Can’t They Do It Right The First Time?
If any of you have ever been a fan of a PC game, any at all. You will probably be familiar with game Patches. Patches are downloadable files (or programs) that “fix” something in your game. For example, maybe a sound effect sounds wrong or doesn’t happen at the right time, this patch will change the game program to act the right way. Most of the time there are several Patches released for any one title to fix multiple problems.
Nowadays with such a big percentage of consumers with their Playstation and XBox game systems online with their consoles, and an even bigger percentage of consumers without the online capability, can’t they do a better job at making the game right? I understand that there could possibly be a hiccup in the game or something that might need fixing because of a small oversight, after all, nobody’s perfect. But constantly seeing XBox 360 games being released that have a notice within a week that the their company is working on a patch for the game, that’s just bad business. Saint’s Row was released for the XBox 360 on Tuesday, August 29, 2006 and there was news of Volition working hard to release a patch for the game on August 31, 2006. That’s a mere TWO days. Now my question is, it’s been out on the streets for so little of a time, is this a problem they knew about ahead of time and just decided to deal with the problems later?
Don’t get me wrong, I do give the game companies credit for taking responsibility for the problems in a game and fixing those problems in a timely manner (most of the time), and I’m not saying that the games are bad at all. But what about that big percentage of the people that don’t have an internet connection for their console. I know that sometimes there are CD’s that can be mailed out to them to fix the problem. But that’s just a wait time that they probably don’t want to wait through. I want to play the $60 dollar game that I bought on the day that I bought it. I don’t want to have to wait for the game companies to make it work right. They’re not unplayable, but there shouldn’t be parts of the game where it freezes, or just loses a game save for any reason.
All I want is for game makers to spend more time with the game making process to make sure that everything works. Look at Halo 2, that game was delayed for about a year just to make sure it was perfect. And it was pretty close. Halo 3, I wouldn’t be surprised if that was delayed until Holiday of 2007, even though they currently say Spring of 2007.
Online Gaming is a fantastic feature to add to multiplayer games, but don’t use that internet connection as an excuse to release a half done game.