most of those changes were mere balance adjustments. Of all of the games I was playing five years ago, only Starfleet Command had any truly serious bugs in it when it was released, and those were pretty obscure.
Things seem very different today. Of the last four games I have purchased, only one of them has worked as it should out of the box. For those uncomfortable with basic mathematics, that means fully 75% of the games I have purchased of late have been severely defective when released, by which I mean they have been defective to the point of being literally unplayable. That's not particularly encouraging.
It seems to me that buying a game is increasingly a matter of buying a product that largely (or even completely) fails to work when purchased, leaving the consumer entirely at the mercy of the developers and the publisher to make things right. That's not a good arrangement, and it's clearly something that needs to be changed. Lest my readers think me too pessimistic, allow me to provide the specifics of the data from which I make such statements.
Rainbow Six 3: Raven Shield (RS) is arguably the worst of the lot, though Battlefield 1942 (BF1942) would have to be a close second. Despite my system being quite powerful by contemporary standards—having an Athlon 2400 CPU, an ATI Radeon 9700 Pro video card, a Creative Labs Audigy 2 sound card, 1024 MB of physical RAM, and a similarly "beefy" host of other components—the game is literally unplayable on my machine. My frame rate typically hovers in the low teens, frequently dropping down to 1 - 2 frames per second (FPS). Far too rarely does it rise out of the teens, and it never gets above 30 unless I'm standing perfectly still staring at a largely featureless wall.
Note well: it doesn't matter at what resolution, color depth, refresh rate, or detail settings I attempt to play. The game plays just as poorly at 800 x 600 resolution, for example, as it does at 1280 x 1024. The frame rate is just as jerky with all the details turned all the way down as it is with them all maxed out. It doesn't make much sense to me, really, but these are the empirical facts of the matter. Worse, the mouse is problematic, insofar as it either lags behind the action or jerks suddenly depending on how it is configured. As you can imagine, those two problems conspire to make it quite impossible to play the game.
Of course, these are merely the problems with the single-player aspect of the game. If I try to play the multi-player aspect of the game instead, I am completely screwed. The in-game server browser crashes the game back to the Windows desktop while refreshing the list of available servers. I can avoid that issue, of course, by joining a specific IP address directly—if I'm fast enough to avoid the refresh-crash, of course—but then I'm still stuck trying to play with the ridiculous frame rate and mouse problems. So even if I can get connected, I have essentially no hope in playing the game. It does make for an attractive slide show, but that's not why I bought it.
From the technical support message board, I see I'm not the only person with these problems. In fact, it seems a veritable host of other users are having these problems and still more serious issues. I've read today alone, for example, about all kinds of crashes I've not seen, strange visual artifacts, lockups that freeze the entire machine, problems with audio playback, "invalid CD key" messages that prevent a user from even getting far enough to hit the refresh-crash, and so forth. There are clearly also some customers who aren't having problems, but it seems that a very large number of users are.
This is utterly baffling to me for two reasons. First, the users who seem to be having the most trouble are those who have an ATI Radeon 9700 Pro video card. That wouldn't be so strange were it not for the fact that Ubi Soft has been running a promotion at the game's web site, giving away that exact video card! In other words, the game has the most intractable issues with the very card with which it ought to be most compatible! Second, and still more baffling, is that RS is built using a variant of the same engine that powers Unreal Tournament 2003 (UT2k3) and Splinter Cell (SC), both of which run wonderfully well on the very same machine. Go figure.
Prior to buying RS, BF1942 was the clear king of the hill among problematic games on my hard drive. It was largely because of the problems I had with it, in fact, that I ultimately upgraded my sound card, bought a copy of the PowerStrip utility so that I could adjust the PCI latency values of my system devices (which had surprisingly helpful results), and ultimately spent hours and hours fighting stupid hardware and software problems just to make the game playable. Incidentally, persons having troubles similar to my own should read my tips on making the game work; they've helped quite a few desperate souls already.
Though I've since managed to get BF1942 working pretty well, after a great deal of effort on my part and several patches from the developers, it was initially an unplayable nightmare right out of the box. I couldn't play the single-player portion of the game at all, and multi-player was an iffy proposition at best. As I noted in my review of the game, it was simply too bug-ridden to be given all the awards that it won. The developers clearly released it when it was about half-baked, and it took them months to issue patches that fixed enough of the problems that most people could actually play and enjoy the game. In short, BF1942 wasn't as unplayable as RS right out of the box, but it was pretty darned close.
Command & Conquer: Generals (C&C:G) was a game I almost didn't buy, and I've had my moments when I wish I hadn't, or at least that I had waited for a while before purchasing it. At its initial release, the game was filled with bugs that caused the in-game sequences to "stutter", crashed the user back to the desktop, screwed up my network connections (hosing the server completely in the process), froze the machine entirely, and leaked memory until the entire operating system came to a grinding halt. It made the game almost unplayable for the first week or so that I owned it.
And those were merely the issues with the single-player aspect of the game! I subsequently discovered that the multi-player aspect of the game had major problems as well in terms of disconnects, synchronization errors, excessive lag, incorrect stats and record keeping, very jerky gameplay (perhaps due to poor network code), and so forth. Reading through the relevant technical support forums one finds quite a litany of issues with both halves of the game, many of which I haven't even mentioned.
Though the game has since been patched four times to date (of which I'm aware), some of the more egregious bugs remain unfixed. For example, there remain control issues with giving basic orders to units. I know the game is also still leaking memory, for it keeps sucking up more and more memory as time goes on during extended play. Seriously, if I play the game for a couple of hours, it will be utilizing 700 - 800 MB of physical RAM (and much more in my paging file as well). It eventually becomes unplayable. I sure do hope the developers fix it. The game is a lot of fun to play when it works. At the present time, though, consumers remain at the mercy of the developers/publisher, hoping that the product they bought may yet someday be fixed.
Of all the games I've bought of late, Splinter Cell (SC) has been the most well behaved of the bunch. It has been largely bug free from the moment I installed it. As I understand it, there have been some scripting issues with certain missions, but I've already played through the game twice, and I've yet to encounter any of them. The only bug I've run into, in fact, is a minor problem with video mode switching (viz., that it keeps switching over and over until it simply gives up), and that occurs only when first launching the game or going from the menu system into a mission or vice versa. As bugs go, it's quite minor and is easily worked around. I would like to see it fixed, but it's hardly the kind of show-stopper that I've seen in the aforementioned games.
The game has been patched once already, and though I didn't perceive any benefit from it, it seems that many of the issues others have experienced have been cleared up. At least, from looking over the technical support forums, it doesn't seem like SC has had the overwhelming flaws that I've mentioned with the other titles. If I'm wrong on this, of course, and I've just been lucky where SC is concerned, then that would mean that 100% of the games I've bought of late have been released in an awful state. I'll continue to hope that SC is the one, glorious exception to the otherwise-depressing rule.
So, am I right to think that things are getting worse in terms of game development? Or am I just "lucky" enough to buy all the bad games or run into all the big problems in the games I do purchase? I know from my own experiences developing software that it's essentially impossible to create any substantive program that is defect free. Frankly, from what I've seen, there's no point in even trying. Games these days are far more complex than games from even five years ago, so it's not unreasonable to expect more defects.
Nevertheless, I still think it similarly reasonable to expect that products be at least mostly functional when released. Sure, every product is going to have some rough edges; it's the nature of the beast—at least given the current state of software "engineering". But no product should have the kind of outrageous, egregious, show-stopping bugs that I'm seeing in three out of the last four games I've bought. I'm not whining about some silly texture-alignment problem, or some other similarly niggling detail; I'm talking about the kinds of problems that render the product literally unusable. That's got to be unacceptable by anyone's standards—especially when we're talking about a product that few (if any) stores will accept as a return in exchange for the consumer's money.
So what can we do about it? Is there anything we can do about it? We could try suing certain developers/publishers, I suppose, but that is guaranteed to benefit lawyers alone. We can surely vote with our dollars, but it doesn't seem to me like that's really happening. Titles are clearly still getting shoved out the door long before they're ready. Is that still happening because we consumers have simply been too forgiving? That is, are we stupidly buying titles in this state and effectively rewarding the developer/publisher for their mistakes? I know in my own case I wouldn't have bought any of the above titles when I did, had I known about their defects at the time of purchase.
Wait a minute. Maybe that's it: could it be that the game-related press, and other metrics we use to judge games prior to purchase, are failing us? Before buying RS, for example, I read lots of reviews of it, and not one of them had anything to say about all the nasty bugs I've seen. I find it hard to believe, given the enormous outcry on the technical support forums, that not even one reviewer saw such things. Do such bugs remain unmentioned for some reason (e.g., fear of legal retribution for discussing them in a review), or are they honestly overlooked?
Obviously, this essay has to end with too many open questions. I think in the future I'm going to try to condition myself to examine the technical support forums for a game before I buy it. It's obvious to me that reviews simply aren't getting the job done. If anyone has useful suggestions regarding how to be a better consumer, I would greatly appreciate hearing them. Here's hoping that I can write a far different essay in another five years. In the meantime, developers, please take this bull by the horns and start shipping products that actually work; the current state of affairs reflects quite poorly on your capabilities, whatever other underlying circumstances might be involved.
04/04/2003