Shaneus said:
Yeah, that's frustrated me ever since consoles started going online, pretty much. Obviously patches have been happening for PC games for decades, but very rarely to fix critical bugs, just little niggles or whatever. Nowadays it's par for the course (just one look at my Steam download queue is testament to to that)... not to mention every time I fire up a console game I haven't played for 6 months will almost always have something that needs to be downloaded.
Exactly this.
I can think of three good examples of large scale games in recent years that had very very few bugs (although no doubt there would be a couple in there, but they arent frequent). Orange Box, Twilight Princess, Batman Arkham Asylum. Two by developers who take a "when its done" approach, one by a developer that has seemingly come from obscurity to god-tier.
I look at those games, with open worlds, large amounts of detail, variety in what the player can do and in playing all three for dozens and dozens of hours I have not encountered
one single bug that has either impeded my progress or made me even
notice it. Hell, I could add more games: RE4, Metal Gear Solid 3, Halo 1/2/3/Reach, GTA3/Vice City, Mario Galaxies, Portal 2, etc etc etc. Not one single bug.
Yet I cant go ten minutes in Fallout 3 or Oblivion, or Assassins Creed, or KOTOR or Fable 2 and not see a flying horse embed itself in a mountain, someone walk backwards up a wall, get stuck in the ground or have a conversation with hovering teeth.
I mean this with all sincerity: Call of Duty is the fucking Mona Lisa or an engineering marvel like the Great Wall of China compared to the buggy pieces of shit that all manage to get GOTY editions this gen.
Shaneus said:
Fuck that then. I generally don't watch trailers for games I don't have some general interest in, unless the IP is something I've been following or other people have. Dead Island solidifies that stance from here on in, I think.
Getting off the hype train is the best thing to do. There are so many great games out there from quality developers that don't need the hype to sell. Nintendo, Valve, Bungie, Blizzard, Platinum Games, Rocksteady, parts of Capcom and Konami - there are some developers that do polish their games and don't even need a trailer to justify consideration of their games.
When someone hypes their game solely based on a trailer trying to tug at the heartstrings of emotionally stunted manchildren who think Mass Effect is the literary equivalent of Dostoevsky, it's best to steer clear.