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> A close cousin to crowdfunding is the trend of pre-releasing games before they are finished. This has contributed to a disturbing trend of actually releasing

by Zikes 11y ago

> A close cousin to crowdfunding is the trend of pre-releasing games before they are finished. This has contributed to a disturbing trend of actually releasing games before they are finished. AAA titles have been released in the past couple of years that should have been delayed several months to be fixed and polished first. Batman: Arkham Knight was so terrible on PC that all stores offered no-questions refunds, and even stopped selling the game altogether until it was patched. Fallout 4 committed the cardinal sin of tying physics to framerate, so people with high-end gaming machines are actually experiencing more bugs and issues than most, unless they cap their framerates.

Mithaldu 11y ago
Are you sure those AAA games released early because of the Early Access trend? Keep in mind they did not release as Early Access, but as full release. A much more fitting theory is simply that such AAA games are absolute monsters in terms of cash expenditure and as all software developments are, very hard to estimate in advance; so they probably ran into cash flow trouble and managers decided to just release it and fix everything else after release, which has a VERY long tradition.
- Zikes 11y ago
  I think it's a little of column A, a little of column B. The consumers are desensitized to the bugginess of early access, and therefore more forgiving of companies releasing games that aren't yet finished. Companies have been releasing buggy games for a long time, but are pushing those limits further every year.
oberstein 11y ago
Batman was pretty bad, but you can't use any game from Bethesda to further your argument. It's pretty well known that if you don't want a super buggy Bethesda experience, wait for the game of the year edition.
kevingadd 11y ago
You're right on Batman and the general theme, so I upvoted you, but you're totally wrong about FO4. Physics are always tied to framerate. There is not a game physics library in wide use that is independent of update rate. In practice what usually happens is that the physics library has an internal tick rate (say every 1ms or every 2ms) and every frame N physics ticks occur to catch up. Without this, the physics sim would be dangerously unstable (and in practice, it still is). There are many other places where game code is typically framerate dependent, not just physics. Even games that are 'framerate independent' are often framerate dependent in very subtle ways, such that players with high or low framerates gain an advantage or experience unique bugs. Most parts of a game are not continuous equations that you can perfectly evaluate at any point in time; there are always 'frames'. So ultimately, this is not some unique cardinal sin FO4 committed. It's just another in a long series of Bethesda titles that ship incredibly buggy and broken and don't get fixed, largely as a result of the way they build software. The incredible scope of their games is a factor, though, as building games that large is EXTREMELY HARD. Ultimately you should consider people talking about FO4 framerates that way to be in the same bucket as the types who get vigorously upset about a game being locked to 30fps: Uninformed.
- ufo 11y ago
  > Physics are always tied to framerate Why does it have to be like this? I would think the more robust approach would be to decouple the simulation from the rendering and display interpolated frames if the renderer framerate is higher than the simulation framerate.
  - hacker_9 11y ago
    Whilst it's nice to think in separate concepts such as 'physics' and 'rendering', in reality all these things are tightly coupled together in code. For example collisions inform physics which informs collisions which informs animations etc. Also with memory being so scarce in AAA games you have to evaluate the cost of using separate threads for different actions, which leads to problems of resource sharing, deadlocks, syncing of update/render loops etc. Bungie did a talk on their multi threaded renderer for Destiny. Google it if you want to see how complex the design can get, and how it affects the whole game process.

by Zikes 11y ago

Mithaldu 11y ago

Are you sure those AAA games released early because of the Early Access trend? Keep in mind they did not release as Early Access, but as full release. A much more fitting theory is simply that such AAA games are absolute monsters in terms of cash expenditure and as all software developments are, very hard to estimate in advance; so they probably ran into cash flow trouble and managers decided to just release it and fix everything else after release, which has a VERY long tradition.

Zikes 11y ago
I think it's a little of column A, a little of column B. The consumers are desensitized to the bugginess of early access, and therefore more forgiving of companies releasing games that aren't yet finished. Companies have been releasing buggy games for a long time, but are pushing those limits further every year.

oberstein 11y ago

Batman was pretty bad, but you can't use any game from Bethesda to further your argument. It's pretty well known that if you don't want a super buggy Bethesda experience, wait for the game of the year edition.

kevingadd 11y ago

You're right on Batman and the general theme, so I upvoted you, but you're totally wrong about FO4. Physics are always tied to framerate. There is not a game physics library in wide use that is independent of update rate. In practice what usually happens is that the physics library has an internal tick rate (say every 1ms or every 2ms) and every frame N physics ticks occur to catch up. Without this, the physics sim would be dangerously unstable (and in practice, it still is). There are many other places where game code is typically framerate dependent, not just physics. Even games that are 'framerate independent' are often framerate dependent in very subtle ways, such that players with high or low framerates gain an advantage or experience unique bugs. Most parts of a game are not continuous equations that you can perfectly evaluate at any point in time; there are always 'frames'. So ultimately, this is not some unique cardinal sin FO4 committed. It's just another in a long series of Bethesda titles that ship incredibly buggy and broken and don't get fixed, largely as a result of the way they build software. The incredible scope of their games is a factor, though, as building games that large is EXTREMELY HARD. Ultimately you should consider people talking about FO4 framerates that way to be in the same bucket as the types who get vigorously upset about a game being locked to 30fps: Uninformed.

ufo 11y ago
> Physics are always tied to framerate Why does it have to be like this? I would think the more robust approach would be to decouple the simulation from the rendering and display interpolated frames if the renderer framerate is higher than the simulation framerate.
- hacker_9 11y ago
  Whilst it's nice to think in separate concepts such as 'physics' and 'rendering', in reality all these things are tightly coupled together in code. For example collisions inform physics which informs collisions which informs animations etc. Also with memory being so scarce in AAA games you have to evaluate the cost of using separate threads for different actions, which leads to problems of resource sharing, deadlocks, syncing of update/render loops etc. Bungie did a talk on their multi threaded renderer for Destiny. Google it if you want to see how complex the design can get, and how it affects the whole game process.