The importance of getting it right the first time (Gaming)

by Ragashingo , Official DBO Cryptarch, Monday, August 08, 2016, 10:50 (3029 days ago) @ Cody Miller
edited by Ragashingo, Monday, August 08, 2016, 10:59

Two things:

1. Anyone relying on and making final purchasing decisions based on a prerelease build of a game is an idiot. It is completely unfair to the developer. Judge a game by what it is when it actually launches. Spread good or bad impressions of it when it actually launches. You may hate the genre or just plain dislike the direction the game is going and that's fine. I've never been interested in No Man's Sky, for instance. But criticizing things like balance issues based on a build you know is not final? That's unacceptable. Especially when you could speak with actual authority by merely waiting a few days to see if those issues are fixed or not. And if they aren't, you get the added bonus of criticizing the developer for falsely implying that their day one fix would solve the problems!

2. Breitzen linked to a great article about game certification and why day one patches are a thing especially when it comes to disc based games. Basically, it's hard to ship a console game and anything from extremely minor developer mistakes to things completely outside their control can force them to delay just long enough so that the final months of development and tuning don't make into the build that ships in the disc and is initially downloaded from a store.

After reading this, I find your stance against day one patches even more absurd. It boarders on deliberate hostility to game developers, even. Now yes, this whole certification process need to be fixed so devs don't faces these challenges. But until they are, we should all give game developers, especially the smaller and less experienced ones, a good deal of slack... until the game is actually released. Then, by all means judge the game. Just not before.