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Thief 3 Deadly Shadows Bug Neuters In-Game AI
Channard writes "You can add another footnote to the strange fortunes of Ion Storm. It's been revealed that Thief: Deadly Shadows has a bug that affects the intelligence of the guards and other characters in the game, both in the PC and Xbox versions. Ion Storm Austin, the creators of the game, really went to work on the character AI in Deadly Shadows - on Expert level, the guards notice things like open doors, missing objects and the like. The catch, as reported on the official Ion Storm forums, is that a bug in the game resets the difficulty level to Normal level if you save and load your position in-game. The word from one of the Thief developers is that: 'We're looking into it.Can't say anything more for now, and there aren't any guarantees... but the find isn't being ignored.' The PC version should be relatively easy to patch, but fixing the Xbox version would be trickier, perhaps requiring a full recall (Microsoft doesn't allow the Xbox Live service to be used for anything other than patches that affect online play.)"
Game Developers don't do adequate testing? No way! I refuse to believe it.
Sigh, this is just one more slap in the face of gamers everywhere. Companies will put millions into advertising and salaries for celebrity programmers, but then budget nothing for Q&A.
And how the hell did Microsoft sign off on this? Isn't the promise of console games that they will be of higher quality, as a result of mandatory licensing fees? Isn't that why we pay more than PC gamers? Looks like that $10 markup is all for nothing.
Assuming, that is, that you bought all your components no less than a week ago, have the latest alpha-quality drivers, and the patience to deal with it when it all fails to work for no comprehensible reason.
Then, you get to buy all new stuff a month later, and start all over again. Whee!
Yeah, because a consistant platform is EVIL!!!!!!
You missed the short bus again this morning, didn't you?
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
is this
perhaps requiring a full recall (Microsoft doesn't allow the Xbox Live service to be used for anything other than patches that affect online play.)"
so they are crippling their own consol by not allowing buggy games to be fixed.....I normally don't mind MS, but this just takes the cake....
When most people were ga-ga'ing over halflife, i was cuddled in the corner of a very dark room filling my pockets in Thief 1. It really changed the way i looked at pc games, and had the most immersive gameplay i had ever seen...
Flash forward to today, and you see Thief 3 (albeit a fine, fine title) obviously rushed out the door, and most of the dev team laid off. What is it with this industries self destructive tendancies? I mean, really. Isnt the goal to make money? And isnt that a product of producing a good game?
I just want to scream at my monitor when i see things like this happen. Just remember, the fault probably doesnt lay on the dev team when something like this happens, something tells me a phb thought he could shave a buck or 2 and went for it.
The xbox has limited HD space. If they allowed developers to release patches, it would more rapidly fill users drives and it would open the floodgates on bug acceptibility at launch. i.e. "It's okay to release in this state because we can patch it later..."
I think a better solution would be to send replacement discs with fixes to those that have already purchased the game, and begin putting pre-patched versions on the shelves.
As I said, the last thing we (users) want is for buggy games to be acceptable. It is important that Microsoft exert the same level of quality control required for the other two consoles.
Go here for teh [sic] funny.
Um, the game PLAYS FINE. You people need to quit thinking you can sue over every mistake that is made. If you are a developer, I ALREADY KNOW you have gotten a product to a client that has had a bug or two. The nature of this one is pretty obscure. Im sure it wasnt "lack of professionalism" that missed it.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
I was wondering why even on expert difficulty, the enemies seemed pretty clueless...oh well, it's still a fun game even at normal difficulty.
Every piece of hardware in my computer except the video card is older than the oldest retail X-Box, and the video card is 2 years old.
A 2 year old computer that can outperform a 2 1/2 year old console.
Wow, guess there goes your theory.
Dark Nexus
"Sanity is calming, but madness is more interesting."
Yes, you could sue. And for winning you would get... a patched copy of the game, which you would have gotten out of a recall with MUCH less effort.
Try suing for damages, and you'd be laughed out of court and forced to pay for the defendant's legal costs.
Dark Nexus
"Sanity is calming, but madness is more interesting."
I love statements like that... ... I'm still waiting for a 3Dfx patch for Commanche3 ;-)
Yeah, because a consistant platform is EVIL!!!!!!
You missed the short bus again this morning, didn't you?
It's okay, so long as one does not consistently miss the short bus.
The PC version should be relatively easy to patch, but fixing the Xbox version would be trickier, perhaps requiring a full recall
Remember when console games that had serious bugs just didn't get licensed? Boy, those were the days.
Rob
"Microsoft doesn't allow the Xbox Live service to be used for anything other than patches that affect online play."
Good thing too, or we'd have a bunch of half-finished games with a "We'll patch it later" attitude.
I'm tired of being a beta tester.
Why is there such an outcry over this? This frankly huge letter on the ionstorm forum is just over reacting. The developers now know about the bug and they've said they'll try to fix it. Suddenly going on about class action and sueing the crap out of them is not going to speed it up.
Fair enough, if the developers next week announce that they've checked and they can't be bothered to fix the bug and basically screw you then yeah, start thinking about campaigning to get this fixed.
If I was a developer this entire incident would give me a bad view of the gaming community. It portrays everybody as being obnoxious impatient asses. The developers didn't intend to release it with a bug. There is only so much testing you can do and people make MISTAKES. It's a fact of life.
Wait and see what they do basically.
I wish this would happen more often. Then maybe people would realize that the PC development process is inferior, because the release-and-patch system coupled with overly aggressive marketing pressure and non-standard/evolving hardware has sent PC games straight into the toilet. The Xbox version is an innocent victim here, but will get screwed the hardest. Time to review the policy on accepting ports of PC games again.
A 2 year old computer that can outperform a 2 1/2 year old console.
Outperform? Then how come the XBox can play Theif 3, and you won't meet the requirements? Or Halo? Or Halo 2 when it comes out? Or just about anything else new.
I guess if Half-Life is your idea of new, then a 2 yr old PC is great. Me, I like to keep up with the times.
I noticed early on that the difficulty settings specified in DEFAULTS.INI can be changed to make each difficulty level easier or harder (yeah, I'm nosy and like looking for things to tweak in games); that would be a useful intermediate "fix" to this issue, since you could specify NORMAL difficulty to be the same as EXPERT. The problem is, the difficulty isn't reset to the NORMAL specified in the .ini, but apparantly to some default setting specified in the game executable.
I spotted this a few hours after installing the game; wtf are they hiring to do their testing!?
"The nature of this one is pretty obscure."
Anyone that has ever played Thief, unless they were looking for a serious challenge (and had 4 hours to kill), has probably saved their game from time to time. This isn't an obscure bug that occurs only when you're in the pantry holding the knife and looking at your feet. Anytime you save the game during a mission, and then re-load that save game, enemy AI gets reset to normal. That's major and something that should have been found during QA. There's little excuse for having a save that doesn't save the state of the game.
Someone already thought of that - certainly owners of modded X-Boxes could also try that - but it apparently doesn't work, according to the intial post in this thread at the Ion Storm boards. Shame.
I disagree. The intelligence of the AI isnt something that is explicitly visible. You could wrongly assume you are just doing good, or the likes.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
ah! the double edged blade that is coward- logic:
possibility 1- MS allows dev's to patch game via LIVE.
constant - everyone is disgusted because MS is the badguy for allowing sloppy and shoddy game development.
possibility 2- MS does not allowing dev's to patch bugs in xbox games via LIVE... constant - everyone is disgusted because MS is essentially 'crippling their own consol(sic) by not allowing buggy games to be fixed'
Get Virtual.
Except that the AI is one of the things to have got a lot of press in the various Thief 3 preview articles. So people buying the game for the better AI end up disappointed.
I don't take this as completely crazy. Patches for bugs - and this one is somewhat obscure in the testing - happen all the time. Too bad for consoles, but I disagree with the concept of them anyway.
It does let me in on a bit of how testing occurred. When we deploy a system, there is a "dashboard" (ug, i hate the term) of all the settings in the program visible on another screen. As you walk through the application, you can check the values live. If thief had a mode to display this (and most FPS have a console that should deliver this), they'd be able to check AI settings. Perhaps they did and it still isn't working correctly - now thats a bug.
mug
having played thief 1 and 2, i think it would be fairly obvious to notice whether a guard blindly walks past an open door, or looks in to see why its open (which is supposed to be the behavior at harder AI levels). It seems that in just the testing of the AI, this should have been an obvious flaw.
I'm well aware that QA on such a game must be a daunting task, but this is not a bug like Starcraft's immortal drones which you could only produce under extreme conditions (and which took the players months to uncover). The orignal discoverer of the error provided a simple test: find an enemy and save the game. Let the enemy hit you and watch how much damage you take. Reload your save game, and let him hit you again. Different amount of damage done. Easy proof of a bug and doesn't require any sort of extreme conditions to achieve. Bottom line is something like that should have been found.
I believe that his argument is that, regardless of what platform they are made for, modern games are routinely released with bugs. The PC platform is relatively easy to patch for. Consoles are not. Are you going to argue that console systems are better because they will somehow force developers to adopt better QA practices and eliminate bugs. Very utopian... and unrealistic.
That developers release programs with bugs in them is not a direct result of the ability of the developer to release later patches. It is a factor, but a more important factor is that the consumers whine, stomp their feet, type IN ALL CAPS, and otherwise make a idiot of themselves if the game does not come out quickly. Couple that with the growing complexity of modern games (perhaps the most important factor) and you are destined to have bugs slip through whatever QA system the developer's have.
jr
I don't have the full version yet, but I just double-checked in the demo and it appears you can set the difficulty on a per level basis. Is this true? If so, just play through a whole level without loading. Don't save and load after each enemy you manage to sneak by. That doesn't strike me as very 'expert' of a tactic.
Buy the game or don't buy it. This bug sucks, but is not a showstopper at all. A game deleting your boot sector when it is uninstalled, now thats a bug. The guy claiming to find the bug didn't shy away from making wild demands or promoting himself as a savior to gamers either. What a turnoff.
Undoubtably, bugs will happen. There isn't much anyone can do about this. But there's a deeper problem at issue here. Namely, games are being rushed out the door before they're ready. Now, this is most likely the fault of the publishers rather than the developers, but there isn't much we can do to distinguish when it comes to our purchases.
It's not like this is Ion Storm's first problem with this sort of thing. Did you try the abysmal Deus Ex II ? There were billions of issues there that should have been caught by simple playtesting. Likewise here...did no one test the difficulty settings for more than 5 minutes ?
The gaming industry really needs to learn that they can't blitz a product to market at less-than-optimal quality, and expuct the publc to shell out $50+ without complaint. Gamers are used to (virtually) blowing crap up, not grabbing their ankles and taking it from behind. PC games are complex constructions, no question about it. If you want your game to be a quality release (and thus keep customers) you have to expend a good deal of effort in QA/testing. Hell, resort to a semi-public beta if you don't have the inhouse staff to do it.
--LordPixie
"Then maybe people would realize that the PC development process is inferior"
I don't think the PC development process is inferior, per se; rather some developers don't give QA the full attention it needs. A number of studios release products which have far fewer bugs than your typical PC game. Take Blizzard for example. Yes, their games have bugs, but unless you've got some seriously weird hardware, chances are the average player will never encounter a game impacting bug playing the retail version.
But things aren't all rosy on the console side either. The most recent console game I'm playing, Harvest Moon, It's a Wonderful Life, is full of problems. Even ignoring the numerous, obvious translation errors, I've had farm animals just disappear on me. I know they are there somewhere, as they're still listed in my ledger, but I can't find 'em. Game stopping bug? no. But a bug none-the-less. Obviously, the game needed more time in QA.
...and this is why, when people start talking about how consoles are going to kill the PC gaming market, I don't get all that worried.
One of the big advantages PC gaming has now is the ability to fix bugs after the game has shipped. Even if that does lead to some greedy and short-sighted business decisions. "Ship now, patch later" is a lousy way to run a game company, but at least, with a PC game, you can patch later. With consoles, you're generally going to get the shaft.
But as consoles get more sophisticated and come with internet connectivity as a requisite, this problem is only going to get worse. So the big advantage of consoles, "just stick a disc / cartridge in and play" is going to become "just stick a disk / cartridge in and wait an hour for the latest patch to download." Because the bottom line is, game companies won't ship a finished, polished game if they don't have to.
... a more important factor is that the consumers whine, stomp their feet, type IN ALL CAPS, and otherwise make a idiot of themselves if the game does not come out quickly.
It should be noted that producers are compounding this problem themselves. (Yes, the gamers are still to blame too) Just about any big-production game gets obscenely hyped. Press releases say what the game "will" do long before any features are really finalized, much less coded. The PR machine gets working as soon as humanly possible. This unsurprisingly leads to innaccurate release dates, and a production time that 'seems' overly long simply because gamers have known about the game from the instant the first design document is written.
--LordPixie
If by "meet the requirements" you mean "run absolutely everything at the highest possible settings," then I suppose you have a point.
People are always trotting out this "you must buy a new video card every 20 minutes or you can't play any games" line - it's b.s. I use the integrated GeForce4 that came on my shuttle's mobo and I can play plenty of games, and they look mighty fine at that.
only by falsely using the term "everyone" in those two scenarios can you point to any supposed problem in logic
I don't have the full version yet, but I just double-checked in the demo and it appears you can set the difficulty on a per level basis. Is this true? If so, just play through a whole level without loading. Don't save and load after each enemy you manage to sneak by. That doesn't strike me as very 'expert' of a tactic. It's not just that, either. Gamers sometimes don't have the time on their hands to spend four hours playing through a single level. They want to save the game so they can go to sleep or do something else. Also, it's not just saving the game that sets this off. Levels in Thief 3 - on the X-Box, at least - have one part which is loaded separately, and so when you enter a room where it needs to load up that part, and then go back through, the bug takes hold.
Temple of Elemental Evil had a save/load issue, bigtime (menu items were wrongly named)
XCom (the original) had this same problem, resetting of difficulty levels.
Agreed. I recall waiting on Enemy Territoty, the sequal to Return to Castle Wolfenstein. The game consisted of two parts, single-player and multi-player, that were being developed by two different companies. Eventually, Activision, the publisher, pulled the single-player project because the contractor was unable to produce the game that was designed. They went on to release the multiplayer portion of the game as a free download. But this was an unusual response for a company, IMHO. In most cases, I suspect that the publisher would just ram the single-player game through, warts and all, and let it earn some money in its failure.
I found this a remarkable feat. Rather than add to the bad blood created by cancelling the project altogether, they release the game for free (with PunkBuster support). The game proved quite popular and continues to remain fairly popular. It's my opinion that they did this to keep the Wolfenstein franchise alive in the eyes of gamers while they moved onto the next game engine - be that Doom3 or Quake4.
I don't have or play Thief 3 so I cannot really judge how important this bug is. But it strikes me that people aren't complaining about poor graphics, bad gameplay, predictable plotlines, boring characters... I've been thinking about trying the game (on PC - I don't have an XBox or a PS2). Given that a patch will no doubt be available for the PC to fix this bug, I am not that concerned.
jr
I'm sorry, I just heard someone say "Halo". Excuse me.
God Bless America. Why? Did it sneeze?
I can entirely see how their Q/A team would miss the bug - Q/A would need to be playing on hard, probably with no cheats on (otherwise, why save and reload?).
IMO, playing without cheats is a pretty significant part of QA. Admittedly, you're going to need someone to breeze through the game easily just to make sure the basic mechanics work. But you're creating a game. The QA team NEEDS to make sure it has enjoyable gameplay, or they're just selling an overly expensive tech demo. Especially in a game like Thief III, where the AI one of the major selling points. If you don't have the time to test all your features, then make time. If you're not willing to do that, then be prepared to reap the whirlwind when your stuff breaks.
--LordPixie
Ion Storm? You can't exit the level without Superfly Johnson!
OTOH, marketers will realize that they can push PC development release dates a lot harder than they can for console games, which is better for the bottom line (money now is always better than the same amount of money later). Hurray for marketing!
picked it up last night.
utterly and completely disappointed.
i have a gforce 5200 and p4-2600, not a terrific system but it lets me play most games with decent framerates.
theif3, at the lowest settings gives me horrible framerates. not only that, but the graphics are nothing to look at. even the menus in the game are pixelated to the point of almost being unreadable.
i wouldn't mind jerky framerates if everything looked good (Farcry with all settings high jerks a little bit, but looks beyond amazing), but as i said before, Theif3 looks terrible.
to give you an idea what i'm talking about, it appears like Ion Storm took the original 1998 Theif engine and added some dynamic lighting and physics, and that's it.
this game would even be a lot better if they licensed the Quake 3 engine for crissakes.
on a side note, i absolutely hated Daikatana as well, but i don't like Theif3 as much as i like Daikatana....
If a vast majority of Xbox gamers were on Live, then the patching system would be okay. But, as many people have mentioned before, this would open the gates to studios pushing out products before they were ready. I'd prefer the game to work the first time. But, as a Live subscriber, I think the patches would be okay, but I understant why they don't allow it.
But with the vast majority of Xbox owners NOT on Live, this would give Microsoft a very bad name in the industry. (Yes, for a lot of you they already have a bad name) It's better if they make the studios do a recall, essentially to 'pay for their crimes'.
But then again, if they allowed patching via Live, they could take it out of the developers hide. "Okay, you want to patch via Live? That will be $2.99 per patch" (not to the subscriber, to the studio). That would be a dis-incentive, but at the same time would allow the service to go through when necessary. Personally, this particular instance would be no big deal to me, because I never play any game on 'expert' anyway.
No reason to lie.
No, you pay more because you got the computer, euhm console (not that there is much difference...) almost for free.
The goal is actually to make money FAST... and that means screwing the users if it'll make money faster. Even if it makes less in the long term.
Yes, I will argue that. Because they do. Is there a groundswell opinion that "console games are usually buggy, so buyer beware"? No, there isn't. 99% of the time, they work and they work perfectly. The good console game devs know that they do not get a second chance to fix their game, so they have to get it right the first time or risk falling on their face in the marketplace.
The PC game world on the other hand, it's common thought that if you buy a game, you better start haunting websites and newsgroups for the inevitable mention of an upcoming patch. I'm not saying that patches shouldn't exist, just that the ability is completely abused and should not be seen as an amazing benefit of PC games.
I'll go Redundant here and point out that the hardware environment is responsible for a lot of this. But this Thief problem was not... it could have been found and should have been found... it was rushed, it was unchecked, it is typical.
And I don't accept a 'complexity' excuse for one second. Games will always push that envelope. That's no excuse for releasing something buggy.
A Geforce FX 5200 is quite literally the slowest DirectX9-compatible videocard you can buy. A Geforce2 or Geforce4 MX would be significantly faster at OpenGL or DirectX7! Expecting a $50 videocard to give you good performance on a modern, DirectX9 game is just ludicrous.
I think it's a legitimate business decision not to alienate their non-Live users by only making critical game patches available to the ones that pay for an optional service. They paid $50 for a game. If that game is broken, they need it fixed for free. If anything, developers would be opening themselves up to a class action lawsuit if users had to pay extra for the product they already paid for.
That means a recall OR an offline patch CD mailed out for free. Either way you're going to press a lot of discs, pay for shipping on each CD, and inconvenience a lot of people.
A lot of people threaten to stop buying PC games because of the "no guarantees" license agreement, but they keep on buying them. I have actually stopped. Haven't bought a PC games in, what, two or three years now. It isn't because I don't want to play them, it isn't because I can't afford them, I'm just not willing to agree to a contract that I disapprove of.
It's amazing to me that a developer will publicly admit to a fairly major fault in a game and then say, effectively, "we might fix it or we might not, dunno yet". I'm sure this thought process goes on in many different industries, but game developers openly admit to having this attitude! It makes me wonder: If this is what they admit to then... well, finish the question for yourself.
This is our fault, though. (Well, depending on who you are, it's actually your fault, not mine!) Consumers tolerated unfinished games for so long that there became very little motivation for developers to bother finishing them. We told them time and time again that we'd buy their faulty products and they heard it so often that they said okay, in that case we're happy to sell them to you. So we did this to ourselves. Or rather you did...
Does anyone know if Ion Storm was utilizing an in-house bug team, or if they were relying upon Eidos' "crack" Quality Assurance team?
The ______ Agenda
Hey! Perfect example of what I was talking about in the XBox killed the PC thread:
5 &t hreshold=0&commentsort=0&tid=127&tid=186&tid=206&m ode=thread&cid=9357082
http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=11023
Games are complex. Under the current system, I believe there is a limit to the complexity of a console game -- at least while the console makers allow no recourse for patching.
on normal difficulty.
So I get no bug. I don't know about the guy earlier bitching about how his little GeForce5200 can't kick out the frames, but my new ATI 9800 Pro sure makes it look damn pretty! I never played the first two Thief games, but this one kicks ass. And looks awesome when hooked up to a bigscreen HDTV.
-my other sig is your mom
MOD UP +5 Informative and Isightful too!
Jesus god you're a faggot.
why do you say "let them go" when you mean "fire"?
IAAL
Furthermore, it only runs on win2k/xp and nvidia or ati boards less than 2 years old which reduces their market quite a bit.
I think it is obvious that they simply planned to cash in on the money that fans of the original would shell out, rather than make a quality game. Well, that is pretty much the definition of 'sequel' in the movie industry. I guess the video game industry is following their lead.
.. and are covering it with a news article here. As luck would have it, the Thief 1 Gold I ordered off E-Bay just turned up today, so I guess I'll be playing Thief 1 till they fix this bug - if they fix it.
I find it funny that for two weeks that people have been talking about this game with comments ranging from "It's awesome" to "It's pretty good, much better than DX:IW at least," and the second somebody find this non-showstopper bug, everybody's like "This is an outrage! I demand that Warren Spector come to my house and apologize to my face! We should sue Ion Storm and burn down their office!" It took the public nearly two weeks to catch onto this bug...basically every Thief fanboy in the world, probably playing it nonstop, and it took them two weeks. Now imagine if it were just a handful of playtesters...probably not as likely they would have found this bug. I'm not saying that it's OK to leave bugs in a program, but Ion Storm honestly probably wasn't aware at all. After all, it is pretty hard to distinguish a guard with "expert" AI from a guard with "normal" AI if you're sneaking behind him in the shadows. So, A) It's not really that big of an issue, just play it on "hard" difficulty and make it a personal goal to get 90% loot instead of 60%, 3 special loot items instead of 2, and don't kill any non-combatants, and for all sakes and purposes it's expert mode, B) Stop being such drama queens, sometimes things in life don't go the way you want them to, and you just gotta accept that, C) It's still a fun game on even normal difficulty, if you demand a challenge go play Ninja Gaiden on hard mode.
Most games don't require much in terms of graphics, even though companies and players make a big deal out of it. Its processor speed that matters. In a recent test, replacing a 9800 XT with an X800XT running Far Cry on 1600by1200 gave a 5% performance boost. And in UT2004, a GeForce 3, even a GeForce 4 MX can run it just fine.
Of the maybe two dozen ps2 games I've had, only one had problems which seriously impeded game-play, namely Dark Chronicle 2 which simply hung on me something like 4-5 times.
So, I searched on the net and found out that I wasn't the only one with this experience (i.e. not just a bad disk or something.) and returned it to the store for a full refund.
I can't imagine it's good for profits if too many customers start doing that. Maybe if people started doing that with PC-games, then the quality would improve. Problem is, a lot more often the shop will try to weasel out, claiming that the "real" problem is that you've got crap ram/bad video-drivers/a virus/unsupported hardware or something like that.
With a PS2 that's a lot less likely to happen, especially if you bougth the PS2 in the same shop and it's still under warranty, like I did. If they tried that, I'd simply ask if they really think I should return my PS2 for a replacement, given that it works perfectly with all my other games.
Being an owner of all current console systems, I have to say that in general, the XBox seems to have more "buggy" games than the others.
The reason for this is that I think the XBox gets more PC ports and PC dev's just think in the mode of "patch it later."
I also think that in general, American games are buggier than Japanese games. Now I'm not saying that no Japanese games have bugs and I'm not saying that all American games have bugs.
But what can't be denied is that the Japanese live and breate work. I saw a special on Polyphony Digital and literally every single developer had a small cot under their desk in their cube because they spend so much time at the office...
The sad part is that I actually proofread that post. Don't even ask how that managed to slip past.
What the Slashdot community really needs is a "Oh crap, my spelling sucks ass. Let me fix that ! button.
--LordPixie
Console games push the graphical evelope, but not necessarily the complexity envelope. Non-linear/multi-path games of today would be difficult to eliminate all bugs, and when you throw in the one-shot chance of console platforms, the process becomes almost impossible. That's why most of the console games are predominately linear. Granted there are exceptions, but it seems that more often than not, bugs do rear their ugly head with the exceptions.
KotOR had bugs that were unpatchable on the Xbox. They weren't showstoppers, but they were bothersome. It'll be interesting to see how trouble free Jade Empire will be (although there may not be as open gameplay as KotOR).
I will agree that *current* console QA is superior to PC game QA - at least on its face. But, as someone else noted, console games are generally more linear than PC games. As the console games expand their flexibility and complexity they are also going to expand their potential for bugs. No amount of QA is going to eliminate bugs. If console developers maintain their current level of QA but increase the scope of complexity of their games (as they are doing), they are going to have more bugs. If they increase their QA efforts to maintain their bug-free integrity, then the price of the console games will have to rise to cover the additional costs.
:)
I believe that console systems of the future will eventually have an online patching system. It will be more automated and thus simpler to use than that which exists for PCs. This will require rewritable media - which can create problems of its own. But development of such a system, regardless of how it is implemented, will allow developers to create the sloppy code that is being bemoaned in regards to PC games. Are you ready for your buggy future?
Games do 'push the envelope'.. but PC games push the envelope much farther than console games. Both in terms of graphics and in terms of gameplay.
jr
Wow; my first troll moderation since the moderation system was added(6 years?). ;)
Thanks. Variety is the spice of life.
Why? New console games have been in the $40-50 for the last couple generations. The complexity level certainly went up between the PS1 era and the PS2 era, and the price did not go up. In fact, for most first-party Sony games, the price went down. (Average price being $40 rather than $50.)
I believe that console systems of the future will eventually have an online patching system.
I hope not. Once you make the gaming process unwieldy, you lose people. More specifically, you lose the casual gamers, the families, that drive sales.
but PC games push the envelope much farther than console games. Both in terms of graphics and in terms of gameplay.
I accept that PCs push graphics further and faster, but that takes us back to the evolving/non-standard hardware issue. One poster here claimed that he routinely runs new games on his older system by dragging down all the graphics sliders (and he seemed proud of it.) Where's the benefit to that if users have to purposefully downgrade the graphics?
But gameplay? That's another issue. When you say that console games are more linear, I don't think you're comparing PC to console, you're more likely comparing MMORPGs to platformers. There are plenty of non-linear, complicated console games. And there's much more overall variety on the console game racks than on the PC racks. I'll take variety and polish over "This Year's Prettiest Way To Score Headshots."
Here's an example that I expect most /.ers will hate: Pokemon. Those damn little GBA games have an incredibly complicated stats management system, once you total up all the possible permutations of creatures/attacks/skills/stats/items/weaknesses and apply the math of it all. There's quite a lot going on under the hood, and that's "just" a Game Boy game. I would liken that to all the skills/items etc of any PC MMORPG. The only differences being the graphics and the theming.
Spoken like someone who has no real experience in software.
Ion Storm used the same modified Unreal engine on Thief 3 that was used on Deus Ex 2. Any form of AI would have been a welcomed addition to that engine.
Learn something new.
To take it further, I think they don't give it the attention it needs because they have to keep release deadlines and the companies know they can release patches.
A Geforce3 can be expected to significantly outperform a Geforce FX 5200. A Geforce 3 (not Titanium) has 7.3GB/sec of memory bandwidth, an FX 5200 has 3.2GB/sec. The Geforce3 also has twice the number of pixel pipelines as the FX 5200. Overall, I wouldn't be surprised at all if you got twice the framerate the dude with the FX 5200 did, or near-so.
I finished Theif 3 last week, on my PC. Cranked up all the settings too.
Dark Nexus
"Sanity is calming, but madness is more interesting."
The levels in Thief 3 asre split to allow the larger levels to fit on the X-Box. What happens during the save upon that transition? Does the skill setting reset then?