Development Cycle Loses the “Beta” Stage

This article serves as more of a rant than anything else, and while I would hate to waste your time with my mindless ramblings, I feel that this particular topic has some merit. While the effect this rant will have is debatable, at least you can get some shopping tips out of it, right?

I’ve been playing games for a very long time, and have played games across all genres and platforms. At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter how many polygons an object has, or how many footstep sounds there are, we just want a game to be fun, engaging, challenging, and any other positive adjectives you can think of. Most importantly, we demand that our games work. We pay a good amount of money to play these things, we should at least get something in return.

Lately, however, I have been seeing more and more examples of developers and publishers not delivering on their promises, and shipping games that just don’t work. And I’m not talking about a small software glitch or lag on an online game, I’m talking about a game you cannot play when you get it.

Let me list some recent examples. Timeshift for the PC, I picked up a copy since it’s one of the only games my aging PC can play close to max as of late. I install and everything goes smoothly, until it’s time to configure some settings, where the game crashes instantly and I can’t reload the game. Okay, I’ll download the patch, buy now when I reload, my mouse and keyboard don’t work. It took some forum searching to learn I had to delete the old config file and it should work.

Now none of this was particularly major, but it was still unnecessary extra work for me to go through just to switch some damn keys around. And I wonder what would happen to someone who doesn’t waste their life away learning a computer, does the average gamer really know or even have to patience to look for every solution to their problem?

Then comes Gears of War for the PC, ready to offer great Co-op LAN options for my buddies. Also attending the party are dreaded C++ errors, Windows Live errors, stuttering problems, and so on. These are more severe, since me and many others cannot even start the game without it crashing. Others have random crashes at timed intervals and cannot get past certain checkpoints. Others have amazing gaming rigs and still get horrible frame rates.

But hey, they can always patch it right? They have come out with one, too bad it solved only some people’s problems. Me and my friends are still stuck with very light paper-weights. I tried every solution out there, even going as far as reformatting my PC, and still no resolve. Let’s just say I’m trying to get rid of my copy at the moment.

I understand it’s the PC market, with so many different variations of hardware it is almost impossible to satisfy everyone perfectly. But the truth is that these problems can be fixed, that’s why we have Beta testing, so issues like these can be discovered and resolved. Some games, even high profile and very demanding ones, pull it off very well so that there are a limited amount of issues.

However, there is no obligation to make games run great, or else we would have to question our capitalist society. Then who do we shift blame to, people preordering these things when they don’t know what to expect from the final product? But just like seeing a big budget film and then seeing a blurry, distorted mess due to bad editing, you expect a certain level of quality when EA/Microsoft/Sony distribute worldwide.

My point is that we must be careful with our games, and we must show the right message when making our decisions to continue this expensive hobby. Not just on the PC market, but any system, there are plenty of RRODs, Lairs, and even slow frame rates in Mass Effect to go around. Speak with your wallet, try to avoid buying games and hardware that have issues, because eventually they will have to be fixed in order to drive sales. It might be common sense to most, but even the best of us can get suckered in, like my Gears of War experience (The game ran great on the 360, right?). I’m sure your life won’t be inadequate just because you don’t buy a game day one.