Games were simpler. Hence easier to release with little to no serious bugs.
It's as simple as that.
They dealed with most of them before release.
It truly baffles me why more people don't see it this way. This is absolutely true. I love gaming these days, because they have bigger worlds, with better graphics, more complex AI, more gameplay options, etc. But trying to imagine what the insanely giant software code base looks like for these games makes my head spin.
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Also, can people stop with the whole "Nintendo Seal of Quality" crap? I mean, I absolutely LOVE their games, but they HAVE to be easier to develop than most of their competition. I mean, I'm just thinking about what the use case / pseudo code might look like for a Goomba:
If (nothing is happening) then
Walk around in pre-determined circle
Else
Detect Mario's location, and run in a straight line towards him
How difficult can this be to Quality Control? Not very much, I imagine. So please stop giving Nintendo more credit than they deserve. Thanks.
It truly baffles me why more people don't see it this way. This is absolutely true. I love gaming these days, because they have bigger worlds, with better graphics, more complex AI, more gameplay options, etc. But trying to imagine what the insanely giant software code base looks like for these games makes my head spin.
---------------------
Also, can people stop with the whole "Nintendo Seal of Quality" crap? I mean, I absolutely LOVE their games, but they HAVE to be easier to develop than most of their competition. I mean, I'm just thinking about what the use case / pseudo code might look like for a Goomba:
If (nothing is happening) then
Walk around in pre-determined circle
Else
Detect Mario's location, and run in a straight line towards him
How difficult can this be to Quality Control? Not very much, I imagine. So please stop giving Nintendo more credit than they deserve. Thanks.
Are you being serious with this statement? You have no idea what does into game development do you? Just... stop. You aren't making yourself look smart by any means.
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.
but the rest of this post is pretty misinformed. Nintendo games are easier to make and all AI will look like that, that is the basis of a state machine
I understand. But I want you (and anyone else that might think my post is misinformed) to answer this:
Do you believe that the code base (size, etc) of a largely static video game like Super Mario 3D World is anywhere near the same as another type of game... say, AC:Unity, Dragon Age, etc?
Bigger code base by definition I think would mean more testing, more situations that have to be forced/tested/etc by Quality Control, etc. Which makes the Quality Control for those more complex games harder, take longer, potentially miss things, etc. (AGAIN, not that I'm excusing blatantly missed things that make games broken)
I think it helped that games were, for lack of a better word, generally less ambitious back then. Open world games weren't really a thing.
Do you believe that the code base (size, etc) of a largely static video game like Super Mario 3D World is anywhere near the same as another type of game... say, AC:Unity, Dragon Age, etc?
Bigger code base by definition I think would mean more testing, more situations that have to be forced/tested/etc by Quality Control, etc. Which makes the Quality Control for those more complex games harder, take longer, potentially miss things, etc. (AGAIN, not that I'm excusing blatantly missed things that make games broken)
They spent more time in QA.
You have to remember, this was before internet and social media, so obscure bugs/glitches went largely unknown outside of the person who found them.
Of course there were random people posting glitches in Nintendo Power magazine, but a large amount of the game breaking bugs were found in the testing process.
Source: My ass.
#262 Wow the revisionist history going on in this thread is laughable. Yes, things might be at a low right now, but let's not pretend QA is still very much a thing and that games weren't sometimes buggy or broken back in the day.
Wow the revisionist history going on in this thread is laughable. Yes, things might be at a low right now, but let's not pretend QA is still very much a thing and that games weren't sometimes buggy or broken back in the day.
If any kind of work makes sense to crowdsource post-launch, it's QA and bugfixing for these huge open ended types of games. There ought to be some way to enable a partnership between the developers and community. If the inevitable unofficial patches for the next Bethesda game could be embedded into the base game, that would be great.
It truly baffles me why more people don't see it this way. This is absolutely true. I love gaming these days, because they have bigger worlds, with better graphics, more complex AI, more gameplay options, etc. But trying to imagine what the insanely giant software code base looks like for these games makes my head spin.
EDIT: this doesn't mean that I'm defending the modern practice of publishers almost relying on patching in a way. And outright broken games? Garbage. Shame on those publishers.
---------------------
Also, can people stop with the whole "Nintendo Seal of Quality" crap? I mean, I absolutely LOVE their games, but they HAVE to be easier to develop than most of their competition. I mean, I'm just thinking about what the use case / pseudo code might look like for a Goomba:
If (nothing is happening) then
Walk around in pre-determined circle
Else
Detect Mario's location, and run in a straight line towards him
How difficult can this be to Quality Control? Not very much, I imagine. So please stop giving Nintendo more credit than they deserve. Thanks.
There was also the DOS port of TMNT NES that had an impossible jump that prevented the game from being beat normally.
Of course not, but your assertion that "the programming for a goomba is simple" is wrong.
Wow the revisionist history going on in this thread is laughable. Yes, things might be at a low right now, but let's not pretend QA is still very much a thing and that games weren't sometimes buggy or broken back in the day.
Succinct and oh so right...Devs usually finished their fucking games.
They dealed with most of them before release.
Reissues (so first run copies were just fucked, but they could probably exchange) or people just lived with them.
A lot of games were shipped with game-breaking bugs or poor performance and people just kind of lived with it, because what was the alternative?
Games were simpler. Hence easier to release with little to no serious bugs.
It's as simple as that.
Oh come on now, that's ridiculous. There were often a few bugs in games or things that ended up either resulting in extra difficulty or minor exploits, but "game-breaking"? Hell no. There's a reason why the ones that ended up in recall as so well-known. It's because of how insanely rare it was and that previously the idea of needing to perform such drastic measures was crazy talk. Some PC games got patches for balance tweaks or graphical issues but they were never outright required to make the games work as intended or to add content post-release that was previously promised.
"How could they ever ship something that wasn't 100%?!?"
That qualified as scandalous. Anything that detracted from enjoyment. In any game. Even the tiniest bit. Ever.
I certainly don't recall anything on PS2 for example that was anywhere near as broken as Halo MCC or AC Unity etc. However, in the case of most of these games the issues have sprouted from online services not being up to snuff, and during the PS2 era that wasn't really part of the equation, so it's not really comparable to current situations. The only real comparable games I can think of are shitty low-budget games like Charlie's Angels.
/Thread
truth is most console games shipped extremely well tested and rarely had any bugs worth worrying about. Back in the day a game bug let you find/do secret things not corrupt your game save or glitch out your whole system. Typically bugs like we have today were a PC only problem, especially for western markets as the versions of games we got were even further tested and fixed after their Japanese release.
A big part of it is that games just weren't scrutinized so minutely back in the day. If a game chugged at certain points people just accepted that's how it was, nowadays it seems like a moratorium gets demanded every time a frame-rate isn't high or stable enough.
I suspect this is partly a result of the collapse of the mid-tier. These days it seems like any full-price title, or even anything put out by a major publisher is treated like a AAA offering, which shouldn't be the case - it certainly never was that way historically.
Little B-tier titles and AAA's generally sold at the same price-point, they shared a standard RRP based on the delivery medium not the content. Meaning that there was much more expected variance in the quality of the software, and gamers were generally more forgiving of bugs and performance issues provided the game was still fun.
Nowadays it seems like price-point is almost irrelevant, (I can't remember the last time I read a review that gave allowances for a title shipped at a budget price), and people make judgements and expectations based solely on the publisher's name.
A lot of people are acting like we are talking about the super Nintendo era. We're not. We are talking ps2 era. The internet was definitely a thing long before the ps2 came out.
Succinct and oh so right...
Here's one of my favorite ways that bugs were dealt with pre-patching.
http://www.insomniacgames.com/self-exploitation/
Bam!
This whole just patch it trend is a shame.
It would just seem, that someone with a hard deadline and lacking the ability to modify a game after that point would have more incentive to rigorously test their product prior to shipping. Contrast that with someone knowing they have three months after a faux deadline to get it right, which only becomes more acceptable as more developers pursue that trainfof thought.
If you installed myth 2 to the root and used the uninstaller, it would format your entire harddrive.
Using dealed instead of dealt is really bothering me.They dealed with most of them before release.
This, plus the dependence on day one patches as a crutch are big contributors to the skimping on QA between PS2 gen and now. To big publishers, hitting 'day and date' is a much higher priority than whether or not the game is 'finished'. The fact that sales of AAA bug fests aren't really ever negatively affected tells them all they need to hear.No need to pay someone to test a game when you have people who will buy your game to test it for you.
They were part of the games.
They dealed with most of them before release.