There isn't such a thing as a bug-free game or a program. Bugs are a thing, which happens with software, especially when we are talking about applications, that should work on multiple platforms and a huge variety of all kinds of hardware, OS versions and drivers. The ever increasing complexity of software and games brings its own spice to the mix: the more features you have, the likelier it is, that some of them might be broken or cause unforeseen bugs on some systems. It's not a new thing, back in the day Sierra On-Line was known for releasing buggy games they then later on patched out. You wouldn't know it now, but the original release of Quest for Glory IV: Shadows of Darkness was riddled with game stopping bugs. This all is to say, that yes, I understand the complexities of software development and I know that bug-free doesn't exist. But I do also think there is a line of broken the publishers should not cross and it seems to me, that lately, that line has been crossed quite often, by knowingly publishing games that are either completely broken or even unfinished. In a word, it seems to me, that "early-access" has spilt over from where it belongs and some new games belong to that group in everything but name.
Here's a video by LateBit of one interesting bug in Shadow of Darkness. Basically, you can lose the game despite you just won it.
What prompted me to write this article are the continuing issues of Elite Dangerous: Odyssey, which seems to have taken its publisher/developers stocks into a nosedive. Even after several big patches, the space-legs Odysse brought to the world of Elite are still fundamentally broken, making the game almost unplayable for some and equivalent of watching a slow drop of molasses for some. The worst of it is, their new and improved render engine works so erratically at the moment, that most of the time the graphical improvements it aimed to bring make Elite look worse in comparison to the base game.
The glitches and bugs didn't come as a surprise for some people. Those, who took part in the "alpha testing" phase of Odyssey reported many of those issues to Frontier Developments, whose response was, that they were either fixing them or that the development branch they had was already working better. Then the launch day came, and the game was just as broken, if not more so than in the alpha stage. And now, the developers are forced to be apologetic at the same time they are insistent, that all the systems "worked perfectly" with their mysterious development versions of Odyssey. They are holding the message of their official PR branch, which states that the myriad problems came as an "unforeseeable surprise".
Here's a big but though: Frontier Developments initial plan was to roll out the console version of Odyssey at the same time as the PC version. They also intended of rolling the graphical and the UI updates for the base game as well, but then they suddenly decided against it, stating, that they'd postpone both closer to autumn. I'm sure you can figure out the question this rises: if they believed Odyssey to be fully functional, why didn't they release the console version? And why do they opt against releasing the improvements for the base game? They effectively split the player base in two: those who have Odyssey and those who don't, with no in-game interaction between the two. At this moment, they have two different versions of Elite online, which just doesn't seem like a smart move. My suspicion is, that it also might be the cause of some of the problems Odyssey has, but FD is afraid of even worse consequences if they do unify the game bases: they could potentially render Elite unplayable on consoles.
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| A hilarious bug from Assassins Creed Unity. |
So that's where Odyssey sits at the moment. It's not wholly unplayable for me, I can get a somewhat decent +25 FPS (really, anything less than 30 FPS in a game like Elite is too little) after tweaking the settings even on the worst locations, but it is less enjoyable than it should be. A month after its release I still feel like I'm merely bug-testing the game for free instead of playing it. When I do Odysse based stuff in it, I merely do it in order to see if the patches have fixed at least some of the issues, but I don't really play it, as it still is probable, that it's just wasting my time.
A good question is, can Odyssey be fixed? Technically, yes. I have no doubt about that, comebacks are possible. You only have to look at much-maligned Fallout 76, which was released to be critically panned because of its technical and gameplay issues. A couple of years after its release, Bethesda managed to fix it to a state, where its current reputation is a bit more positive. Another big, botched release was Cyberpunk 2077, which CD Projekt has managed to fix into a more playable state half a year after launch. They even got back at the Playstation store, from where Sony kicked the game out because of its broken state.
Comebacks are possible, there's no question of that. It's just a matter of Frontier being willing to pour in the needed resources for fixing what is broken and listening to their players. We are the ones playing their game after all. We are the ones they should be pleasing, not their faceless shareholders who don't give a flying fuck about the technical state of the game.
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| Geralt's flying horse from Witcher 3 was a great aviation invention. |
Frontier has made severe mistakes and miscalculations with Odyssey. They have damaged their reputation, perhaps for good. They have lost a good amount of good faith and getting that back will be very difficult if not impossible. For the time being, I suspect they will have problems pre-selling their games, as the whole debacle with Odyssey has been very visible and very vocal. A bad bell tolls far.
It might be a foolish hope, but I do wish game publishers and developers could learn something of these events. Not only momentarily, but for the long run as well. It isn't beneficial for either, the players nor the developers, to release games in a broken state. And if they are released in a broken state, they should be labelled as such, i.e. as being in early access, so that the consumers could draw their own conclusions and properly opt-in or out. As of now, if this current trend of knowingly releasing broken games continues, it only hurts the developers and publishers and wastes the consumers time and money.
Pre-ordering anything was always a crapshoot, but in this day and age, there's not even a need for it. Games, delivered as downloadable, don't suddenly run out of copies, so there's no need to rush. And if a developer wants to release something before it is ready, do so honestly and release it either as an alpha or "in-development"-version. But don't knowingly deceive your audience and expect to get away with it. That's just scummy.
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