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Metacritic stronghold 311/20/2022 For these players, it's absolutely crucial that disc-based games work well right out of the box. But some gamers live in homes without high-speed Internet, or for whatever reason don't take the steps required to put their machines online. Most of us have our consoles hooked up to the Internet, so patching a game is no big deal. While severe bug problems seem to come up more with PC games, they're most frustrating to deal with when they occur on consoles. What's not fair is that developers are putting me, and CCC readers, in this situation. But then I draw complaints about the inconsistency between the text and the number-which is fair enough. My usual strategy is to give the game a number rating that I think will endure (since there's no taking it off of Metacritic once it's up there), but to use the text of the review to very clearly explain how the game plays in its current state. There's no good answer to these questions whichever path I take, some readers will be ill-served. Should I assume that the obvious bugs will be fixed and basically review the game for what it (hopefully) will be rather than for what it is? Or should I simply blast the game for being buggy and offer my readers a review that will quickly become obsolete (but will live on in the CCC archives and the game's Metacritic score for eternity)? And, as I've learned from my work at Cheat Code Central, it is incredibly difficult for a reviewer to give an accurate assessment of a game that will probably be dramatically different in a week or two. Friends talking about the latest games don't know whether to recommend a title until it's clear that all the issues will be cleared up. And they should have.Ī major problem with this "eh, we'll fix it later" attitude is that it interferes with the process by which gamers find out about new products. Both developers (Square Enix and Firefly respectively) showed an admirable willingness to listen to their consumers and fix their games, but both faced some angry customers as well. Notoriously bad recent launches include Final Fantasy XIV and Stronghold 3. There's nothing wrong with different platforms' having different standards, but at some point, it just gets ridiculous. Even the biggest PC games are typically sold by download instead of by disc, so developers can safely assume that nearly all of their customers will have high-speed Internet. But more often than not, buggy games reflect an assumption on developers' part that polish doesn't matter anymore in the world of the patch-and they also reflect developers' lack of respect for their paying customers.īy far, the greatest offenders have been PC developers. Sometimes, this might be the only way to do things-I'm not a computer programmer, but I imagine a game as big and elaborate as Skyrim is bound to have a few bugs until millions of gamers start finding and reporting them. Nowadays, many games are released in an obviously incomplete state, and consumers are just supposed to assume everything will be fixed eventually. Patches are standard practice even on consoles these days.īut somewhere along the line, patches became a crutch for many developers, instead of a tool that could be used to correct rare mistakes. If you define the word "patch" loosely enough, it can even include new game modes and new content. And today, it's not just outright bugs that can be fixed via patch-multiplayer games can be rebalanced, overly difficult missions can be made easier, and old games can be made compatible with new hardware. If, by some freak accident, a bug made it through a developer's process of fine-tuning a game, the company could fix its mistake after the fact. The advent of the "patch" was a great thing for video games.
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