The Year of Broken Games

The first year of a console generation can be a rough one. The consoles we have now, will not be the ones we see at the end of the generation. Developers are still learning what makes the consoles tick. So, you do expect there be some problems. But the string of big games with issues is not that.

From Assassin's Creed: Unity to Halo: The Master Chief Collection, so many games had issues. So many games were not playable. Unity had climb glitches and faces not rendering. You were basically just watching two eyes float in the middle of a characters face. And Halo had matchmaking issues for days. Ubisoft got hit twice as players had issues connecting to servers for Far Cry 4. PS3 players had issues even playing the game.

Essentially, studios were releasing broken games. Yes, there were quick fixes. And free things were handed out. But that does not erase the fact that the games were broken in the first place. These companies know how to release games. They know how to test games to make sure things like this doesn't happen. So, what happened?
Yeah, you sometimes can't anticipate what will happen when you have millions of people playing at the same time. But in-game bugs should be caught in testing. They should be caught before people pay sixty bucks on a game.

If you play games you know what a patch is. It's something that developers release after a game's release to fix problems and bugs. And as great as it is to fix bugs months after a game comes out, there shouldn't be a day one update. And this brings us to the topic of DLCs and unfinished games.

I don't mind DLCs. They can be fun and sometimes be worth the price. If they are not done in time for the games release than I don't want that in the game. But season passes that details exactly hat you get and when you get it. And day one DLC, like Mass Effect 3's From Ashes, don't make me happy. When you are holding something that you can already put in the game just to make money, that is not okay. You are selling a game that you know is not the game you plan on, that you know is incomplete, and that is a form of fraud.

I think I got off topic for a moment. This article was supposed to be about the many games that were broken. That were not playable. That studios had to apologize for. But when you talk about broken games, you get to unfinished games. And then you get to DLC. But the point was that, in a year were you got some great games, what people will remember is the broken games. And that is probably not fair.