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

by cheapLEY , Monday, August 08, 2016, 23:02 (3037 days ago) @ Ragashingo

But your console will strongly suggest, if not demand, you patch the game before you play it, right? Yeah, day one patches suck for offline games and players with no internet. Preventing those edge cases is the best argument against day one patches. But even so, <b>reviews and the public's perception of a game should be based on how a game will play for the overwhelming majority of players</b>, not the few unfortunate edge cases.

I can't recall the site, but there is one that published a review a few days ago based on the pre-patched version of No Man's Sky. While, no, I don't every site should publish a review that way, I do happen to think it's great that at least one did. That is the experience people are buying on the disc, that is the experience some players (a minority of them, obviously) will get. I think it's completely fair to judge a game on those merits.

If it's ok to judge a game based on its unpatched version, is it also ok to judge it based on someone's console with a bad hd making load times 10x longer than they should be, or someone attempting to play a modern heavily multiplayer game over a 14.4k dialup modem, or someone who tries to play a VR game like Golem on a single 1950s television? Of course not! That would be absurd!

Those are all bad analogies. The things you listed are all obviously not the way those things are meant to be experienced. The fact that the unpatched version of No Man's Sky was put on a disc and sent to retailers for people to buy has to mean something, in my opinion.

Instead, we need to agree upon a consistent state by which to judge new games. And in the current day, with development practices as they are (for better or worse) judging games fully patched running on proper and properly performing hardware makes a hell of a lot more sense than judging a game unpatched a week before it is even supposed to be playable...

That's what I'm arguing against. For a probably not insignificant amount of people, the unpatched version is what will be experienced. I'm not rallying against Hello Games--they're not doing anything that any other developer doesn't do. I'm arguing against the entire trend of putting unfinished games on a disc in the first place. It's about principle. If that's what people can buy, then it's absolutely okay to judge based on that, and that alone.