Support NeoGAF

[Schweinehund]

Usually just changed a future shipment.

I do think games are rushed now a days but developing games aren't as simple as they used to be.

 

[PensivePen]

And any games that didn't got a really bad name.
People don't forgive if their tv or washing machine arrives broken, they didn't for games either

If anything people were way more forgiving. Final Fantasy 1 became a classic despite huge parts of the game just not functioning, and never being fixed on the NES.

 

[Seth Enosh]

They tested the games better, simple as that, and the project managers couldn't pull a "we'll just patch that after release" when something like the crash in Dk64 was found. Back then they had the choice of either delaying the game or spending massive $$ to pack in the expansion pack with the game.

Looking at something like halo MCC single player, where checkpoint saves straight up don't work in the centerpiece campaign (halo 2), that would have never been allowed to ship back then. I'm sure they found that bug in testing and just decided to ship with it unless they literally did no testing of the game at all.

Yes there were a lot of glitches and bugs hidden in the games but they usually didn't impact player experience that much. For instance Pokemon had a lot of bugs (missingno) but you had to read about it on the internet and seek it out, I never encountered that in my completed play through until I found it on GameFaqs or something.

There were only a few exceptions in major games, such as the dungeon in link's awakening where you could use the keys in the wrong order and get stuck. In that case they did have to patch later cartridges and fixed it in DX, but if you had the original cartridge you just had to wipe your save.

 

[Starwolf_UK]

Here is one good example.

Donkey Kong 64. ex-Rare devs in a let's play of Conkers Bad Fur day revealed a shocking fact. The only reason the game needs 8mb of RAM (instead of the default 4mb of RAM) is because there is a memory leak when using 4mb they couldn't fix (this did not happen with 8mb). So quite literally they dealt with this bug by forcing people to get a peripheral to play the game (or if you're in Europe the peripheral is forced upon weather you own it or not...as the game was not available separately)

the seal never had anything to do with games not being broken or not only that they were actually license from Nintendo on weren't unauthorized games.

That is as much the official Nintendo Seal, the newer version of it. For games I believe there was some sort of assessment needed for the seal of quality but searching failing me. That might have just fallen under the more general product approval assessments they did of not having religious references etc.

But the history behind the seal (and the tightfist of NOA) of the videogame [console] crash was essentially unlicensed shovelware of absolutely appalling quality leading to lack of consumer confidence and retail dumping these products. You even had dogfood makers making games and not in a Chex quest sort of way. So it was an important symbol kind of like a passed QC sticker on a cheap piece of made in china electronics.

That was a mistranslation (which LOTS of older games had).

It is actually a joke that is lost in translation (which also happened a lot) because the other half was mistranslated:
http://legendsoflocalization.com/whats-up-with-the-i-am-error-guy-in-zelda-ii/
Error and Bug are both programming terms and the characters look very similar.

 

[Qblivion]

People who think old games had very few bugs have obviously never watched speedruns before.

How many modern games can you beat in under 20 minutes by warping to the final boss?

 

[Seth Enosh]

People who think old games had very few bugs have obviously never watched speedruns before.

How many modern games can you beat in under 20 minutes by warping to the final boss?

Did people usually encounter those warp bugs in the course of a normal play through?

I don't think anyone cares if the game has glitches that you have to intentionally seek out. For instance ocarina has those warp glitches but I never encountered them when just playing the game and some are really hard to do even if you have instructions.

 

[DirtyLarry]

The fact that all gaming hardware can go online and grab a patch if needed has made a very complex process easier for devs is really the truth of the matter. Prior they did not have this luxury, so they had to do everything in their power to make sure the game they were shipping was in as playable of a state as possible.

Have some devs taken advantage of this fact? Absolutely.
I also believe it is because it is a very, very different business then it was as well.
We are talking about a billion dollar industry now. Publishers do not want to hear any excuses. They just want a product to ship.

So I think it is a combination of several factors, but make no mistake about it, being online affords them a luxury they just did not have before the advent on always being online.

It is what it is though. It is up to developers to do the right thing, and up to publishers to not make unrealistic demands.
Doubtful much will change, but if the public simply just refused the purchase broken products, perhaps it would.
Thing is we live in a culture where this is next to impossible of actually happening. Release days and having something right when it comes out is considered a status symbol for kids as much as having the latest sneakers or smartphone.

So yeah, like I said, it is what it is.

 

[Moon_frogger]

They actually qa'd the games properly and here's an incredibly alien concept: they waited till the game was finished before releasing it.

 

[Quadraphonic]

Games were 1000x less complex 20 years ago.
Teams were 5% the size they are today.

 

[Revengineer]

They didn't - notice how most speedrun games are older cart-based games!

 

[injurai]

They dealed with most of them before release.

ehh

Reissues.

this is correct

 

[PepsimanVsJoe]

Sonic 2: Gather all the chaos emeralds and beat a level with 50 rings. After you cross the goal, press jump twice to change into super sonic. You will change for a second, mid-air, then quickly change back and start running in air. Since you crossed the goal post, you cannot move, and the clock has stopped.

Congratulations, you have now crashed the game. You can't proceed any further until you hit reset. this was fixed in the second revision.

Haha I remember doing this! Man that was such a kick in the nuts.

 

[SapientWolf]

Tons of games were shipped with bugs, most never revised

Some even gamebreaking..

All video games ship with bugs. Some are just really hard to find.

 

[TheSpoiler]

They actually qa'd the games properly and here's an incredibly alien concept: they waited till the game was finished before releasing it.

Yeah too bad there are a ton of games listed in this very topic that prove this notion wrong.

Revisionist history is probably the best term I've seen to describe this thread.

 

[vcc]

I don't buy the "games are much more complicated today" it comes off as being apologetic for these companies, publishers and developers. Games were relatively just as complicated in the 80s 90s and early 00s albeit with the lack of networking and online features to worry about most of the time. So your game is super ambitious and complex? That's great, that was your choice so why should we accept serious bugs and glitches just because of how grand a games' design was.

I can honestly say that in my 23 years of gaming I never encountered a single game where a glitch or bug that wasn't cought ruined or soured the experience. Were they out there, of course. Above posts atest to that but in no way were they as wide spread as today and certianly not in the most anticipated and sought after releases such as The Evil Within, Unity and MCC's MP.

Fact of the matter is that publishers, and perhaps in some cases developers, make the choice that instead of doing rigourous QC of their product and possibly delaying the ship date they would rather tarnish the integrity of their software and name by letting consumers do the testing or wait and see if enough people are bothered by a known bug. A perfect example would be Skyrim on PS3 where the gamesave file size issue never got 100% fixed. It's just too bad, I miss the days where I could have confidence in so many developers and publishers without being so cautious for a day one purchase but they seemingly don't lose enough money in sales for doing it or get brought to task by enough review venues. Not to mention the problem this poses for game preservation for the future. Anything but a GOTY edition will likely be useless.

I think you're looking at the past with rose tinted glasses. There were often massive bugs in shipping games and even major hyped releases or future classics which were basically unplayable or easily broken (Daikatana, ET, Planescape Torment, baldurs gate, morrowing, daggerfall, EoB. all had progress ending bugs. And many many more.).

 

[The Spoony Hou]

That was a mistranslation (which LOTS of older games had).

That's not a mistranslation, that's his actual name. It's just a bad joke.

And I think the guy posted the pic just to illustrate .

 

[nded]

It's easier to fix a house than it is to fix a skyscraper.

But seriously, it was just easier to debug games back then due to their relatively less complex nature. QA departments are probably working harder now than ever.

 

[ArcaneFreeze]

People who think old games had very few bugs have obviously never watched speedruns before.

How many modern games can you beat in under 20 minutes by warping to the final boss?

Well your not warping but you could beat MGV Ground Zeroes in about 10 min.

 

[Cynn]

They dealed with most of them before release.

I'm not sure you actually played games before last gen if you really believe that. In truth the bugs just stayed there and games sucked due to them. There was no concept of fixing a bad game back then. They just hoped word didn't spread before they met sales quotas.

 

[The Crimson Beast]

games were immensely more simple back in then so catching all major bugs was far easier.

 

[Jonm1010]

I'm not sure you actually played games before last gen if you really believe that. In truth the bugs just stayed there and games sucked due to them. There was no concept of fixing a bad game back then. They just hoped word didn't spread before they met sales quotas.

Some yeah, but I think it depends. Overall I would say games much, much more often took on a delay rather then release incomplete. In fact I would say it felt like most major releases saw at least one major delay.

Plus, the industry for a long time was dominated by Japanese developers and so games released there initially and then were translated to English. A secondary function of that process was that it allowed them to further iron out bugs. It was like the medieval form of patching.

 

[Yoda]

It's easier to fix a house than it is to fix a skyscraper.

But seriously, it was just easier to debug games back then due to their relatively less complex nature. QA departments are probably working harder now than ever.

Your first statement is true, but the latter isn't quite kosher. Most games simply aren't given proper amounts of developers for the time-frame the publisher demands the game be released. QA is almost always the first thing to get chopped into too small to be comprehensive.

 

[Fuzzification]

While we're talking about fond bugs from older games this is one of my favorites (from the comments here):

Back on Wing Commander 1 we were getting an exception from our EMM386 memory manager when we exited the game. We'd clear the screen and a single line would print out, something like "EMM386 Memory manager error. Blah blah blah." We had to ship ASAP. So I hex edited the error in the memory manager itself to read "Thank you for playing Wing Commander."

Brilliant!

 

[SkyOdin]

It would be a mistake to think that games made in the pre-patch days didn't have bugs; a lot of major games had some pretty serious ones. Final Fantasy 6 for one had some pretty critical bugs: the Sketch bug was a really bad one that could delete save files or even brick the cartridge. They fixed that bug in particular in all shipments of the game after the first, but a lot of issues, such as the evasion bug, remained.

However, early games were a lot less complex than modern ones, with much less code overall. In terms of things like geometry and physics, there was a lot less that could go wrong, and they were easier to test. Bugs in gaming are just the result of Murphy's Law, so the more lines of code you have, the more bugs you will get. The advent of patching can thus be seen to be in part be a response to an increasingly complicated job of dealing with these bugs.