And a canceled game is never bad
There’s only so much delaying can help a badly designed game, delaying only really helps those games that need that extra polish and likely won’t be receiving it afterwards.
Duke Nukem Forever took 11 years to develop and is considered the greatest narrative since Jesus rose from the dead
Really? I heard it was a disappointment.
Woosh
Yeah, but there’s only so much delays can fix. Sometimes suck is sticky.
It can also be difficult to determine when a game has had enough development time. Pretty much every game considered good or great has had some content cut for development time reasons. At the end of the day, somebody does have to be the person who reigns in the excess.
Sometimes cut content would have been better if left in, sometimes cutting it was clearly a good choice.
And then there’s the simple reality that a studio that delays too much risks going under, which kills that game and all future games by them, so when is good enough good enough to ship a game?
Duke Nukem Forever PTSD
Perhaps. I suppose saying: “Delaying a game which is making coherent progress is better than forcing devs to cut their work short.” is a much less catchy quote.
Duke Nukem Forever suffered both from not giving the appropriate development time to a single workflow, and from the related problem of upper manglement constantly demanding changing the game so much it was like starting over again and again.
The leaked 2001 Duke Nukem build is promising. If the devs had been supported in focusing on that rather than constantly retooling the game to chase trends, it may have at least been decent.
Daikatana PTSD
If only there had been a 20% higher cocaine budget for John Romero.
Interesting spin on the “A delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad”-quote.
Lol that quote is literally in the first sentence of the article.
These quotes are from a time when games were stamped into hard plastic and circuitry. No Man’s Sky and Cyberpunk are two examples of games with rocky launches that are both amazing now. Saying a game is forever bad simply isn’t true anymore provided the makers stand behind the product.
I think it depends on if the bad game has enough public attention that it can get a second chance after launch. When No Man’s Sky and Cyberpunk got updated, the story was plastered all over the game news channels/sites.
Most games if they get off to a bad start, nobody gives them a second thought. How would you even know if it got better? If nobody is newly buying and reviewing it, the steam reviews won’t reflect the change in quality.
There’s something to be said for the unfairness of which of these games that botch their launch get that second chance, but it kinda is what it is. People can’t pay attention to everything.
the steam reviews won’t reflect the change in quality.
Actually, Steam now does have two separate ratings. One is for lifetime rating, and the other is for recent ratings.
I know, but that still requires that some people give the game another look and review it. That works for games that people keep checking on to see if it’s good yet, not so much for some no name game that people don’t give a second thought to when it turns out bad at launch.
But the damage is lasting. NMS will always be known for the absolute shitshow it was on launch. Props to them for eventually delivering, but the game will never be as iconic as it could have been. Like compare bg3’s reception of “holy shit it’s so good” vs NMS’s “oh it’s finally good now.”
Indeed. I always read in forums people asking if NMS is worth playing now. Imagine if it had a great launch from the beginning. It would’ve been much more successful and wouldn’t have a bad reputation like it does know.
Tell that to Game Freak.
No those two games are the exception no the rule.
NMS is better since release but saying it’s amazing now is a bit of an embellishment. At its core it’s the same game with all the fundamental issues it always had, there’s just more fluff added on.
Same goes for Cyberpunk 2077 tbh.
I mean, IMO it’s good enough to get your moneys worth out of it, its a hell of a lot of fun actually. It’s just that the main storyline is relatively short and the gameplay loop after completing the main story is not engaging enough to make it one of those games that you end up sinking 500+ hours into. To me that puts it in the same tier as Subnautica.
Out of all my VR games almost none make it into double digits playtime (notable exceptions, Beat Saber and Boneworks) but I have logged hundreds of hours in NMS VR. No other VR experience comes close in terms of content.
The question bring why you’d keep working on something you got money for. Especially when you’ve been shown time and time again that people keep buying your games anyway. Seems more cost effective to pay those marketing people than your code monkeys…
On the other hand, making me a beta tester for games I paid AAA prices for leaves me with a very negative feeling. You only get one chance to make a good first impression.
Also, while some genres can be fixed after release, some can’t because they aren’t very replayable.
A number of adventure games, for example – you’re probably not going to play through them many times. If you blow the initial release, you kind of blew the experience.
But they don’t most of the time. If you aren’t very lucky like with No Man’s Syk or Cyberpunk, you are stuck with an abandonend pile of garbage. And even with those games, it would have been better for everyone involved if they were what they are now from the start.
Hey anyone wanna play fallout 76?
You mean the family friendly version of rust
While we’re at it, mad props to facepunch. Rust was always a great game. Even through the weird bits with xp and blueprint scraps and aimcone, it always felt like a complete game.
Granted, I’m not touching it again unless a new plague shuts everything down for a month or I quit my job, but if you have 18 hours to waste every day it’s the best game ever.
Sad as that sounds, I’m sure there are some poor souls who are up for it.
From everything I’ve heard, 76 is a lot better now, I am planning on playing it with a friend… Sometime… Ha
It’s a lot better, but it’s not Fallout 5, which is what I think a lot of people – including myself – actually wanted.
If you wanted to play a game in the Fallout universe with some of your friends or your spouse or something, then, yeah, I can see Fallout 76 being a legitimate fit.
But Bethesda built up a fan base around a franchise that liked playing an immersive, story-oriented, highly-moddable game where the main character is kind of core to the story. They moved to a genre where xxPussySlayer69xx is jetpacking around, the story couldn’t matter much past the initial part of the game (since the point of the online portion is to have people replaying relatively-cheap-to-produce content), that couldn’t be modded much (to keep balance and players from cheating), and where the player’s character cannot matter much, because there are many player characters.
They did make some things that I’d call improvements, like shifting away from PvP (the Fallout 76 playerbase has not shown a lot of enthusiasm for it) and reducing the emphasis on survival mechanics (it turns out that focusing a lot on gathering food and water can kind of detract from playing the rest of the game if you have limited time to play with other people).
But Fallout 76 just fundamentally cannot be Fallout 5, because it’s aimed at online play, replaying the same events over and over. It can be a lot better at being an online-oriented Fallout-themed game than Fallout 76 was at release, and they did that.
People complaining about, say, the lack of human NPCs in the initial release are complaining that they want that kind of single-player-oriented game. Bethesda put some in, true enough, shifted things a little towards earlier games in the series. But they have not and were not going to convert the game into Fallout 5.
There have been franchises that have spanned multiple video game genres. Think of, say, Star Wars. But I’m not sure how often there are long-running video game franchises that shift to other genres successfully. If Capcom decided to make a 4X Mega Man game, or a dating sim Mega Man game, I’m not sure that things would go well.
Granted, Fallout 76 is closer to earlier 3D Fallout games than a hypothetical Mega Man dating sim would be. But I think that there are some important, not immediately-obvious divergences from what made the series popular.
Bethesda built up a fan base around a franchise that liked playing an immersive, story-oriented, highly-moddable game where the main character is kind of core to the story. They moved to a genre where xxPussySlayer69xx is jetpacking around, the story couldn’t matter much past the initial part of the game (since the point of the online portion is to have people replaying relatively-cheap-to-produce content), that couldn’t be modded much (to keep balance and players from cheating), and where the player’s character cannot matter much, because there are many player characters.
For real. I know every Fallout fan says this, but I don’t even need a new Fallout game-a remaster of new Vegas or even FO3 would be awesome. I know that’s not easy but it’s less work than designing a whole new game. Sometimes devs could save themselves a lot of trouble and aggravation if they listened to the fanbase instead of trying to tell us what we want
Supposedly. But I was never a fan of the Bethesda Fall Outs, so I’d just never play FO76 in the first place.
I will wait for Silksong like a good little boi, if it ends up as good as the original.
The art is a fair bit more detailed, but I’m fascinated with whatever might be taking them so long. The original took about two years to finish and is ridiculously polished, so doubling the development time is wild. Is Hornet’s movement system just terrifically prone to breaking? Is the game simply gargantuan? Did they make a game of sneezing into each other’s coffee and lose a few years to the kitchen camping meta? All equally possible.
It’s just not true anymore, especially with Steam. If a game releases in a sucky, broken state where more development time was definitely needed, nowadays the game companies will often just fix those games over time.
Well it stills impacts the game and the brand, The smash-like game that got out in Beta that was almost great has fallen down to me not remmebering the name of the game because it was not memorable enough and not fully polished. They will have a second chance then the game will “fully launch” but for a lot of people the Beta launh was the full laucnh
Yeah, 100%. If a game gets released in a mediocre unfinished state, and it doesn’t capture the attention of the player base back then it can certainly kill the game, I agree completely.
However, my original comment was mostly referring to the fact that games can be updated nowadays, unlike in the older days when you bought a game (when buying games was mostly done via retail stores and physical copies) and if the game was bad, it would be bad forever. There’s also the fact that there were a couple of high-profile cases where the game came out clearly unfinished or even unplayable (such as Fallout 76 and Cyberpunk 2077) that have fixed themselves, and if you were to mention that the game was bad at launch and how it was a bad business practice, you’d immediately get told to shut up and to look at what state the game is now.
True! No Man Sky too, the new goal is “how to hype people again”
suck is forever
I should call her
Tell your mom she still owes me for the Uber.
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
Preach Gaben!
When you can literally change the entire game over time with updates to be something entirely different from what it was: Suck isn’t forever. But neither is good.
Even the perceptions don’t necessarily stay forever. Look at NMS.
Mighty GabeN is getting pretty deep into his wizard years, I best prepare myself for his passing.
The dude is 61, not even retirement age in the US. You don’t need to be dramatic just yet.
He’s been significantly overweight for most of his life, though, although a bit better than his worst these days… The beard makes him look older than he actually is, though.
Yeah I don’t know why you’re getting down voted. Obesity shortens life expectancy by around 10 years. Life expectancy for men in the US was at 79 years before covid (it is now down to 73 years). Gabe is currently 61 years old so he can be expected to die by the end of this decade.
I’m not sure that applies to billionaires, who have unlimited access to the best possible medical care.
Before anyone gets their “um actually” comment in…
Yes, he would be eligible for retirement, but your average retirement eligible american isn’t expecting to retire until 65-70.
Is that why they still have yet to make hl3 TF3 or update TF2 give portal 2 additional support
suck is forever
Why is the consumer just expected to roll over and take it when a game sucks instead of the responsibility being on the publisher to release updates until the game resembles what was originally advertised? Games aren’t on ROM cartridges anymore, you can still improve the game after it’s released.
Look, No Man’s Sky set the precedent for what you’re supposed to do when your game sucks at launch. And we should expect nothing less from game studios with ten times the person-power and money.
The problem is had the No Man’s Sky team did nothing, nobody would’ve really done anything about it.
And even now there’s people who won’t come back because of the release issues.
There’s just no incentive other than whether or not the company wants to do it, not even much of a reward for doing so.
That’s not what Gaben meant.
He is saying that games that were released despite being buggy or unfinished or both will have a permanent stain in the user reception. Basically, updates cannot fix a bad first impression.
Fair enough, if that’s what he meant it’s a good point.
Praise be unto papa Gaben.
deleted by creator
HL3 gang remembers
