Expect after the Steam Deck 2 for its successors to be Steam Deck 2: Episode 1 and Steam Deck 2: Episode 2.
Steam Deck: Alyx
Just stay away from the knockoff Steam Deck: Kill the Freeman.
That was the Steam Deck 64GB: Kill the free space (with shader caches)
My Deck64 was turned into a 1tb before you could even buy them like that though. For anyone who had extra 2230s lying around and was going to use a screen protector anyways it was a no brainer.
I modified mine too but I tried to go the 512GB SD card route first and just install everything on that. Yeah still filled the internal storage. 1TB SSD is worth it. Now i just use the SD card for emudeck+roms.
Valve can’t count to 3 though.
Capcom had years of jokes on exactly that point with the Street Fighter series, but they eventually did release Street Fighter III.
To be fair to Capcom, they did release Ace Attorney 3 quickly and it was the peak of the franchise.
It would be free marketing if they went with that approach. I can already see the headlines: “Why the ‘Steam Deck 3’ is called the ‘Steam Deck: Episode 1’ and other 5 things with origins on the memeverse”
Yep. I consider HL:Alex to be HL:3. It's that good.
But I still want another HL game.
Hollow Knight: Silksong is gonna be perfect.
(Actually, knowing those devs, it might.)
Their problem is they already made a perfect game. Now they have to do it again. Doing something perfectly once can be chance, doing it twice is massively more difficult.
I'd settle for an Alyx 2 at this point.
No more Alyx after that though!
I can't wait for my great grandson to play it
Here you dropped this:
"great "
Confirmed!
Interesting spin on the "A delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad"-quote.
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.
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
Specifically with the Fallout series, I think that one complication is that there was a lot of unhappiness way back when with the series moving from a much-liked isometric, turn-based/real-time game to a 3D game with shooter elements. A lot of people, including myself, didn't think that it would likely reproduce what they liked about the series. And, well, it was a change, but what ultimately came out was pretty good, and while I'm sure that it didn't cut it for some people -- you had things like the Wasteland series continuing the isometric approach -- I think that it was a pretty decent transition. The same people who liked the isometric games generally liked Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas. So in that case, the game series was taken through a major shift that a number of players were skeptical about, and it generally worked.
But with Fallout 76, I think that the transition caused tradeoffs that didn't work out as well for many players.
3 and new Vegas had such effort to keep the same level of writing, and VATS was an excellent nod to to the isometric games. So while the form was different, the experience was still fallout. 76 was a copy-paste of FO4 with no story, no npcs, and the entire game revolved around the most controversial part of 4: settlements.
Supposedly. But I was never a fan of the Bethesda Fall Outs, so I'd just never play FO76 in the first place.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Same goes for Cyberpunk 2077 tbh.
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.
No those two games are the exception no the rule.
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.
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...
Tell that to Game Freak.
Lol that quote is literally in the first sentence of the article.
Not sure why we're arguing this quote with the same two games over and over. Nms and cyberpunk are great games, but they're a rarity.
Game Dev crunch is a plague in th industry, we suffer as consumers who cop bad releases on release. The whole industry could learn from its roots and delay things for a better initial product.
Defending the current practice of redevelopment in post is almost consumer gaslighting.
Plus, the base game itself should be good. It shouldn't need updates. Post-game launch updates should be enhancements, not fixes.
Seriously, we need to return to pre-internet console mentality. You put out an N64 game, it better be goddamn finished. Companies rely way too much on "ehh can just patch it".
I mean, modern games are many times more complex so the idea of putting out a "finished" game these days is more like "this is an acceptable level of bugs/most players won't hit this." The problem is that the acceptable level has shifted way too fucking far in the wrong direction to the point where in some cases we're barely getting an alpha, much less a beta. In general, I have no problem with companies putting out good games that get better, like tuning for performance so you get better FPS, it's player on lower spec machines, etc. I don't like the idea of paying to be a beta tester for two years, and not getting the good game until way later.
I’m not arguing in favor of companies putting out shoddy gamesor the practice of games needing patches to fix glaring issues, but suggesting that the 90s and early 2000s were the days of totally flawless games seems like a result of survivorship bias.
We remember the great games from those days, but there were mountains of shovelware games releasing with all the problems we see today.
Even many good or great games from those days have problems that either remain unfixed, or have only been fixed years later by fans.
I would even say NMS is a good example of this sentiment. The game has been good for years now and has had tons of free updates. There's a lot of people out there who just don't care and you can see this in forums whenever the game makes news. People still show up to decry the game for how terrible the release was.
Public sentiment on the game and the studio is still pretty mixed
The fact that it’s only the same two games is more of an argument against than for, honestly. With all of the awful launches people can think of two games that were redeemed.
That’s bad.
I think a big difference with both is that they're not big multiplayer titles that are looking to make money with cosmetics.
If a multiplayer focused game is shit at launch, it won't get a good user base and then it's as good as dead.
Both Destiny and Destiny 2 had really poor launches. Then they cleaned up their act and we're very successful and had thriving playerbases. Light fall and this past year notwithstanding...
I fucking loved the Forsaken expansion and felt that it was worth the money. I got Black Armory not realizing it wasn't an expansion like Forsaken and was so fucking disappointed. I eventually quit because they kept making the game worse.
Destiny 2's been a real roller coaster. Forsaken was the best it ever was, so you haven't missed much imo.
I’m not defending the need for post-launch patches to fix glaring issues and I’m not defending crunch, but suggesting that buggy releases and crunch haven’t been with gaming since the earliest days of the industry seems like putting on rose colored glasses. There is a lot to damn about the current industry, but painting the root days of the industry as free of those same issues just to make the comparison seems unrealistic.
I don't disagree that often an early release can really kill a game. I think that Fallout 76 would have done much better had it not gone out the door for a while, and I think that the poor quality at release really hurt reception; despite Bethesda putting a lot of post-release work into the game, a lot of people aren't going to go back and look at it. CDPR and Cyberpunk 2077 might have done better by spending more time or deciding to cut the scope earlier in development too. But, a few points:
First, game dev is not free. The QA folks, the programmers, all that -- they are getting paid. Someone has to come up with money to pay for that. When someone says "it needs more time", they're also saying "someone needs to put more money in".
Second, time is money. If I invest $1 and expect to get $2 back, when I get that $2 matters a lot. If it's in a year, that's a really good deal. If it's in 20 years (adjusting for inflation), that's a really bad deal -- you have a ton of lower-risk things than you could do in that time. Now, we generally aren't waiting 20 years, but it's true that each additional month until there is revenue does cut into the return. That's partly why game publishers like preorders -- it's not just because it transfers risk of the game sucking from them to the customers, but also because money sooner is worth more.
Third, I think that there are also legitimate times when a game's development is mismanaged, and even if it makes the publisher the bad guy, sometimes they have to be in a position of saying "this is where we draw the line". Some games have dev processes that just go badly. Take, say, Star Citizen. I realize that there are still some people who are still convinced that Star Citizen is gonna meet all their dreams, but for the sake of discussion, let's assume that it isn't, that development on the game has been significantly mismanaged. There is no publisher in charge of the cash flow, no one party to say "This has blown way past many deadlines. You need to focus on cutting what needs to be cut and getting something out the door. No more pushing back deadlines and taking more cash; if the game does well, you can do DLC or a sequel."
EDIT: I think that in the case of Cities: Skylines 2, sure, you can probably improve things with dev time. But I also think that the developer probably could have legitimately looked at where things were and said "okay, we gotta start cutting/making tradeoffs" earlier in the process. Like, maybe it doesn't look as pretty to ship with reduced graphical defaults, but maybe that's just what should have been done. Speaking for myself, I don't care that much about ground-level views or simulated individuals in a city-builder game, and that's a lot of where they ran into problems -- they're spending a lot of resources and taking on a lot of risk for something that I just don't think is all that core to a city-builder game. I think that a lot of the development effort and problems could have been avoided had the developer decided earlier-on that they didn't need to have the flashiest city sim ever.
Sometimes a portion of the game just isn't done and you might be better-off without it. Bungie has had developers comment that maybe they shouldn't have shipped with The Library level in Halo. My understanding is that some of the reason that different portions of the level look similar is that originally, the level was intended to be more open, and they couldn't make it perform acceptably that way and had to close off areas from each other. I didn't dislike as much as some other people, but maybe it would have been better not to ship it, or to significantly reduce the scope of the level.
I mean, given an infinite amount of dev time and resources, and competent project management, you can fix just about everything. Some dev timelines are unrealistic, and sometimes a game can be greatly-improved with a relatively-small amount of time. My point is that sometimes the answer is that you gotta cut, gotta start cutting earlier, and then rely on a solid release and putting whatever else you wanted to do into DLC or maybe a sequel.
I won't lie: That's the kind of talk that really makes me wish Valve would quit playing around with Steam and weird hardware experiments, and go back to making new games.
I don't agree at all. There's one Valve and Steam. If it's not Valve, it's gonna be Microsoft or someone, and I'd much rather have Valve handling the PC game storefront than Microsoft. There are lots of game developers and publishers out there that could develop a game competently, but not many in Valve's position.
I think that pretty much every great game, especially those boxed and released before digital distribution, was made by a passionate and talented team.
I’m just about certain that every team on those games would have at least one person pushing for more development time to make it just a little bit better.
It’s a romantic idea to say devs should have all the time in the world, but somebody needs to be the voice saying, “No, it’s done. We are boxing it.”
If enough of the development team can articulate why they need a delay, and if it looks like they are making actual progress, delays are good. If it’s just constant iteration and tweaks, that’s not enough justification.
This is true, but gamers are so impatient. I am in early access with my Virtual Reality Theme Park and have been busting it for 3 years as a solo dev, and of course it is not a full Theme Park yet. What does exist has put me into the top 10 on the Meta Quest App Lab store, but I get bounced out of the top 10 now and then as I will get 3* saying new rides are not coming fast enough. People are so impatient just like shareholders.
Make sure you put in the description you are a small one dev team. Most people are reasonable and understand you can only do so much.
People are way less patient with asshole AAA studios that crank out garbage because they waste time implementing micro transactions or bullshit DLCd
Game of Thrones agrees with him.
Time was not the issue with HBO Got. The show runners ran out into the ground so they could move on and be done with it.
Time was the issue. They ran out of time waiting for GRM, so they went their own way. If they had waited... We'd still be waiting, but wouldn't have gotten the suck.
You mean if they’d been competent show runners in the first place.
The show was great when it was based off of good writing.
Then it got sketchy as they had to rely on GRRM’s notes.
Then the notes got more vague, and season 7 and 8 turned into garbage.
Conclusion: D&D were mediocre show runners who couldn’t hire competent writers, and thought game of thrones was about subverting expectations instead of strong character arcs.
Justifiably, it lost them their next gig.
HBO was willing to wait for good seasons. But D&D wanted to get into a Star Wars contract with Disney. They rushed season 8 out the door with lazy writing to get that Star Wars deal.
After season 8 traumatized GOT fans and bombed in reviews, Disney backed out of the deal, and D&D have fallen into obscurity.
Suck is forever
"Hard disagree."
-- person who played FFXIV before the realm got reborn
The memories are fantastic though.
I'd almost argue vanilla and realm reborn aren't even the same game. As you said, the realm had to be reborn. It's like they nuked it and then started over.
...They did.
Duke nukem forever says hi
That game was both late and suck
Apparently it managed to get worse. The leak of the 2001 build that people are patching up actually looks really cool.
My understanding is that the released game was not a "descendant" of that 2001 preview. The game was totally scrapped and then a new iteration was started years later which is what eventually was released. So it's not like the game was actually being worked on for a decade. More like the released game (which was only built over a couple of years) had the same name as a scrapped game from a decade prior.
That is precisely what happened.
I was merely framing it that the 2001 build was seemingly on the road to being a good, or at least faithful Duke Nukem game but management kept dictating changes to it to keep up with gaming fads. Eventually Gearbox just shoved an entirely different build out the door.
The 2001 build was victim to a lot of start-stop-start-stop development.
Obviously CS2 has sucked for a while and is gonna suck forever...
I dont think any creative would disagree shareholders and useless management however
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.
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.
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?
Fantastic advice, as a guideline in a vacuum.
No game should be shipped broken, but sometimes concessions are a reality.
Even Half-Life had to make concessions. Xen is infamously less polished and fine tuned than the rest of the game. Valve didn’t have infinite resources and time to keep tinkering. Would the game have been better? Maybe. But time is money, and Half-Life already ended up selling huge. Would taking time to fine tune Xen have boosted sales? Were people in the 90s avoiding the game because of Xen? I don’t think so.
The profits from Half Life allowed Valve to make more games and be successful. Is it worth trading off a more fine tuned Xen in order to have Valve exist as we know it today?
In the documentary, they actually expand on that, they delayed the core game until the story and levels worked out and specially left Xen to the last as if they were not having fun before, they would have given up
I know. Perhaps I was not being clear in my point.
Xen was made last, and Valve never could quite get it to the same quality as the rest of the game.
If we follow the logic, which many commenters have, that “games should only be released 100% finished” then Half-Life should have been delayed indefinitely until Xen was as polished as the rest of the game.
I was making the point that Xen is an example of Valve deciding part of their game is “good enough” and shipping it, rather than continually extending development.
There are realities of game development that even Valve isn’t immune to.
Definitely a "change some words around" from Miyamoto, whom this is usually attributed to.
There isn't any solid evidence that the quote originated from Miyamoto.
Which they would know if they read the article.
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.
Why don't they just not bother with a release date and release it when the game is 100% ready
A lot of the time in the industry, developers are using money loaned by publishers. Things like getting more development time, which means asking for more money is a negotiation that the devs aren’t guaranteed to win.
Valve is one of the successful developer & publisher companies that managed to survive. The 90s were a much smaller time for video games, and a small startup like Valve could compete with the big names out there. They had more freedom in a sense, but they also were taking quite a gamble. Other companies tried the same and didn’t survive.
It’s easy to simply say “only release a game when it’s 100% done” but it’s a lot harder when you’re watching money that keeps your company afloat dwindle with each delay. Also, “100% done” is a very flexible concept. Games almost always have to cut content or make concessions in some way, so figuring out what a done version looks like while working on it can be difficult.
The modern version of a small Valve style startup would be something like a Kickstarter funded development. Again, unless you are (for some reason) a Star Citizen dev, people are going to stop giving you money and you have limited funds and thus limited development time.
And just because you delay to try and release a superior game doesn’t mean it will be a smash hit.
baldur's gate did that and other companies were complaining about the high standard it set
Art is never finished, only abandoned.
Also it's fucking expensive to market things so people are aware you just released it. Or at least it used to be, before wish lists, early access, and so on.
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.
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.
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.
Okay, so there's game delays that actually have helped some games. Then there's games that sit on Early Access for what seems like forever, wondering what the fuck are they doing, like 7 Days to Die.
I like and respect games that, take their time because they want a certain vision of a game to work itself out as intended. I don't like and respect games that need to rush for the holidays or need to rush for company appeasement.
Some of my favorite Early Access games, I'd actually rather just finish development and then start on a new release.
Take Nova Drift and Caves of Qud. Both games, I think, are in a state where I have gotten my money's worth out of them many times over. But they're still Early Access.
But, hey, as a player, who is going to complain about more stuff being provided for free?
At this point, my preference would be to say "Okay, you did a good job with the resources you had. Now, I would like to give you more money and you can hire more people and produce content at a higher rate, because I really like the stuff you make."
Or at least DLC or something. Like, I don't have a problem with blocky pixel art as a way of reducing dev costs. I think that many traditional roguelikes have benefited from just using text -- means that gameplay revisions are easier, and that one doesn't need an art team. I think that it's an effective tactic. But having seen how much art has added to, say, Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, I'd like to be able to purchase high-resolution art for Caves of Qud. I pay for tons of art in many, many games that I enjoy much less than Caves of Qud. Ditto for a number of other pixel-art indie releases that I like.
I'd like to see more content coming out at a higher rate, and that is gonna require funds.
Paradox does this. They have a deal where they make a game and if I like it, I can send them more money and they will make more game at a pretty good clip. Now, maybe not everyone wants to spend what some Paradox games run if you take into account all DLC -- okay -- but I'm not left in a situation where I want more of Game X but I'm unable to buy it.
Gabe starts looking like Game-Gandalf more every day
He hit hard that Santa Clause.
I was gonna say, maybe he knocked Santa off a roof or something.
Gandalf the Burger King version
You are the reason we don’t get a Half Life 3 ya know?
I still believe we will se HL3 one day.
And a canceled game is never bad
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"
Okay but Gabe, you're looking like a grandpa nowadays. Maybe you're waiting just a little too long.
Unless you're No Man's Sky? Or Cyberpunk? Like games have been getting patches and updates for a long time, sometimes they get better, sometimes they get worse. Maybe he means your reputation as a developer and as a publisher is forever tarnished no matter how well you patch up the game post-launch.
In the days of Half Life 1? Yeah, it wasn't really feasible to patch games after they got printed on discs and left the warehouse.
I'm sure they got better, but they never won me back, that original feeling of disappointment is still associated with the games for me.
I'm pretty sure this is what he means. It's like first impressions with people. You only get one shot. Yes, you can improve the initial release to be playable and amazing but people will remember you put out a shit game to start with and that alienates people.
Yeah reptuational is part of the issue but there is also a big financial issue too. Delaying a game is financially difficult as it affects financial projects for each year with shareholders (who only care about share price growth). If you release a game in a poor state you get to hit some of the financial targets which benefits the publisher particularly, but for the developer it means longer terms sales are much lower as reviews and feedback come in that the game is crap. You then have to patch and repair the game.
Patching has allowed publishers and developers to get away with this releasing of games in bad states, but it doesn't change that fundamental issue which disproportionately affects the developer. Dev studios often only have 1 game being worked on at a time. An unready early release which is poorly recieved can be an existential crisis. For publishers, a poorly recieved game is a disappointment but generally have other many other games also on release so they can move on and not care as much.
No Man's Sky and Cyberpunk are high profile exceptions. The gaming world is littered with abandoned flops, often due to not being ready for release.
Agreed. And many of counterexamples belong to the Live Service model. Halo Infinite, Anthem, Evolve (I'm digging deep on that one), etc.
Also, games that are delayed too much sometimes end up being outdated and therefore relatively bad. Eg. Duke Nukem Forever.
A 12+ year delay is so extreme it needs its own category.
Welly wait for Star Citizen now... :-D
IIRC, though, that isn't "give developer some more money and keep plugging". It was "take the game in its current state, hand it to another developer to get it into a releasable state, and ship it".
googles
Yeah. Basically, 3D Realms just kept kicking the can down the road. Gearbox took over, cleaned up what was there, and shipped it in half a year. It wasn't the perfect, ideal 3D FPS, but I suspect that cleaning up what was there and making what return was possible (and at least getting the people who had preordered the game many years back) was probably the right move. I don't think that 3D Realms was going to produce a huge success if they had another two years or something. It probably would have been a good idea to have wrapped up the project several years earlier than was the case.
In 1996, 3D Realms released Duke Nukem 3D. Set apart from other first-person shooter games by its adult humor and interactive world, it received positive reviews and sold around 3.5 million copies.[8] 3D Realms co-founder George Broussard announced the sequel, Duke Nukem Forever, on April 27, 1997,[9] which he expected to be released by Christmas 1998. The game was widely anticipated.[8] Scott Miller, 3D Realms' co-founder, felt the Duke Nukem franchise would last for decades across many iterations, like James Bond or Mario.[8] Broussard and Miller funded Duke Nukem Forever using the profits from Duke Nukem 3D and other games. They gave the marketing and publishing rights to GT Interactive, taking only a $400,000 advance.[8] 3D Realms also began developing a 2D version of Duke Nukem Forever, which was canceled due to the rising popularity of 3D games.[10]
Rather than create a new game engine, 3D Realms began development using Id Software's Quake II engine.[8] They demonstrated the first Duke Nukem Forever trailer at the E3 convention in May 1998. Critics were impressed by its cinematic presentation and action scenes, with combat on a moving truck.[8] According to staff, Broussard became obsessed with incorporating new technology and features from competing games and could not bear for Duke Nukem Forever to be perceived as outdated.[8] Weeks after E3, he announced that 3D Realms had switched to Unreal Engine, a new engine with better rendering capabilities for large spaces, requiring a reboot of the project.[8] In 1999, they switched engines again, to a newer version of Unreal Engine.[8]
By 2000, Duke Nukem Forever was still far from complete. A developer who joined that year described it as a series of chaotic tech demos, and the staff felt that Broussard had no fixed idea of what the final game would be.[8] As the success of Duke Nukem 3D meant that 3D Realms did not require external funding, they lacked deadlines or financial pressure that could have driven the project. Broussard became defiant in response to questions from fans and journalists, saying it would be released "when it's done".[8] In December 2000, the rights to publish Duke Nukem Forever were purchased by Take-Two Interactive, which hoped to release it the following year.[11] By 2001, Duke Nukem Forever was being cited as a high-profile case of vaporware, and Wired gave it the "vaporware of the year" award.[12]
At E3 2001, 3D Realms released another trailer, the first public view of Duke Nukem Forever in three years. It received a positive response, and the team was elated, feeling that they were ahead of their competitors. However, Broussard still failed to present a vision for a final product. One employee felt that Miller and Broussard were developing "with a 1995 mentality", with a team much smaller than other major games of the time. By 2003, only 18 people were working on Duke Nukem Forever full time.[8] In a 2006 presentation, Broussard told a journalist the team had "fucked up" and had restarted development.[8] By August 2006, around half the team had left, frustrated by the lack of progress.[8]
According to Miller, the Canadian studio Digital Extremes was willing to take over the project in 2004, but the proposal was rejected by others at 3D Realms. Miller later described this as a "fatal suicide shot".[13] In 2007, 3D Realms hired Raphael van Lierop as the new creative director. He was impressed by the game and felt it could be finished within a year, but Broussard disagreed.[8] 3D Realms hired aggressively to expand the team to about 35 people. Brian Hook, the new creative lead, became the first employee to push back against Broussard.[8] In 2009, with 3D Realms having exhausted its capital, Miller and Broussard asked Take-Two for $6 million to finish the game.[8] After no agreement was reached, Broussard and Miller laid off the team and ceased development.[8] However, a small team of ex-employees, which would later become Triptych Games, continued developing the game from their homes.[14]
In September 2010, Gearbox Software announced that it had bought the Duke Nukem intellectual property from 3D Realms and would continue development of Duke Nukem Forever.[15] The Gearbox team included several members of the 3D Realms team, but not Broussard.[15] On May 24, 2011, Gearbox announced that Duke Nukem Forever had "gone gold" after 15 years.[16] It holds the Guinness world record for the longest development for a video game, at 14 years and 44 days,[17] though this period was exceeded in 2022 by Beyond Good and Evil 2.[18]
In 2022, Miller released a blog post on the Apogee website about 3D Realms' failure to complete Duke Nukem Forever. He attributed it to three major factors: understaffing, repeated engine changes and a lack of planning.[13] On Twitter, Broussard responded that Miller's claims were "nonsense", described him as manipulative and narcissistic, and accused him of blaming others. He blamed Miller for the loss of 3D Realms and the Duke Nukem intellectual property.[13]
I think that one key phrase there might be important: "As the success of Duke Nukem 3D meant that 3D Realms did not require external funding, they lacked deadlines or financial pressure that could have driven the project." Like, this is maybe a good example of where they really did need someone outside the project to say "I need you to get milestones and a schedule in shape", and where more money and time isn't the right answer. It's not that the project is on the cusp of amazing success and the people managing the project just mis-estimated the schedule by several months. It's that they just aren't anywhere near where they want to be and don't have a realistic roadmap for getting there.
I'll never touch No Man's Sky because of the rugpull they did. It is sucky to me forever. If they made that game from the start - I would probably be playing it.
In the days of Half Life 1
Literally what the headline, article, and quote are about. Half life 1. When half life 1 released. When they delayed it because they didn't want it to suck forever.
It's an oversimplification, but first impressions do mean a lot. A lot of people will forever remember No Man's Sky as being a terrible game, even though they did do a lot to fix it later.
Sounds like he stole that from Nintendo.
I mean who cares? Truth is truth.
Ironically, this was contadicted in the same documentary by the Half-Life devs when they were talking about Xen and how they were aware that it kinda sucked but the deadline was coming up…
Is that why they still have yet to make hl3 TF3 or update TF2 give portal 2 additional support
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.
HL2 EP3 any day now boyz.
I also liked 'the narcissistic injury of the level ignoring me' as an excuse for unrealistic hit decals.
I didn't care for his 'so what?' attitude about someone pointing out they were unrealistic - because the game's supposed to be immersive. If you want an effect and the excuse doesn't fit, find a different excuse. What else would justify the mechanic you're trying to convey?
Someone complained about the hit decals from a 25 year old game being unrealistic? I don't blame him for the "attitude"; this was among the first games to have such a thing. That shit was cutting edge for the time and it blew our minds. Not even Quake 2 had hit decals, IIRC.
Half-life was hella immersive for the time. People take everything for granted nowadays.
He was describing a discussion with one of his fellow devs, 25 years ago.
Preach Gaben!
But he said that in the context of releasing Half Life 1, back when there was no way to patch a game after release. This isn't the case anymore and it's been proven many times that games can come back from sucking.
Very few games actually come back from that though.
And patches even existed before the advent of internet, they just were also rare.
A game can, but the reputation of it can't. The reality of it is - it's unacceptable and always have been. Producers have just pushed for releasing buggy crap and the "fix it later" mentality.
I'd generally agree, but one huge exception that comes to mind is No Man's Sky. It feels like its updates get far more attention than most games' just because they did manage to turn it around. Even though it was generally considered "redeemed" years ago, it still gets credit and publicity for its redemption every time there's an update, to the point where I think it does far better today than it would be doing if it had released in the state it was supposed to.
It's not a strategy I'd recommend other companies try to emulate, though. I think Hello Games got very lucky with people letting them redeem No Man's Sky, along with it taking them a lot of extra time and work. It was a phenomenon, not something that can be worked into a strategy.
You only get to make a first impression once, after all.
But that's the thing though right? No man's sky will always be known for sucking at first. Sure it got better, but it did suck. It will forever have that taint of sucking attached to it.
It's better to be remembered as being good from the start.
It’s better to be remembered as being good from the start.
I think NMS is an exception. If it released today, I think most people would end up feeling that it's just kind of "fine" and it'd die down somewhat quickly. It's managed to get a lot of goodwill because of how they turned it around and I think it gets a lot more publicity and positive attention because of that.
Can't it? Cyberpunk's DLC came out not long ago and it was consistently in the top sellers and praised by everyone. Maybe people on Reddit will still hold a grudge but the vast majority of people don't care; If it's good then it's good.
For every Cyberpunk there is 200 Payday 3's, CoD MW3s etc.
The spirit of your point is right, but: game patches existed back then. The first patch for Half Life was 1.0.0.8 released in 1999 (release version was 1.0.0.5). I cannot find the patch notes or exact release date as my search results are flooded with "25th anniversary patch" results.
What was true is that players patching their games was not a matter of course for many years. It was a pain in the ass. The game didn't update itself. You didn't have a launcher to update your game for you. No. Instead, you had to go to the game's website and download the patch executable yourself. But it wasn't just a simple "Game 1.1 update.exe" patch. That'd be too easy. It was a patch from 1.0.9 to 1.1, and if you were on 1.0.5.3 you had to get the patch for 1.0.5.3 to 1.0.6.2, then a patch from that to 1.0.8 then a patch from that to 1.0.9. Then you had to run all of those in sequence. This is a huge, huge part of why people eventually started to fall in love with Steam back in the day. Patches were easy and "just worked" — it was amazing compared to what came before.
The end result being that patches existed but the game that people remember (and played) was by and large defined by what it was on release. Also console games weren't patched, although newer printings of a game would see updates. Ocarina of Time's 1.0 release was exclusive to Japan; the North American release was 1.1 for the first batch of sales. After the initial batch was sold out the release was replaced by 1.2. That was common back then. As far as I know there was no way for consumers to get theirs updated, or to even find out about the updates. But they did exist.
There were also revisions of even game cartridges for consoles.
I remember having a first revision of the first Legend of Zelda for the Game Boy. A bug meant that hitting a particular button combination (Select or Start+Select, can't recall) precisely when crossing a screen boundry would let you cross two screens rather than one.
That was patched in a later revision of the cartridge.
Steam literally started as a way to easily patch and find servers for your valve games. They didn't start selling other games on there until a few years later.
Praise be unto papa Gaben.
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.
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.
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.
🙄
Can't stand this Miyamoto quote. Not only it's contentious at best (think of all the terrible games the kept getting delayed), it's factually untrue since the mid to late 2000s when online patching for games became common practice across the industry.
I think there's a kernel of truth to it. A poor first impression followed by a subsequent recovery tells us that a game could have been good at launch, but was rushed out for various reasons. This practice of forcing the public to pay to be beta testers for a half finished product should be punished.
And nothing's going to erase a garbage launch. It will always have been garbage and the shit launch will always be a part of the conversation about the game. Hence why we still talk about it even in games that have recovered.
You can't patch history.
I agree with the first impression aspect and I believe it's important to get the release right because of it, but the phrase deliberately implies a bad game will always be bad which just isn't true. "Bad impressions are forever" would be more accurate.
I would like to hear the Gabe Newell on why steam promotes gambling to kids
I loved Half-Life and played through it several times to get all the details.
However, watching the 25 year anniversary about it is about as boring as watching the anecdotes from some old rock band describing their amplifier setup in the 1970s. I's interesting in some technical historical way, but it also seems soo out of touch with what's happening today.
These guys aren't going to put out a new banger.
I didn’t find this boring whatsoever. It was great seeing the creation process of such a foundational game.
What does this have to do with modern gaming? It’s a retrospective.
Not sure whether or not it was the same team, but Half-Life: Alyx was incredible
I would definitely call half life alyx a banger.
and most people don't realise how it ended, but keep bitching about hl3
Most people don't have VR gear, and it's a VR-only game.
Well, then they should shut up about half-life until they've played all the half-life already released.
Your analogy sucks because knowing your tools, even old ones, is important in both of the fields you're talking about. Funk and soul are using old music tools to create new and unique sounds in their genres regularly (see vulfmon). You apparently just hate the history of music/gaming or have no interest and that's fine, but you are a FOOL to think these tools can't still be used today. Low fidelity is a choice you can make that has no actual bearing on the final product's quality overall (See Lethal company).
Halflife 3 is going to be amazing you guys
Valve can't count to 3 though.
Expect after the Steam Deck 2 for its successors to be Steam Deck 2: Episode 1 and Steam Deck 2: Episode 2.
Steam Deck: Alyx
Just stay away from the knockoff Steam Deck: Kill the Freeman.
That was the Steam Deck 64GB: Kill the free space (with shader caches)
My Deck64 was turned into a 1tb before you could even buy them like that though. For anyone who had extra 2230s lying around and was going to use a screen protector anyways it was a no brainer.
I modified mine too but I tried to go the 512GB SD card route first and just install everything on that. Yeah still filled the internal storage. 1TB SSD is worth it. Now i just use the SD card for emudeck+roms.
Capcom had years of jokes on exactly that point with the Street Fighter series, but they eventually did release Street Fighter III.
EDIT: For those not familiar, here's the relevant portion of the series timeline:
Street Fighter
Street Fighter II: The World Warrior
Street Fighter II: Championship Edition
Street Fighter II: Hyper Fighting
Super Street Fighter II: The New Challengers
Super Street Fighter II Turbo
Street Fighter Alpha
Street Fighter: The Movie (the video game)
Street Fighter Alpha 2
X-Men vs. Street Fighter
Street Fighter EX
Street Fighter III: New Generation
To be fair to Capcom, they did release Ace Attorney 3 quickly and it was the peak of the franchise.
It would be free marketing if they went with that approach. I can already see the headlines: “Why the ‘Steam Deck 3’ is called the ‘Steam Deck: Episode 1’ and other 5 things with origins on the memeverse”
Yep. I consider HL:Alex to be HL:3. It's that good.
But I still want another HL game.
Hollow Knight: Silksong is gonna be perfect.
(Actually, knowing those devs, it might.)
Their problem is they already made a perfect game. Now they have to do it again. Doing something perfectly once can be chance, doing it twice is massively more difficult.
I'd settle for an Alyx 2 at this point.
No more Alyx after that though!
I can't wait for my great grandson to play it
Here you dropped this: "great "
Confirmed!
Interesting spin on the "A delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad"-quote.
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.
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.
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
Specifically with the Fallout series, I think that one complication is that there was a lot of unhappiness way back when with the series moving from a much-liked isometric, turn-based/real-time game to a 3D game with shooter elements. A lot of people, including myself, didn't think that it would likely reproduce what they liked about the series. And, well, it was a change, but what ultimately came out was pretty good, and while I'm sure that it didn't cut it for some people -- you had things like the Wasteland series continuing the isometric approach -- I think that it was a pretty decent transition. The same people who liked the isometric games generally liked Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas. So in that case, the game series was taken through a major shift that a number of players were skeptical about, and it generally worked.
But with Fallout 76, I think that the transition caused tradeoffs that didn't work out as well for many players.
3 and new Vegas had such effort to keep the same level of writing, and VATS was an excellent nod to to the isometric games. So while the form was different, the experience was still fallout. 76 was a copy-paste of FO4 with no story, no npcs, and the entire game revolved around the most controversial part of 4: settlements.
Supposedly. But I was never a fan of the Bethesda Fall Outs, so I'd just never play FO76 in the first place.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Same goes for Cyberpunk 2077 tbh.
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.
No those two games are the exception no the rule.
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.
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.
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...
Tell that to Game Freak.
Lol that quote is literally in the first sentence of the article.
Not sure why we're arguing this quote with the same two games over and over. Nms and cyberpunk are great games, but they're a rarity.
Game Dev crunch is a plague in th industry, we suffer as consumers who cop bad releases on release. The whole industry could learn from its roots and delay things for a better initial product.
Defending the current practice of redevelopment in post is almost consumer gaslighting.
Plus, the base game itself should be good. It shouldn't need updates. Post-game launch updates should be enhancements, not fixes.
Seriously, we need to return to pre-internet console mentality. You put out an N64 game, it better be goddamn finished. Companies rely way too much on "ehh can just patch it".
I mean, modern games are many times more complex so the idea of putting out a "finished" game these days is more like "this is an acceptable level of bugs/most players won't hit this." The problem is that the acceptable level has shifted way too fucking far in the wrong direction to the point where in some cases we're barely getting an alpha, much less a beta. In general, I have no problem with companies putting out good games that get better, like tuning for performance so you get better FPS, it's player on lower spec machines, etc. I don't like the idea of paying to be a beta tester for two years, and not getting the good game until way later.
I’m not arguing in favor of companies putting out shoddy gamesor the practice of games needing patches to fix glaring issues, but suggesting that the 90s and early 2000s were the days of totally flawless games seems like a result of survivorship bias.
We remember the great games from those days, but there were mountains of shovelware games releasing with all the problems we see today.
Even many good or great games from those days have problems that either remain unfixed, or have only been fixed years later by fans.
I would even say NMS is a good example of this sentiment. The game has been good for years now and has had tons of free updates. There's a lot of people out there who just don't care and you can see this in forums whenever the game makes news. People still show up to decry the game for how terrible the release was.
Public sentiment on the game and the studio is still pretty mixed
The fact that it’s only the same two games is more of an argument against than for, honestly. With all of the awful launches people can think of two games that were redeemed.
That’s bad.
I think a big difference with both is that they're not big multiplayer titles that are looking to make money with cosmetics.
If a multiplayer focused game is shit at launch, it won't get a good user base and then it's as good as dead.
Both Destiny and Destiny 2 had really poor launches. Then they cleaned up their act and we're very successful and had thriving playerbases. Light fall and this past year notwithstanding...
I fucking loved the Forsaken expansion and felt that it was worth the money. I got Black Armory not realizing it wasn't an expansion like Forsaken and was so fucking disappointed. I eventually quit because they kept making the game worse.
Destiny 2's been a real roller coaster. Forsaken was the best it ever was, so you haven't missed much imo.
I’m not defending the need for post-launch patches to fix glaring issues and I’m not defending crunch, but suggesting that buggy releases and crunch haven’t been with gaming since the earliest days of the industry seems like putting on rose colored glasses. There is a lot to damn about the current industry, but painting the root days of the industry as free of those same issues just to make the comparison seems unrealistic.
I should call her
Tell your mom she still owes me for the Uber.
Delay No More
I don't disagree that often an early release can really kill a game. I think that Fallout 76 would have done much better had it not gone out the door for a while, and I think that the poor quality at release really hurt reception; despite Bethesda putting a lot of post-release work into the game, a lot of people aren't going to go back and look at it. CDPR and Cyberpunk 2077 might have done better by spending more time or deciding to cut the scope earlier in development too. But, a few points:
First, game dev is not free. The QA folks, the programmers, all that -- they are getting paid. Someone has to come up with money to pay for that. When someone says "it needs more time", they're also saying "someone needs to put more money in".
Second, time is money. If I invest $1 and expect to get $2 back, when I get that $2 matters a lot. If it's in a year, that's a really good deal. If it's in 20 years (adjusting for inflation), that's a really bad deal -- you have a ton of lower-risk things than you could do in that time. Now, we generally aren't waiting 20 years, but it's true that each additional month until there is revenue does cut into the return. That's partly why game publishers like preorders -- it's not just because it transfers risk of the game sucking from them to the customers, but also because money sooner is worth more.
Third, I think that there are also legitimate times when a game's development is mismanaged, and even if it makes the publisher the bad guy, sometimes they have to be in a position of saying "this is where we draw the line". Some games have dev processes that just go badly. Take, say, Star Citizen. I realize that there are still some people who are still convinced that Star Citizen is gonna meet all their dreams, but for the sake of discussion, let's assume that it isn't, that development on the game has been significantly mismanaged. There is no publisher in charge of the cash flow, no one party to say "This has blown way past many deadlines. You need to focus on cutting what needs to be cut and getting something out the door. No more pushing back deadlines and taking more cash; if the game does well, you can do DLC or a sequel."
EDIT: I think that in the case of Cities: Skylines 2, sure, you can probably improve things with dev time. But I also think that the developer probably could have legitimately looked at where things were and said "okay, we gotta start cutting/making tradeoffs" earlier in the process. Like, maybe it doesn't look as pretty to ship with reduced graphical defaults, but maybe that's just what should have been done. Speaking for myself, I don't care that much about ground-level views or simulated individuals in a city-builder game, and that's a lot of where they ran into problems -- they're spending a lot of resources and taking on a lot of risk for something that I just don't think is all that core to a city-builder game. I think that a lot of the development effort and problems could have been avoided had the developer decided earlier-on that they didn't need to have the flashiest city sim ever.
Sometimes a portion of the game just isn't done and you might be better-off without it. Bungie has had developers comment that maybe they shouldn't have shipped with The Library level in Halo. My understanding is that some of the reason that different portions of the level look similar is that originally, the level was intended to be more open, and they couldn't make it perform acceptably that way and had to close off areas from each other. I didn't dislike as much as some other people, but maybe it would have been better not to ship it, or to significantly reduce the scope of the level.
I mean, given an infinite amount of dev time and resources, and competent project management, you can fix just about everything. Some dev timelines are unrealistic, and sometimes a game can be greatly-improved with a relatively-small amount of time. My point is that sometimes the answer is that you gotta cut, gotta start cutting earlier, and then rely on a solid release and putting whatever else you wanted to do into DLC or maybe a sequel.
I don't agree at all. There's one Valve and Steam. If it's not Valve, it's gonna be Microsoft or someone, and I'd much rather have Valve handling the PC game storefront than Microsoft. There are lots of game developers and publishers out there that could develop a game competently, but not many in Valve's position.
I think that pretty much every great game, especially those boxed and released before digital distribution, was made by a passionate and talented team.
I’m just about certain that every team on those games would have at least one person pushing for more development time to make it just a little bit better.
It’s a romantic idea to say devs should have all the time in the world, but somebody needs to be the voice saying, “No, it’s done. We are boxing it.”
If enough of the development team can articulate why they need a delay, and if it looks like they are making actual progress, delays are good. If it’s just constant iteration and tweaks, that’s not enough justification.
This is true, but gamers are so impatient. I am in early access with my Virtual Reality Theme Park and have been busting it for 3 years as a solo dev, and of course it is not a full Theme Park yet. What does exist has put me into the top 10 on the Meta Quest App Lab store, but I get bounced out of the top 10 now and then as I will get 3* saying new rides are not coming fast enough. People are so impatient just like shareholders.
Make sure you put in the description you are a small one dev team. Most people are reasonable and understand you can only do so much.
People are way less patient with asshole AAA studios that crank out garbage because they waste time implementing micro transactions or bullshit DLCd
Game of Thrones agrees with him.
Time was not the issue with HBO Got. The show runners ran out into the ground so they could move on and be done with it.
Time was the issue. They ran out of time waiting for GRM, so they went their own way. If they had waited... We'd still be waiting, but wouldn't have gotten the suck.
You mean if they’d been competent show runners in the first place.
The show was great when it was based off of good writing.
Then it got sketchy as they had to rely on GRRM’s notes.
Then the notes got more vague, and season 7 and 8 turned into garbage.
Conclusion: D&D were mediocre show runners who couldn’t hire competent writers, and thought game of thrones was about subverting expectations instead of strong character arcs.
Justifiably, it lost them their next gig.
HBO was willing to wait for good seasons. But D&D wanted to get into a Star Wars contract with Disney. They rushed season 8 out the door with lazy writing to get that Star Wars deal.
After season 8 traumatized GOT fans and bombed in reviews, Disney backed out of the deal, and D&D have fallen into obscurity.
"Hard disagree." -- person who played FFXIV before the realm got reborn
The memories are fantastic though.
I'd almost argue vanilla and realm reborn aren't even the same game. As you said, the realm had to be reborn. It's like they nuked it and then started over.
...They did.
Duke nukem forever says hi
That game was both late and suck
Apparently it managed to get worse. The leak of the 2001 build that people are patching up actually looks really cool.
My understanding is that the released game was not a "descendant" of that 2001 preview. The game was totally scrapped and then a new iteration was started years later which is what eventually was released. So it's not like the game was actually being worked on for a decade. More like the released game (which was only built over a couple of years) had the same name as a scrapped game from a decade prior.
That is precisely what happened.
I was merely framing it that the 2001 build was seemingly on the road to being a good, or at least faithful Duke Nukem game but management kept dictating changes to it to keep up with gaming fads. Eventually Gearbox just shoved an entirely different build out the door.
The 2001 build was victim to a lot of start-stop-start-stop development.
Obviously CS2 has sucked for a while and is gonna suck forever...
I dont think any creative would disagree shareholders and useless management however
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.
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.
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?
Fantastic advice, as a guideline in a vacuum.
No game should be shipped broken, but sometimes concessions are a reality.
Even Half-Life had to make concessions. Xen is infamously less polished and fine tuned than the rest of the game. Valve didn’t have infinite resources and time to keep tinkering. Would the game have been better? Maybe. But time is money, and Half-Life already ended up selling huge. Would taking time to fine tune Xen have boosted sales? Were people in the 90s avoiding the game because of Xen? I don’t think so.
The profits from Half Life allowed Valve to make more games and be successful. Is it worth trading off a more fine tuned Xen in order to have Valve exist as we know it today?
In the documentary, they actually expand on that, they delayed the core game until the story and levels worked out and specially left Xen to the last as if they were not having fun before, they would have given up
I know. Perhaps I was not being clear in my point.
Xen was made last, and Valve never could quite get it to the same quality as the rest of the game.
If we follow the logic, which many commenters have, that “games should only be released 100% finished” then Half-Life should have been delayed indefinitely until Xen was as polished as the rest of the game.
I was making the point that Xen is an example of Valve deciding part of their game is “good enough” and shipping it, rather than continually extending development.
There are realities of game development that even Valve isn’t immune to.
Definitely a "change some words around" from Miyamoto, whom this is usually attributed to.
There isn't any solid evidence that the quote originated from Miyamoto.
Which they would know if they read the article.
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.
Why don't they just not bother with a release date and release it when the game is 100% ready
A lot of the time in the industry, developers are using money loaned by publishers. Things like getting more development time, which means asking for more money is a negotiation that the devs aren’t guaranteed to win.
Valve is one of the successful developer & publisher companies that managed to survive. The 90s were a much smaller time for video games, and a small startup like Valve could compete with the big names out there. They had more freedom in a sense, but they also were taking quite a gamble. Other companies tried the same and didn’t survive.
It’s easy to simply say “only release a game when it’s 100% done” but it’s a lot harder when you’re watching money that keeps your company afloat dwindle with each delay. Also, “100% done” is a very flexible concept. Games almost always have to cut content or make concessions in some way, so figuring out what a done version looks like while working on it can be difficult.
The modern version of a small Valve style startup would be something like a Kickstarter funded development. Again, unless you are (for some reason) a Star Citizen dev, people are going to stop giving you money and you have limited funds and thus limited development time.
And just because you delay to try and release a superior game doesn’t mean it will be a smash hit.
baldur's gate did that and other companies were complaining about the high standard it set
Art is never finished, only abandoned.
Also it's fucking expensive to market things so people are aware you just released it. Or at least it used to be, before wish lists, early access, and so on.
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.
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.
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.
Okay, so there's game delays that actually have helped some games. Then there's games that sit on Early Access for what seems like forever, wondering what the fuck are they doing, like 7 Days to Die.
I like and respect games that, take their time because they want a certain vision of a game to work itself out as intended. I don't like and respect games that need to rush for the holidays or need to rush for company appeasement.
Some of my favorite Early Access games, I'd actually rather just finish development and then start on a new release.
Take Nova Drift and Caves of Qud. Both games, I think, are in a state where I have gotten my money's worth out of them many times over. But they're still Early Access.
But, hey, as a player, who is going to complain about more stuff being provided for free?
At this point, my preference would be to say "Okay, you did a good job with the resources you had. Now, I would like to give you more money and you can hire more people and produce content at a higher rate, because I really like the stuff you make."
Or at least DLC or something. Like, I don't have a problem with blocky pixel art as a way of reducing dev costs. I think that many traditional roguelikes have benefited from just using text -- means that gameplay revisions are easier, and that one doesn't need an art team. I think that it's an effective tactic. But having seen how much art has added to, say, Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, I'd like to be able to purchase high-resolution art for Caves of Qud. I pay for tons of art in many, many games that I enjoy much less than Caves of Qud. Ditto for a number of other pixel-art indie releases that I like.
I'd like to see more content coming out at a higher rate, and that is gonna require funds.
Paradox does this. They have a deal where they make a game and if I like it, I can send them more money and they will make more game at a pretty good clip. Now, maybe not everyone wants to spend what some Paradox games run if you take into account all DLC -- okay -- but I'm not left in a situation where I want more of Game X but I'm unable to buy it.
Gabe starts looking like Game-Gandalf more every day
He hit hard that Santa Clause.
I was gonna say, maybe he knocked Santa off a roof or something.
Gandalf the Burger King version
You are the reason we don’t get a Half Life 3 ya know?
I still believe we will se HL3 one day.
And a canceled game is never bad
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"
Okay but Gabe, you're looking like a grandpa nowadays. Maybe you're waiting just a little too long.
You better not pout, I'm telling ya why...
Half Life 3 ain't comin... to toooooown!
Unless you're No Man's Sky? Or Cyberpunk? Like games have been getting patches and updates for a long time, sometimes they get better, sometimes they get worse. Maybe he means your reputation as a developer and as a publisher is forever tarnished no matter how well you patch up the game post-launch.
In the days of Half Life 1? Yeah, it wasn't really feasible to patch games after they got printed on discs and left the warehouse.
I'm sure they got better, but they never won me back, that original feeling of disappointment is still associated with the games for me.
I'm pretty sure this is what he means. It's like first impressions with people. You only get one shot. Yes, you can improve the initial release to be playable and amazing but people will remember you put out a shit game to start with and that alienates people.
Yeah reptuational is part of the issue but there is also a big financial issue too. Delaying a game is financially difficult as it affects financial projects for each year with shareholders (who only care about share price growth). If you release a game in a poor state you get to hit some of the financial targets which benefits the publisher particularly, but for the developer it means longer terms sales are much lower as reviews and feedback come in that the game is crap. You then have to patch and repair the game.
Patching has allowed publishers and developers to get away with this releasing of games in bad states, but it doesn't change that fundamental issue which disproportionately affects the developer. Dev studios often only have 1 game being worked on at a time. An unready early release which is poorly recieved can be an existential crisis. For publishers, a poorly recieved game is a disappointment but generally have other many other games also on release so they can move on and not care as much.
No Man's Sky and Cyberpunk are high profile exceptions. The gaming world is littered with abandoned flops, often due to not being ready for release.
Agreed. And many of counterexamples belong to the Live Service model. Halo Infinite, Anthem, Evolve (I'm digging deep on that one), etc.
Also, games that are delayed too much sometimes end up being outdated and therefore relatively bad. Eg. Duke Nukem Forever.
A 12+ year delay is so extreme it needs its own category.
Welly wait for Star Citizen now... :-D
IIRC, though, that isn't "give developer some more money and keep plugging". It was "take the game in its current state, hand it to another developer to get it into a releasable state, and ship it".
googles
Yeah. Basically, 3D Realms just kept kicking the can down the road. Gearbox took over, cleaned up what was there, and shipped it in half a year. It wasn't the perfect, ideal 3D FPS, but I suspect that cleaning up what was there and making what return was possible (and at least getting the people who had preordered the game many years back) was probably the right move. I don't think that 3D Realms was going to produce a huge success if they had another two years or something. It probably would have been a good idea to have wrapped up the project several years earlier than was the case.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duke_Nukem_Forever
I think that one key phrase there might be important: "As the success of Duke Nukem 3D meant that 3D Realms did not require external funding, they lacked deadlines or financial pressure that could have driven the project." Like, this is maybe a good example of where they really did need someone outside the project to say "I need you to get milestones and a schedule in shape", and where more money and time isn't the right answer. It's not that the project is on the cusp of amazing success and the people managing the project just mis-estimated the schedule by several months. It's that they just aren't anywhere near where they want to be and don't have a realistic roadmap for getting there.
I'll never touch No Man's Sky because of the rugpull they did. It is sucky to me forever. If they made that game from the start - I would probably be playing it.
Literally what the headline, article, and quote are about. Half life 1. When half life 1 released. When they delayed it because they didn't want it to suck forever.
It's an oversimplification, but first impressions do mean a lot. A lot of people will forever remember No Man's Sky as being a terrible game, even though they did do a lot to fix it later.
Sounds like he stole that from Nintendo.
I mean who cares? Truth is truth.
Ironically, this was contadicted in the same documentary by the Half-Life devs when they were talking about Xen and how they were aware that it kinda sucked but the deadline was coming up…
Is that why they still have yet to make hl3 TF3 or update TF2 give portal 2 additional support
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.
HL2 EP3 any day now boyz.
I also liked 'the narcissistic injury of the level ignoring me' as an excuse for unrealistic hit decals.
I didn't care for his 'so what?' attitude about someone pointing out they were unrealistic - because the game's supposed to be immersive. If you want an effect and the excuse doesn't fit, find a different excuse. What else would justify the mechanic you're trying to convey?
Someone complained about the hit decals from a 25 year old game being unrealistic? I don't blame him for the "attitude"; this was among the first games to have such a thing. That shit was cutting edge for the time and it blew our minds. Not even Quake 2 had hit decals, IIRC.
Half-life was hella immersive for the time. People take everything for granted nowadays.
He was describing a discussion with one of his fellow devs, 25 years ago.
Preach Gaben!
But he said that in the context of releasing Half Life 1, back when there was no way to patch a game after release. This isn't the case anymore and it's been proven many times that games can come back from sucking.
Very few games actually come back from that though.
And patches even existed before the advent of internet, they just were also rare.
A game can, but the reputation of it can't. The reality of it is - it's unacceptable and always have been. Producers have just pushed for releasing buggy crap and the "fix it later" mentality.
I'd generally agree, but one huge exception that comes to mind is No Man's Sky. It feels like its updates get far more attention than most games' just because they did manage to turn it around. Even though it was generally considered "redeemed" years ago, it still gets credit and publicity for its redemption every time there's an update, to the point where I think it does far better today than it would be doing if it had released in the state it was supposed to.
It's not a strategy I'd recommend other companies try to emulate, though. I think Hello Games got very lucky with people letting them redeem No Man's Sky, along with it taking them a lot of extra time and work. It was a phenomenon, not something that can be worked into a strategy.
You only get to make a first impression once, after all.
But that's the thing though right? No man's sky will always be known for sucking at first. Sure it got better, but it did suck. It will forever have that taint of sucking attached to it.
It's better to be remembered as being good from the start.
I think NMS is an exception. If it released today, I think most people would end up feeling that it's just kind of "fine" and it'd die down somewhat quickly. It's managed to get a lot of goodwill because of how they turned it around and I think it gets a lot more publicity and positive attention because of that.
Can't it? Cyberpunk's DLC came out not long ago and it was consistently in the top sellers and praised by everyone. Maybe people on Reddit will still hold a grudge but the vast majority of people don't care; If it's good then it's good.
For every Cyberpunk there is 200 Payday 3's, CoD MW3s etc.
The spirit of your point is right, but: game patches existed back then. The first patch for Half Life was 1.0.0.8 released in 1999 (release version was 1.0.0.5). I cannot find the patch notes or exact release date as my search results are flooded with "25th anniversary patch" results.
What was true is that players patching their games was not a matter of course for many years. It was a pain in the ass. The game didn't update itself. You didn't have a launcher to update your game for you. No. Instead, you had to go to the game's website and download the patch executable yourself. But it wasn't just a simple "Game 1.1 update.exe" patch. That'd be too easy. It was a patch from 1.0.9 to 1.1, and if you were on 1.0.5.3 you had to get the patch for 1.0.5.3 to 1.0.6.2, then a patch from that to 1.0.8 then a patch from that to 1.0.9. Then you had to run all of those in sequence. This is a huge, huge part of why people eventually started to fall in love with Steam back in the day. Patches were easy and "just worked" — it was amazing compared to what came before.
The end result being that patches existed but the game that people remember (and played) was by and large defined by what it was on release. Also console games weren't patched, although newer printings of a game would see updates. Ocarina of Time's 1.0 release was exclusive to Japan; the North American release was 1.1 for the first batch of sales. After the initial batch was sold out the release was replaced by 1.2. That was common back then. As far as I know there was no way for consumers to get theirs updated, or to even find out about the updates. But they did exist.
There were also revisions of even game cartridges for consoles.
I remember having a first revision of the first Legend of Zelda for the Game Boy. A bug meant that hitting a particular button combination (Select or Start+Select, can't recall) precisely when crossing a screen boundry would let you cross two screens rather than one.
That was patched in a later revision of the cartridge.
Steam literally started as a way to easily patch and find servers for your valve games. They didn't start selling other games on there until a few years later.
Praise be unto papa Gaben.
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.
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.
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.
🙄
Can't stand this Miyamoto quote. Not only it's contentious at best (think of all the terrible games the kept getting delayed), it's factually untrue since the mid to late 2000s when online patching for games became common practice across the industry.
I think there's a kernel of truth to it. A poor first impression followed by a subsequent recovery tells us that a game could have been good at launch, but was rushed out for various reasons. This practice of forcing the public to pay to be beta testers for a half finished product should be punished.
And nothing's going to erase a garbage launch. It will always have been garbage and the shit launch will always be a part of the conversation about the game. Hence why we still talk about it even in games that have recovered.
You can't patch history.
I agree with the first impression aspect and I believe it's important to get the release right because of it, but the phrase deliberately implies a bad game will always be bad which just isn't true. "Bad impressions are forever" would be more accurate.
I would like to hear the Gabe Newell on why steam promotes gambling to kids
I loved Half-Life and played through it several times to get all the details. However, watching the 25 year anniversary about it is about as boring as watching the anecdotes from some old rock band describing their amplifier setup in the 1970s. I's interesting in some technical historical way, but it also seems soo out of touch with what's happening today. These guys aren't going to put out a new banger.
I didn’t find this boring whatsoever. It was great seeing the creation process of such a foundational game.
What does this have to do with modern gaming? It’s a retrospective.
Not sure whether or not it was the same team, but Half-Life: Alyx was incredible
I would definitely call half life alyx a banger.
and most people don't realise how it ended, but keep bitching about hl3
Most people don't have VR gear, and it's a VR-only game.
Well, then they should shut up about half-life until they've played all the half-life already released.
Your analogy sucks because knowing your tools, even old ones, is important in both of the fields you're talking about. Funk and soul are using old music tools to create new and unique sounds in their genres regularly (see vulfmon). You apparently just hate the history of music/gaming or have no interest and that's fine, but you are a FOOL to think these tools can't still be used today. Low fidelity is a choice you can make that has no actual bearing on the final product's quality overall (See Lethal company).
Bad take