Should POE's Final release have been called "Early Access?"

[Flow]

Are you seriously comparing the production values and programming resources of a AAA console/PC first person RPG with literally hundreds of people on the project to PoE? Good lord. Don't be an idiot.

 

You clearly aren't into this style of game, which is fine... but that's on you for not doing much research before buying.

[majestic]

Hey here is another "opinion"

 

This one is a Fifty year old gamer:

 

Quote:

 

"Having lived for just shy of a quarter of a century, I can’t say I am old myself. But at least I am old enough to remember the days when games worked like everything else; when you fork out money, it is for something that works the way it should. In fact, anyone who is reading this now is probably old enough to remember those good old days where games were bug free on launch day, or if there were any, they were so obscure and difficult to reproduce that finding them actually became another objective after the actual game was completed."

 

http://www.hardwarezone.com.my/blog-game-development-releasing-unfinished-unpolished-and-buggy-games-new-trend

 

Quick.... flame him and ask him for "evidence" of his claim that in the good old days "games were bug free on launch day, or if there were any, they were so obscure and difficult to reproduce that finding them actually became another objective after the actual game was completed."

 

Well that's awesome, I'm not sure how you get the idea that this particular gamer is fifty years old because "just shy" of a quarter of a century is a little less than 25 years. So in essence that guy isn't even old enough to be able to use nostalgia goggles on the good old days of computer gaming where you bought a game and actually had no idea if you even could make it work in the first place (the CD version of Strike Commander was an especially egregious case because early CD-ROM support by Microsoft required a truckload of memory, and by that I mean 45 kilobytes), but that was all at a time probably long before that guy diddled himself for the first time.

 

So more realistically for that guy we can go back 15 years and look at Baldur's Gate 2, a game that had an annoying habit of corrupting your savegames without you noticing because some area you haven't visited in 40 hours but needed to go to after coming back from Spellhold died, or scripting bugs that rendered your game unfinishable if you saved at the wrong time and then loaded that save.

 

That took some fiddling around with Near Infinity to get those damaged saves fixed. Which we did on the tech support forum without ever thinking whether or not we should be paid for that (well Interplay did give each of us a free copy of Lionheart before it died, but I'd rather not talk about that game). Coz we, you know, cared. And people would wait patiently for those fixed save games and politely say thank you instead of raging on like the whiny entitled kids of today.

 

There are some good points on that opinion piece by the way, especially about DLCs and microtransactions. The gaming nostalgia not so much, at least not for PC gaming. On consoles, oh yeah, you never had a chance to get a patch 20 years ago so the games really just had to work but they were also a lot less complex than today's games. Having to download 10GB patches before you can play a console game these days while waiting hours for it to be installed, well THAT really is ridiculous.

Edited June 1, 2015 by majestic

[abaris]

 

But if they are, I can think of several reasons. In particular, ubiquitous broadband Internet, plus services like Steam, Origin, GoG Galaxy, and the consoles' online services. They make patch delivery much cheaper and easier than it was back then. 

 

 

They usually are, if they're shoddily ported to PC - which is the usual procedure. These days you have to be glad that a game doesn't constantly CTD on you. And by these days I mean the last decade or so. As I said in a previous post. Skyrim at release reintroduced the blue screen of death for quite a number of users.

 

So calling this game unfinished is missing the mark by a mile.

[boffmoffet]

This is my favorite Baladas quote thus far as I watch his constant policing of the patch notes. LOL

 

"So next time, please release the game as early access and spare paying customers like me who do NOT want to get involved in the development of an unfinished product and who simply want to play the game."

 

I don't like getting involved in this process, now watch me be the most involved and mildly negative during said process!

[McPartyson]

Are you seriously comparing the production values and programming resources of a AAA console/PC first person RPG with literally hundreds of people on the project to PoE? Good lord. Don't be an idiot.

 

You clearly aren't into this style of game, which is fine... but that's on you for not doing much research before buying.

 

The style suits me just fine. I think they couldn't get it together with what they had to work with. I wasn't expecting AAA quality, but they could of at least assembled this old school thing properly and had it working ticky boo at launch. Again, I think the style is fine. It was not ready at launch. It still had bugs, patch after patch. I don't know if the current patch has fixed everything in it's current state because I haven't revisited it yet. Is it worthy of calling 1.0 now? I hope so. Maybe after I finish Witcher 3 I will find out.

[MunoValente]

It's not like Witcher 3, despite it's larger budget and development time doesn't also have bugs and hasn't already released a few of it's own patches, with another coming out soon.

[Elerond]

Well, it's my opinion this game was not ready for release and I think it was coded by a bunch of kids to be honest. For almost the same price, I got the Witcher 3...compare those 2 games for a second. PoE is a friggin joke when you compare the 2.

 

I played 20 hours of the game according to Steam, and that was because I kept re-rolling a new character due to running into bugs with each save. I never made it passed Act 1, character was never more then lvl 4 and I just got frustrated, so I ditched it and kept playing Dragon Age Inquistiion. Then GTA V came out, then Witcher 3 came, so I never went back to it...maybe 1 day. It just sits there as my lowest played Steam game, lol.

 

This game got a lot of 8/10 and 9/10...but I really think the high scores were due to the nostalgia of Baldur's Gate...

 

Witcher 3 is poor example if you want to give example of game that is not full of bugs. PoE is much better working of those two.

[majestic]

It's not like Witcher 3, despite it's larger budget and development time doesn't also have bugs and hasn't already released a few of it's own patches, with another coming out soon.

 

Psssst. A game was ready for launch when McPartyson doesn't experience a bug playing it and it clearly isn't working ticky boo when he does. You could of know that, silly. It's the only sane and objective measurement for buggyness.

[FlintlockJazz]

 

Are you seriously comparing the production values and programming resources of a AAA console/PC first person RPG with literally hundreds of people on the project to PoE? Good lord. Don't be an idiot.

 

You clearly aren't into this style of game, which is fine... but that's on you for not doing much research before buying.

 

The style suits me just fine. I think they couldn't get it together with what they had to work with. I wasn't expecting AAA quality, but they could of at least assembled this old school thing properly and had it working ticky boo at launch. Again, I think the style is fine. It was not ready at launch. It still had bugs, patch after patch. I don't know if the current patch has fixed everything in it's current state because I haven't revisited it yet. Is it worthy of calling 1.0 now? I hope so. Maybe after I finish Witcher 3 I will find out.

 

You know nothing McPartyson!

[Flow]

It still had bugs, patch after patch. I don't know if the current patch has fixed everything in it's current state because I haven't revisited it yet. Is it worthy of calling 1.0 now? I hope so. Maybe after I finish Witcher 3 I will find out.

 

Kinda hard for me to say what you consider "worthy of 1.0". I finished it two weeks after release and none of the bugs existing at the time bothered me enough to stop playing, so we're obviously not on the same page here.

[kozzy]

Well, it's my opinion this game was not ready for release and I think it was coded by a bunch of kids to be honest. For almost the same price, I got the Witcher 3...compare those 2 games for a second. PoE is a friggin joke when you compare the 2.

 

I played 20 hours of the game according to Steam, and that was because I kept re-rolling a new character due to running into bugs with each save. I never made it passed Act 1, character was never more then lvl 4 and I just got frustrated, so I ditched it and kept playing Dragon Age Inquistiion. Then GTA V came out, then Witcher 3 came, so I never went back to it...maybe 1 day. It just sits there as my lowest played Steam game, lol.

 

This game got a lot of 8/10 and 9/10...but I really think the high scores were due to the nostalgia of Baldur's Gate...

Nope, have loved my time with both Witcher 3 and Pillars, two amazing games I gave them both the same score. If you never made it past act 1 in pillars then how can you say all this? You have really only gone as far as the tutorial. Here is an idea.. how about try the game? Like please more than an hour?

 

For me these are two of the best rpgs in awhile, as much as I liked Divinity Original Sin and Wasteland 2, for me Pillars and W3 are even better.

 

Put in 100+ hours on both pillars and E3 and I honestly can't pick which one I liked more, both where a blast and extremely well made rpgs. And if we are talking bugs, I have had more in W3 than I did during my time with Pillars.

 

From your post it seems like the game was to hard for you and you quit as you where frusterated, and went to go play the much worse and extremely easy Inquisition. Just because you find a game hard doesn't mean its bad.

Edited June 2, 2015 by kozzy

[kozzy]

125 people disagree with you on the poll, while only 16 agree with you. Thread can be closed now, a small % agrees with him, many others don't.

[McPartyson]

It's fine that they disagree. If we all agreed on everything, we would just be a single entity, not multiple human beings with differing views like we are today.

 

Anyhow, I put 25hrs exactly according to Steam into PoE. That was a lot of re-rolling due to bugs. It was just a nasty 2 weeks on the forums and back and fourth on the game, just frustrations. Then I just gave up. I moved on because GTA V made that decision easy, and maybe I will return. I play games for fun, and I didn't have fun with it at the time due to lame bugs. It wasn't ready at launch, perhaps it is now ready after the 6-7 patches it has had (apparently the patches fixed over 1000 bugs, LOL, that says a lot about it's launch state).

 

Despite the bugs some people have been having with the Witcher 3, none have gotten to me yet with 70 hours in. I guess i'm lucky? GTA V was pretty polished too (as it should be since it was released 2 years ago). I shouldn't compare all these games at all, they just happen to be released fairly close to one another. It's a good time to be a gamer.

 

Like I said before, I will see to it that I make an effort to play PoE again when I get bored of Witcher 3.

 

PS - I don't get frustrated when games are too hard, I play all games on max difficulty and I am a completionist at heart. I'm the type of guy who will purposely nerf my character in order to remain challenged throughout a game. Though I didn't play "Trial by Iron" because there's no way of conning mobs.

Edited June 2, 2015 by McPartyson

[nipsen]

By the way - the entire "console releases have less bugs" thing. That's a myth. It's true that it's much easier to rescue badly programmed and junky code when you have one single hardware target. Since you know that when your build doesn't break on one console, you can guarantee that the identical playtest session won't break on the next console. Of course - how much does that really help you? Not all that much. That you have identical and limited amounts of input devices -- useful to know, but it doesn't free you from having to deal with generic interfaces and different combinations and variants of input, disconnected devices, avoiding direct addressing, etc.

 

The truth is that with the sdk-requirements and the ram limitations, you force the developers to deal with, for example, garbage collection consciously. And that alone is probably the biggest element that generally makes a console-release less likely to randomly hang itself. Outside of that, there's how the console-company will have a type of, or a limited amount of playtest responsibility. And that they'll guarantee certain functionality in the sdk that has to work. So you can abstract away a large amount of mechanics and core logic from the beginning, and many developers suddenly find out that when you orient your development process around that, it elevates the process they've adopted in the past and makes it more robust.. I.e., that coder guy that's used to writing direct addressing hacks can have a specific framework to create a specific function in. And that suddenly insures that this function can be tested, and that it can be guaranteed to not interfere with other functions and methods.

 

And that is something you don't have to deal with on a "PC" release. 

 

The same tendency is there with the increased use of 3rd party frameworks. The actual framework, that used to be junky horror-code, suddenly starts having to be able to run on limited hardware and limited storage, ram, and so on, with slower processors and slower IO. And that forces the middle-ware to become more fleet if it's supposed to be used at all. So you end up with middle-ware that, at best, ran like treacle on the latest gaming PC, becomes an actual framework.

 

In the same way - that companies become invested in actually making their production targets streamlined, is what pushes for example the Unreal Engine, or Gamebryo, to mention two popular examples, to have automatic resource handling routines with max ram use targets. 

 

Another significant part of why games are generally becoming more stable is that physics engines and so on are dealt with in well-tested middle-ware as well. Drivers in general must be designed to massively different hardware, just like mentioned over, and you end up with functions that are pretty much guaranteed to work even without testing - you know on beforehand that you won't run into weirdness if the logic in the code is sound.

 

Meanwhile, console-release games tend to be streamlined and specific. Games in general contain less and less "hacks" of the kind that magicked out 3d-effects no one had seen with Glide and 3dfx, for example. And more and more, you're having general code that executes on pretty much everything.

 

So if you look at this from... a bit higher than the compiler and the keyboard, games are actually getting extremely much better in terms of bugs than before.

 

The type of bugs that are still there shift in type, though. From earlier coming predominantly from hardware interface curiosities and actual hardware differences that.. would be difficult to account for (ram-timing, cache hits, compiler quirks, all kinds of things you don't need to think about now - consoles also had those with the xbox and ps2. Fairly complex systems if you wanted to simply use general code that would run effortlessly on a PC). And into becoming more and more about logical faults in the code, and consistency problems springing from badly structured or maintained programming conventions.

 

So in one sense, you could argue that the fact that console-releases have as many bugs as they still do is.. a step back. That you would actually expect that console-releases should be much better and more stable than they in reality have been the last 10 years.

 

Or, at the same time, that what's really happened is that PC releases have generally become as stable as the wished for console target, that neither MS or Sony ever managed to reach. In spite of how extremely well that (fake) narrative has been sold to the public.

 

Specifically for PoE, though - the bugs they have tend to, from what I've seen of the code and the faults that have turned up at least, come from iterative scripts that have very variable running times. So I think they ran into at some point that they had to specify the scripts a little too much, and add in functions that weren't necessarily going to work with the later addons. Objects duplicating, functions being called on non-existent objects, that sort of thing. Unnecessary and obvious because they might be showstopping. But not.. serious.

 

Good attempt at trying to twist the polls to fit your agenda, work in politics? 

Haha. No, if you work in politics, you don't twist facts to fit your agenda. You simply present the relevant facts as you would, on reflection, have liked them to have appeared in the given situation you wanted to describe. To let people more easily discover the truth, with as little detour and distraction as possible.

 

(Medal to whoever can figure out whether I'm being serious or not).

[abaris]

Anyhow, I put 25hrs exactly according to Steam into PoE. That was a lot of re-rolling due to bugs. It was just a nasty 2 weeks on the forums and back and fourth on the game, just frustrations. Then I just gave up. I moved on because GTA V made that decision easy, and maybe I will return. I play games for fun, and I didn't have fun with it at the time due to lame bugs. It wasn't ready at launch, perhaps it is now ready after the 6-7 patches it has had (apparently the patches fixed over 1000 bugs, LOL, that says a lot about it's launch state).

 

 

Two things about this. The reason why steam tells you how many hours you put in tells me, you don't play POE as it's meant to be played: Started as admin from the folder and not using the steam client. A lot of bugs or pseudo bugs result in the steam client interfering. If you start as admin, steam isn't able to keep count on your play time and doesn't award you achievements, which are unnecessary in my book anyway.

 

Second, GTA V or the whole GTA series are entirely different puppies. That's not meant to sound judgmental, since I have nothing aagainst a good action game off and on, but it's not an RPG, although it has it's role playing elements. So your playstyle and preferences may be different from the intended audience. Also, GTA is produced with the console as it's primary medium. If it's ported well, more power to them, but again, different audiences.

[Gromnir]

 

OK.

 

So so far approximately 20%

Good attempt at trying to twist the polls to fit your agenda, work in politics?  The fact of the matter is that almost 70% disagree with you and think it was a final product and almost 10% don't give a ****.  End of discussion.

 

it's a message board poll.  

 

what bala actual said were:

 

"So so far approximately 20% of POE customers consider that the game should either have been either:"

 

what follows the quoted material don't matter.  however, the suggestion that a self-serving poll on this board, a poll that has actual gone through revisions, is adequately representing the entirety o' poe customers such that we could make any guesses as to how 20% o' poe purchasers feel 'bout anything being discussed in this thread is laughable.  

 

this may come as a surprise to folks, but the message board population, particularly those who active respond in threads such as these, is unlikely to be representative o' the mythical Average Purchaser.  

 

and again, what we say in polls such as these is having negligible impact on any game publisher.  sales figures is far more relevant than silly message board polls.  could have 80% respondents complain o' poe stability at state o' release, but if such complaints is not reflected by reduced or slowed sales and if such concerns cannot be seen in decreased pre-orders for the expansion, then publishers is, quite reasonably, ignoring such complaints.  is noise.  complaints alone o' day 1 stability is sound and fury.  complain but continue to buy as before?  heck, the genesis poster actual tells us that he ignored reasonable opportunities for education regarding poe stability, and changed from being a person who intelligently avoided day 1 purchases o' gaming software to a foolish drone who did succumb to his nostalgia for bg, spitting in the face o' the many linked authors who cautioned him against intemperate and impulsive game purchasers, making of himself a... statistic.  

 

baladas should weep for a lost opportunity to meaningful chastise obsidian.  his steely resolve instead expressed in an impotent post release message board poll?  prudence is a cardinal virtue.  gluttony is a deadly sin.  o' tragedy indeed.  nevertheless, preach on, brother.  preach as a sinner and not as a saint. 

 

over-the-top?

 

HA! Good Fun! 

[PrimeJunta]

When I owned an Xbox and PS2 I also had a gaming PC.

 

During that time I used to buy games on release and I very rarely experienced the amount of bugs that are present in games nowdays as practically standard.

 

I did, and most of the ones I bought were in far worse shape than P:E was on release. A few were un-completable, even. Especially RPG's which are massively complex. 

 

Off the top of my head, some games from around then: The Witcher 1 had seriously screwed-up quests and iinnnnssssaaaannneeelllly long loading times. Vampire: Bloodlines had a broken main quest; you couldn't actually finish the game in the initial release version. NWN2 had seriously screwed-up quests, horrid, horrid camera controls, and performance that melted your video card with frankly pretty mediocre graphics. Morrowind had you stuck in geometry or falling through it, as did Gothic 2. All of these had regular crashes to desktop.

 

In other words, I believe your memory is tricking you. If you ended up enjoying the game, it's easy to forget such stuff. 

[nipsen]

 

baladas should weep for a lost opportunity to meaningful chastise obsidian.  his steely resolve instead expressed in an impotent post release message board poll?  prudence is a cardinal virtue.  gluttony is a deadly sin.  o' tragedy indeed.  nevertheless, preach on, brother.  preach as a sinner and not as a saint. 

 

 

:D ...on the other hand. This here's a quote from the latest patch notes: "This update contains lots of great fixes and some cool paladin balance changes".

 

And it seems they're patching out a few of the flat ability score bonuses. After having replaced the scaling abilities with flat bonus scores, initially in order to balance the game more easily, to please the fans, etc. That's the kind of people who run the shop here.

[abaris]

 

 Morrowind had you stuck in geometry or falling through it, as did Gothic 2.

 

There are what I would call Bethesda bugs. They're virtually in every game they release. From Morrowind up to Skyrim. So, for example, the flying dead creature. Or the falling through the floor, or the NPC being stuck in some wall or furniture. There are people who compiled fun videos of all the bugs Skyrim contained on release. Watching them makes you rolling on the floor laughing.

 

Didn't play neither the Witcher nor the Gothic series because I don't like fixed player characters. For me that takes the R out of RPG.

[Zwiebelchen]

 

"So so far approximately 20% of POE customers consider that the game should either have been either:"

 

 

this may come as a surprise to folks, but the message board population, particularly those who active respond in threads such as these, is unlikely to be representative o' the mythical Average Purchaser.  

 

 

There is so much truth in this.

 

The average message board mostly has people complaining. Because when something goes right, nobody posts about it. That's why gaming communities can be anal at times.

So It's safe to say that even less than 20% of the actual gamers think it's "early access".

Edited June 3, 2015 by Zwiebelchen

[Baladas]

None of the bugs from here are fixed in 1.06

 

http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/80047-106-list-of-bugs-that-i-reported-and-that-are-still-present-in-106/

 

http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/79258-common-recurring-bug-list-patch-105/page-5

 

Endurance still bugged in 1.06:

 

http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/79382-issuebug-hiravias-stuck-at-half-endurance/

 

Also check this out:

 

http://www.rpgcodex.net/content.php?id=9913

 

"All of this stuff -- class, abilities, weapons -- is important because I'd say 80% of the game is fighting."

 

So since the combat is the buggiest part of the game, along with the character bugs, ability bugs and weapons and items bugs, that means that at least 80% of the game is broken. Broken in this case meaning not working as the developers intended.

 

Add that to the quest bugs and other occasional glitch and you have a game that is ....

 

Completely finished and ready for release! *sarcasm*

 

No, really, you have a game that is not working as intended and is broken at least 80% of the time you are playing it whether you realize it or not.

[majestic]

None of the bugs from here are fixed in 1.06

 

http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/80047-106-list-of-bugs-that-i-reported-and-that-are-still-present-in-106/

 

http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/79258-common-recurring-bug-list-patch-105/page-5

 

Endurance still bugged in 1.06:

 

http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/79382-issuebug-hiravias-stuck-at-half-endurance/

 

Also check this out:

 

http://www.rpgcodex.net/content.php?id=9913

 

"All of this stuff -- class, abilities, weapons -- is important because I'd say 80% of the game is fighting."

 

So since the combat is the buggiest part of the game, along with the character bugs, ability bugs and weapons and items bugs, that means that at least 80% of the game is broken. Broken in this case meaning not working as the developers intended.

 

Add that to the quest bugs and other occasional glitch and you have a game that is ....

 

Completely finished and ready for release! *sarcasm*

 

No, really, you have a game that is not working as intended and is broken at least 80% of the time you are playing it whether you realize it or not.

 

I'm sure there's an anal-rentitive OCD anonymous group somewhere who would really like them to tell you their story, it's just that we certainly don't want to, in case that you missed the result of your poll entirely.

Edited June 5, 2015 by majestic

[ilhdr]

I will made a poll: should Witcher 3 have gone Early Acess?

[Luzeryn]

 

 

"So so far approximately 20% of POE customers consider that the game should either have been either:"

 

 

this may come as a surprise to folks, but the message board population, particularly those who active respond in threads such as these, is unlikely to be representative o' the mythical Average Purchaser.  

 

 

There is so much truth in this.

 

The average message board mostly has people complaining. Because when something goes right, nobody posts about it. That's why gaming communities can be anal at times.

So It's safe to say that even less than 20% of the actual gamers think it's "early access".

 

 

The average OFFICIAL message board mostly has people heralding the developers for how awesome they are, even if the game is a complete mess. Which is why even games like Final Fantasy XIV 1.0 had lots of people defending the game on the official site, even if it was absolute garbage and they had to spend millions to completely change it.

[nipsen]

 

The average OFFICIAL message board mostly has people heralding the developers for how awesome they are, even if the game is a complete mess. Which is why even games like Final Fantasy XIV 1.0 had lots of people defending the game on the official site, even if it was absolute garbage and they had to spend millions to completely change it.

 

..well. Usually, the best generalisation you can make over, say, forum feedback from eager and extremely interested and engaged people - is that you know you will get an overweight of opinions that are either categorically negative or categorically positive. And that most of the traffic will be short and not very well thought through ditto-opinion. Afterwards, it's easy to focus on that type of opinion, very easy to poll for it, or categorize it, etc. 

 

Similar to how political campaigning works, by the way