Bugs

[Hacksaw]

Pick a game, any game, and go to any set of forums related to that game. And the biggest complaint? Probably bugs (followed by poor customer service I'll bet).

Now go back a decade, or a couple of decades, for those of you who can. Were there any bugs in those old Nintendo or Sega games? Even in something more recent, like an N64 game? It seems to me like the last 10 years or so have been the worst, with totally buggy games becoming the industry standard. The most recent bug-free game (more or less) that comes to mind for me is Diablo II. I'm sure the game wasn't perfect, but I can't remember any bugs that really got in the way of my game, and I put countless hours into it.

But computers are orders of magnitude more powerful than they were a decade ago, and software is stunningly complex. Today's games are brought to the level of interactive movies, in many cases.

So how about it? Is a bug-free game so unreasonable that it just can't be done? There must be one person reading this who can comment with some authority.

 

[xSuoiveDx]

The Computer Game " Pirates Of The Caribbean " was bug free until we started modding it & making new builds for it. The same goes for the Delta Force Series & the Joint Operations Series, they were bug free until we started making Mods for it.

 

[Rayven]

I think a truly bug-free game is going to be nearly impossible today. The game devs are driven by whoever the big label is shouldering most of the financing for the game, not by any sort of timeline that provides for ironing out bugs. "Release a patch!" is a mantra any of them can use in order to put out a subpar product and we've all come to expect the need for these patches. Patches used to be an anomaly, not a given. But it also used to be that patches were often given on actual physical disks, not downloaded on demand over the internet. With the ability to get fixes in as fast as they can and games requiring access to the internet to even activate, I see no reason a dev company would even be terribly concerned about people's inability to get the patches. And despite the annoyance, as gamers, we have not been unwilling to cater to this as evidenced by the fact we cram up the company's forums and inboxes, then download the fixes and still play our game.

I think the Indie games have the best shot at it because of not being tied to the big labels but then one also has to consider that, at least for PCs, there are even more variations of hardware available that need to be considered during development and I'm not sure it's feasible or possible for any company to make a game that works flawlessly on every permutation.