Console owners wanted a PC like experiance....they got it :P

I'm really glad AC for the PC is coming out later, it gives Ubi more time to work on it and get rid of the bugs.

I love how stream automatically updates the game with new fixes, it saves a lot of time and effort. Does the Ps3 and the 360 have automatic game patching?

I think some folks are missing the difference between a crash bug and a glitch. Glitches are expected in every game...yes this is probably true..they can be reduced to an insignificant level with good testing though. But a crash bug should be removed through two basic programming methods 1) good coding practices 2) good testing.

The programmer should wrack his brain to think of all cases his code will handle and ensure that it will handle them gracefully. This isn't 100% but thats where #2 comes in and testers should beat their heads against every aspect of a game while they have the opportunities to do so and should think of ways to break it even if its something no player would do (because that is a faulty assumption).

If both steps are followed thoroughly you should be able to eliminate crash bugs altogether or at bare minimum reduce it to something less than 1% of people will experience. Any crash bug that can't be removed altogether should at least be addressed by making sure players can still proceed past that point in the game. Glitches obviously will make it through still but as I said it is expected to some extent.

I completely agree, nothing can be 100% bug free, but a crash bug is not acceptable. A game that crashes should never be allowed to go gold.   It seems clear that this game was rushed though the final stages and might not of been properly tested with the lastest PS3 firmware that I believe was released shortly before AC went gold.

Another cross platform title where the only worthwhile version is the 360 one.

 Ah, there's the post I was expecting.

 Go back and review the links posted above.  The flying bug is clearly on a 360.  So bugs exist on BOTH versions.

The flying bug was on the demo, I'd rather see it replicated on a full version before I count that as all that damning.

Also, Wii games contain system updates on the disk (Guitar Hero III, Super Mario Galaxy), so that's defiantely not unique to PS3.

Bugs are bad, but there are various levels.

Die for no apparent reason - bad.
Stab the air and suddenly, get a kill - weird, but alright.

Have a sprite load incorrectly - Weird, but amusing (Horse)
Have a wall load incorrectly and trap you - bad.

Have memory overflow when a user intentionally modifies variables in an unexpected manner - Happens quite a lot actually, you can screw with inventories in a lot of games with some experience.
Have a memory overflow when a user acts in an expected way - bad. Hire a QA team.

Patches? Definately bad. If you cannot ship a working product, you face the risk of recall, or used to. So, make sure it works. Now with patches, you don't have recall, you have a patch to download in a week, and then a better one in 2 weeks once consumers are pacified.

That is awesome, Ubisoft should have made that a cheat you can unlock by beating the game or something...

Edit: whoops already posted missed that.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QlpdyvwGe-s Hurray!

That's great. Hot Coffee debacle revisited anyone? :P

For our members who don't have experience of software development, let me tell you some basic facts about how bugs and bug fixing work in decent software companies.

When someone in a development team (usually a tester) finds a bug in the product that they're working on, they are usually requested to assign two values to the bug - priority and severity. The severity of the bug is related to how bad the consequences of the bug are. Some game examples, in order of ascending severity:

- A bug which consists in an ambient sound not getting played in some situation would have low severity

- A bug which causes the weapons system to accidentally refire in some situation would have slightly higher severity

- A bug which makes it impossible to complete a mission would have quite high severity

- A bug which causes demons to fly out of the console owner's nose would probably be assigned with the highest severity level.

Then we have the bug priority. This is a more subjective value, which depends on the severity and on how frequent/expectable the error is. A bug with high severity would usually have high priority too, but that may not be the case if the bug only happens every Friday 13th when the moon is full and the user is wearing a tuxedo while playing the game with the console downloading 1000 files from the network at the same time. Conversely, a bug with low severity would usually have low priority too, but that may not be the case if the bug happens so often that it becomes annoying and screws the user experience. All in all, assigning bug priorities is a matter of common sense and experience in software testing.

As the name says, the bug priority value is what the developers use to prioritize their work. Usually they'd start to fix bugs with highest priority level towards the ones lower in the list. If there's no time to fix some low priority bugs, the product can be shipped. However the product can never be shipped with bugs which, whether detected or not, have or would have high severity and high priority. If a game gets shipped with such a bug, it means that either the development team sucks, or the game was rushed to the market.