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SvennoJ on 24 October 2011
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twesterm said:
SvennoJ said:
twesterm said:

Games *rarely* ship completely broken out of the box. There may be bugs and there may even be nasty ones that happen under certain specific circumstances but they're rarely broken.

Can you name me one game that is unplayable out of the box on the PS3 or 360?

-edit-

I should add I already know the answer to this is more than probably no.  Not because I know the specifics of every game out there, but because I know every console game has to go through a specific test of requirements in order to be shipped on that platform.  If the game doesn't work, it doesn't pass those requirements.

Yes, game breaking bugs may exist, but that has been true since the NES days and those only happen under specific circumstances where you're probably trying to break the game or gaming the game in some way other than normal play.

Well The witcher 2 for pc didn't work for me until the first patch. For consoles I don't know. It usually doesn't say what the patches are for on day 1. I assume they should work, how else can people who don't have their console connected online play the game. That doesn't stop the stories of corrupt game saves for some games and people having to start over. I myself got stuck on a bugged quest in Fallout NV but could luckily revert to an older save 4 hours back.

However the news about the introduction of 'offline pass' for Arkham city where you have to download the rest of the game is not sitting right with me. Yes it is less then 10% of the game and the game still works fine without it, but it's a slippery slope.

PC games are a different beast and patches have been around with them for a LOOONG time.  I remember having PC games with patch discs even before the internet.  With the bazillion different PC configurations it's completely unreasonable to expect a game to work flawlessly on every PC.

As for things like corrupt game saves, that's simply a bug and probably not an incredibly common one or easily avoidable one.  I looked on the New Vegas Wiki and there's the obvious fix of uninstalling and reinstalling the game and the other common save corruption problem is doing janky things like trying to open the PIP boy while dying.  I'm not trying to make excuses for those bugs but bugs happen.  It's impossible to catch them all and while some games are buggier than others (New Vegas is an excellent example!) calling them completely unplayable without a patch is being a complete drama queen.

Also, don't assume games shipping with bugs only started with this gen.  I can think of countless games where I've encountered everything from game breaking bugs to annoying glitches on everything from the NES to PS2.  Hell, we're actually lucky that Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft all force games to go through compliance testing and patch.  20 years ago broken unplayable games were common on the PC and buggy console games were just accepted.

And you're last statement just looks like you're here to bitch and not much else (and I know because we can smell our own). 

I switched to console gaming for the convenience of it. But it's becoming more and more like pc gaming, down to having to enter codes to play. And you're right I'm bitching about the direction my hobby is going, and I probably would have stated my concerns differently had I had more then 2 hours of sleep.

Actually I'm relieved so many people still prefer boxed copies.