"It feels like the developers are knowingly shipping games with giant chunks missing."
That sentiment from OS User
RipCityAndy seems to sum up the sentiment of OS'ers at the moment.
In a recent poll on Operation Sports, 47% of respondents said they were no longer buying games at launch after what has been an absolute epidemic of games shipping with broken pieces within them.
With notable non-sports game flubs the past couple of weeks, including the new
Halo: The Master Chief Collection shipping with broken online matchmaking as well as
Assassins Creed: Unity being a buggy mess -- it seems like the fervor over video games shipping as incomplete nearly 'beta' versions has reached a new level.
In sports gaming, several titles have shipped with pieces or components which simply were not working.
NBA 2K15's insistence on being always online even for single player experiences was a brief disaster, as-is
Driveclub's continual server issues.
NHL 15 managed to ship so stripped down, it caused a near mutiny on OS.
From an editorial point of view, this puts us in a weird position. We want to convey our impressions so our readers can have informed buying positions as soon as possible -- but recently publishing a review on the same day as launch is a good way to be a few days too early on what will inevitably be a mass influx of bugs and issues discovered by the community. As it stands, we have elected a far more conservative position of releasing day one impressions -- but leaving the scored review to a few days after release.
For us, much less to many consumers needing to spend $60 on a brand new game, the uncertainty of how a piece of software is going to react to gamers logging in is simply too great to justify a day one purchase recommendation. That is the unfortunate reality of gaming in the final days 2014.
Is there anything developers and publishers can do to ensure better launches of games in the future?