Den of Geek brought up a great fact. There are too many game patches for available games. There used to be a time where developers took pride in their work and not release a game with many bugs, but it seems like those days are over.
For example, let’s look at two good examples: The Sims 2 series and SimCity Societies.
SimCity Societies – it took Tilted Mills 5 patches to finally have a stable game on the market. This was a span of over 6 months. If they had time to finish their product, we wouldn’t have to deal with many of the bugs that caused the game poor ratings and hate amongst gamers.
The Sims 2 series – I don’t know where to begin on this. It seems like every expansion and stuff pack they release, it just gets riddled with more and more bugs. And when they do release a patch, it causes even more issues than what it did before! The FreeTime patch comes to mind. Not to mention a lot of their games don’t even get the recognition of a patch – the community ends up fixing the game via Mod The Sims 2 or MATY. Not to mention I don’t even think the developers even acknowledge problems with their games in the first place!
Hey developers….you have some serious explaining to do!
I honestly believe EA is doing their best to save SimCity Societies, and they are not giving up on it. The patches added lots of new features, like monsters, strategy modes, etc.
The Sims is an open ended game. Unlike other games, it doesn’t have set levels. Objects can interact with each other in unexpected ways. I think bugs will always exist, simply because of the open ended nature of the game.
SimCity Societies isn’t all that bad of a game…I just wish they were given an extra 6 months to finish it up instead of releasing it as it was. It probably wouldn’t have gotten so many bad reviews if Tilted Mills had more time to finish it up.
As for TS2,,,While yes, there will always be bugs, I think they are biting off too much then they can chew. Too many games are released too fast and they are hammered with a strict schedule. If they could cut down a few games and use the staff that worked on them to debug, we probably wouldn’t be in that bad of shape.