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[Frumple]

It's like the good old days all over again, except a lot easier to get the patches! Also to find out ahead of time. Less likely to attempt to wipe your hard drive. All sorts of things, really. It's like nothing has changed except everything about the process has become more convenient :V

Which may be the point, but still. Can't recall if there's ever been a time in PC gaming where buying at launch wasn't speculative. The history of gaming is, in part, the history of spectacular day 1 bugs. And day 200 bugs. And day NaN, 'cause the devs or their overlords dropped that mess like it was hot for whatever (money, effort, money) reason.

[Retropunch]

It's like the good old days all over again, except a lot easier to get the patches! Also to find out ahead of time. Less likely to attempt to wipe your hard drive. All sorts of things, really. It's like nothing has changed except everything about the process has become more convenient :V

Which may be the point, but still. Can't recall if there's ever been a time in PC gaming where buying at launch wasn't speculative. The history of gaming is, in part, the history of spectacular day 1 bugs. And day 200 bugs. And day NaN, 'cause the devs or their overlords dropped that mess like it was hot for whatever (money, effort, money) reason.

I don't ever recall it being this bad - sure, there were a few bad ones, but If you were going to print and ship in hard copy, you had to be damn sure it'd work for the vast majority of people or you'd go out of business very, very quickly. Even a few years ago it was much more difficult to put out constant patches without something like Steam.

[Majestic7]

I've been gaming since late 1980s and there used to be plenty of broken games even back then. If it wasn't a completely game-breaking bug, people just got used to circumventing them. Gaming magazines even published hints and tips on the subject. What is new is people giving companies slack for pushing out broken games if they are patched properly. In the old games broken games just went to trash since patching was very hard.

[Hanzoku]

I'm sort of with Retropunch on this. At least on big-name titles, what was released was generally playable, wouldn't have very many game-breaking bugs, and was also a complete game experience from start to finish.

Now, it seems that just about everything is pushed out the door in beta (if it's not released already as early-access, so you can pay to beta-test their game for them.), quality across the board is far worse, and too many games come with launch-day DLC and early days DLC that you need to buy if you want the full game.

[Greenbane]

A tricky subject, but I don't think that much slack is given to most developers. There are specific exceptions, like Paradox and the Endless games, due to the companies' track record and the uniqueness of their products. But I don't think anyone considers relying on that slack a sustainable practice. Look how the future of Mass Effect was put on hold over the shoddiness of Andromeda's launch, for instance.

At any rate, it's a different context. It's a much larger ecosystem, and there's several large companies with long histories. Patching is easier, sure, and the big ones may take advantage of that to some extent. But if you're a newbie without much of a track record (old days context) and release a broken game, boy the reviews are going to drag you under perhaps even more viciously than back in the day. Look at Gaslamp Games: Dungeons of Dredmor was cool, blew it with Clockwork Empires, went under. Double Fine somehow survived but its reputation was largely destroyed due to screw-ups like DF-9. Bigger companies and bigger franchises can more easily absorb hits like this, living on the inertia of popularity and history, but that's not endless and I don't think anyone gets out scot-free from a botched launch.

[Majestic7]

In the context of 4X, Kerberos hitting the curb hard with Sword of the Stars 2 is a good example. They are still alive, yeah, but seem to be struggling.

[forsaken1111]

SOTS2 was a classic example of scope and feature creep problems. As far as I know they just ran out of money and some of the things they wanted to do were much harder than they realized

[Retropunch]

I've been gaming since late 1980s and there used to be plenty of broken games even back then. If it wasn't a completely game-breaking bug, people just got used to circumventing them. Gaming magazines even published hints and tips on the subject. What is new is people giving companies slack for pushing out broken games if they are patched properly. In the old games broken games just went to trash since patching was very hard.

As Hanzoku says, the majority of big titles were bug free, and in the era of big boxed game stores (late 90s to 2000s) it was pretty much unheard of for a game to have serious bugs in it (it did happen, but I can't think of more than maybe 2 examples). Sure, you got some glitches and sometimes it wouldn't work on your hardware for whatever reason but not on the same scale as the 'this is a game stopping bug affecting everybody' like with ES2.

I do think/hope that ME:Andromeda was a bit of a turning point though - it was a prime example of a studio just trying to edge it out without proper testing and polish to save money, and backfiring horribly. I'm sure a lot of the other studios which were starting to go down that route have taken note. The same with stuff like NMS - no one's going to start doing the whole 'promise the universe' thing again for a long time.

[aristabulus]

Yeah, I'm with y'all in the "didn't suffer any/many buggy titles back in the day" camp, though I will qualify that with not having sampled a particularly large slice of what I now know was released back then.  The only title I clearly recall was Chaos Gate circa '97; it had lots of weird little glitches that got in the way of mission progress.  Everything else basically Just Worked.

I feel like a lot of the contrast between then and now comes down to production methods and overall complexity.  Middleware is very much a thing now, while it was functionally unheard of back in the DOS-to-Win95/98 days.  Everyone had to cook their own game engines back then, because they didn't have a choice.  There was also a fairly low ceiling on what you could make the hardware do (compared to today's components), which was a healthy constraint on design.  Once the ceiling started moving away faster than the designers could bump into it occasionally, things got messier.

Nowadays there are so many moving parts in a modern major title, it's really really easy to get bits that don't quite play nice together.  Extra Credits just did a clip on this not long ago, even.

[Viken]

I saw a news article online not too long ago, although I couldn't find it when I went back looking for it, that spoke about modern games and bugs.  As the complexity of modern games increases, in terms of coding, graphics, and the hardware compatibility requirements increases, so to does the number of bugs that the development team has to fix.  Even modern AAA games like Elder Scrolls: Skyrim and Fallout 4 were like that.

Comparatively, those two games had a greater number of game breaking bugs upon release than all several other games combined.  Just like in RL, there are bugs all over the darn place.

[Majestic7]

I'm pretty sure it is not only a question of technology and sales logic changing, but as well corporate culture. Developing games seems to pretty much grudging work with disposable workers. Teams are fired immediately after doing their job etc. There are exceptions to this, but the organization of the company producing the game must effect the end result. Sometimes having a big team is in itself a flaw as it increases the chances of miscommunication. I think this is something you can see with companies like Bioware, not really with smaller ones like Paradox.

[Criptfeind]

So, this is having a free weekend, for anyone interested in trying it out.

I figure I'll pick it up and give it a spin, play a few single player games at least.

[umiman]

I played a good 10 hours or so of this during the free weekend.

I went in thinking this would be yet another Amplitude game. It would look gorgeous, have fantastic setpieces, beautiful UI, and set itself up to just blow you away at first glance and for the first few hours. Then after the veneer wears off, you'll find a really shallow baby's-first-4X with awful AI and simple, braindead mechanics that just don't go anywhere.

And that's basically what I got. It's a lot better than Endless Space 1 at least.

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I find this is a big issue with these modern 4Xs. They put so much into making a great first impression that they completely forget the rest of the game. It's how it is for Stellaris for example. I played a few campaigns in this from hard to a few levels higher than that and not once. Not a single time. Did the AI ever declare war on me. And it's not like there's anything to do in this game past the exploration stage other than to war with people. Even in the quests which deliberately force you to fight the AI, the AI never fought me and just did nothing. The pirates were more of a threat to me than any of the AI factions. Not that increasing the difficulty improves the AI to begin with, since this game is one of those where the AI is exactly the same at all levels, just at every level above "normal" it has more and more resource cheats.

Then there's all the dumb, half-assed mechanics that seem like they have a lot of promise at first but don't turn out to be anything but half-assed. The diplomacy for one barely even works with the AI. If this was idea of a patched feature, I have no clue how terrible it must have been at launch. Combat has all these fancy buttons all over the place, but they don't do anything and you'll never need to refer to them. Trading is bloody dumb in that you connect a trading company HQ with a subsidiary you build somewhere else. That's it. The late stage of the game is just as unbalanced here as it is in all the other Amplitude 4X games, where you end up with infinite dust and whatever so every single turn you just spam the buy everything button over and over again. Don't get me started on ground combat.

------------

All in all, I think it's better than Endless Space 1 and worse than Endless Legends. I'd put it at slightly behind Stellaris, but only because at least the AI in Stellaris will fight you. They're both frigging bare bones baby's-first-4X games, though one is noticeably getting better (and more expensive) every two months.

This does have planet destroyers and, more importantly, cutscenes for them. So I might actually rank this higher than Stellaris just for that.

[Majestic7]

Games are made to have a high initial wow-factor because that is what sells them. Reviewers only play for a couple of hours with some notable exceptions. Same for streamers. Steam refunds can't be received if you've played too much. So yeah.

I don't regret buying ES2 at early access since I've had lots of hours from it, but it suffers from "it could be so much better" at many angles.

[andrea]

Personally, i found it much more confusing in the interface than endless space 1.

And it is less charmy than endless legends.