Sheriff05 said:
Don't confuse your "opinion" of ToEE with the "reality". 95% of the bugs in ToEE were not game stoppers and IF you didn't know D&D rules you wouldn't even know they were bugs.
Well if you want to talk about reality, let's talk reality. I haven't beaten ToEE. I bought the game after the first patch was released. I installed the patch before playing. Consider me surprised that when I first tried to play the game, it crashed to desktop. Great patch. Then I started playing on the Ironman mode. I was in the temple and the game crashed. It fucked my savegame. Great, time to restart from the beginning. Even with the latest patch and the Co8 patch, I still get crashes. I simply can not start a chaotic evil party. After the cut scene, crasheroo!
Now I'll admit, I haven't played a game in a while, because I've been too busy, and not because of the bugs. I do intend to play ToEE again when I get the chance, but your statement about "reality" just really struck a nerve. If it's only 5% of the bugs that are game stoppers, then I must have encountered all 5%. And considering the number of miniscule bugs, 5% has to be a hell of a lot of game stoppers. (Though I thought the infinite magic missiles bug was awesome!
)
Now to you folks bitching about the publishers releasing the games in a poor state, I find that to be one of the dumbest opinions ever expressed. If you give a developer a time extenstion to complete the project, and they still don't complete it at the end of that timeframe, how are you going to be able to figure out when the developer would actually be able to complete the project? If a developer says they just need a couple months to complete it, and they don't complete it in that time frame, then obviously they aren't going to be able to give you an accurate assessment for the time to completion. At that point, as a publisher they have to cut their loses. Publishers estimate how many sales they expect to get from a title based on market analysis, and then make the budget based on that fact. They can't just keep giving the money to developers, otherwise they'll not be able to recoup their costs.
So if a publisher gets to the point where they have to cut their losses, then they certainly can't be blamed for releasing the product to the public. They are after all a business. Paying for the development of a game and then not releasing it is just a death wish. At least if they release it, they stand a chance to recoup some of their money. And yeah, I know that sucks, and I hate being lead into buying a shitty product just like the rest of you. For example, I bought Tribes 2. I NEVER played it. The game was buggy in that it didn't want to connect online, and it was an online game. The only way to get the patch to fix it was through the ingame update thingy, which DIDN'T WORK! Yeah, I was pissed about it, especially since I loved the first Tribes. It's a shame publishers have to resort to such shitty business practices, but if they want to stay in business, they have to at times.
Also note that Troika wasn't being all that honest either. Here's that postmortem quote that Marfish dug up:
Postmortem said:
For programming, I think the biggest challenge was getting the party pathing in and working. We had a milestone for pathing very early on, but we had sort of fudged that one together using existing code from Arcanum and making it look pretty good... but the intention was always to rip it out entirely and come up with something new. So, a new milestone was added called "complex party pathing" for several milestones down. Well, when that one hit, for some reason we got that past Atari too, even though it really wasn't as complete as it should have been. Ultimately, pathing was being worked on and improved up until the very end... and there are even additional enhancements in there now from the patch.
They simply passed off the milestones with temporary fixes that "looked nice". Despite being a common practice in games development (so it's not like it's only Troika that does this), it's deplorable. It's these sorts of "Let's just get the milestone completed and then think about actually making it work." mentalities that are a VERY big sign of something larger being wrong. It means bugs propagate and development usually isn't finished on time. Once you reach the milestone, the publishers tend to accept that you have the features in a working state. That means they have no reason to expect to give you more time, heck the features work, right? When instead you have a complete rework in mind, "the intention was always to rip it out entirely and come up with something new", and you pass it off like it's complete, things get out of whack.
So while the publishers might have some deplorable practices, it's not like they are alone in that fact. The developers have them as well. It's just that the publishers pass it all onto the customers, which sucks even more!