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PS3 OS Wasn't Final at TGS
LifesBlood writes "The PlayStation 3 operating system used at the Tokyo Game Show was apparently not final. Sony confirmed to GameDaily BIZ that the company has been in the process of finalizing it and that just like the Wii's OS, it will be upgradeable in the future." From the article: "We were told that this should not affect PS3 production whatsoever. Moreover, SCEA does not believe that the state of the OS at TGS had anything to do with the system resets or other glitches that some witnessed. Sony reiterated that it was the confined cases and other unfriendly trade show conditions that caused problems with the consoles. In addition, Sony said it has the capability to upgrade the PS3's OS after the console launches through its online network, memory stick files or Blu-ray discs."
Nope, that's why I went to consoles.
And I don't want any of my consoles hooked to the net, period. If it needs updates, I likely won't purchase it.
I would think the main problem is the implication (who knows if it's true) that the OS hasn't been fully tested (how could it be if the software isn't finalized?). If, for example, the PS3 is released and requires an update out of the box to fix a problem, then the buyer would have to find a way to get that update, such as by connecting the box to the Internet, even if that buyer had no initial intention of doing so. While I recall hearing about X360 hardware problems, I don't remember many (any) complaints about how the software worked out of the box.
While it's hard to imagine someone spending $500-600 on a PS3 and then not connecting it to the Internet (where, presumably, OS updates would come through automagically), still, if there are showstopping OS bugs left when the PS3 ships then people are [rightly] going to be upset.
So you're saying I need to wire my house because of the crap Sony et. al want to pull? Wireless doesn't work very well downstairs, not at all near the consoles.
There's still plenty of PS2/GC/XBox games I need to play, I don't need to go to the next gen for a long time.
I'll give you the King Kong and Dead Rising SD problems, though I'd attribute that to retarded testing procedures at the developer, publisher, and Microsoft QA levels. If they had seriously tested the game on all four supported resolutions as one would expect them to, the problem would have been obvious. The responses I've seen from the developers of both of those games are not indicative of a "patch it later" attitude, rather more of an "oh shit, we forgot to test that!".
Oblivion problems, well those are to be expected. The same thing happened with Morrowind on Xbox, but there they did not have a way to release updates. The original version had a fatal flaw that caused constant crashing if your save file got large. As the save file size was directly proportional to the level of clutter in your game, people like me who kept a lot of crap around their in-game houses got huge saves. At one time mine was over 20MB. This made the game so unplayable that I quit until the Game of the Year Edition release with the expansions and all the patches from the PC version to date was released. That fixed all the major issues and made the game playable again (I finally finished the main quest), but it cost $30 and honestly I haven't played the expansion quests enough to consider them worth it. If the Xbox version had a Live-based patching mechanism like Oblivion on 360 does, I'd probably have downloaded a patch long before my save file got large enough to encounter the problem.
The ability to patch after release is a very good thing, but the console makers need to enforce strict rules of QA before allowing production of the title to prevent "patch-it-later" syndrome.
You're looking at this pessimistically, believing that this system will be abused by developers to release a beta-grade game and fix it later, though that position is validated by the current situation with some PC games. I'm taking a more optimistic position and noting that people with SD screens who bought King Kong or Dead Rising would just have been fucked if there wasn't a patch mechanism in place. The control the console makers hold over the release of titles is what I hope will prevent the patch problems you fear, where those controls are nonexistant in the PC world where anyone can release a game to retail in any state.
I used to get high on life, but I developed a tolerance. Now I need something stronger.
This comment shows the source of the patch situation: damn programmers are too lazy to do engineering right!
Do you thing hardware is easy?? It ain't, and it's tougher than software by miles. Why is it that hardware has to be perfect at all price points and "low cost" software has no such duty? I'll give you the answer: programmers are lazy. Programmers have been lazy for so long that even users have no expectation of quality for software. And software publishers have been so good at backing lazy programmers that putting a disclaimer inside the software, unaccessible before purchase and binding before it can be read, is a legally accepted way to do business.
I've done hardware, and am now in software. Still, I think that somebody should sue the pants off a sloppy software publisher just like the dumbass that sued Lawn-Boy for cutting off his own limb while using a lawnmower to do his hedge-trimming. Maybe sloppy asses would wake up and stop playing with computers and start engineering products instead.
I'll leave you with a question to answer: what is the lowest price, for a piece of software, at which it should behave as expected and be free of faults? 100$, 1 k$, 100k$?
You're not old until regret takes the place of your dreams.