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Saboteur Launch Plagued By Problems With ATI Cards
An anonymous reader writes "So far, there are over 35 pages of people posting about why EA released Pandemic Studios' final game, Saboteur, to first the EU on December 4th and then, after knowing full well it did not work properly, to the Americas on December 8th. They have been promising to work on a patch that is apparently now in the QA stage of testing. It is not a small bug; rather, if you have an ATI video card and either Windows 7 or Windows Vista, the majority (90%) of users have the game crash after the title screen. Since the marketshare for ATI is nearly equal to that of Nvidia, and the ATI logo is adorning the front page of the Saboteur website, it seems like quite a large mistake to release the game in its current state."
Sounds like they've been sabotaged.
Like the surgeon general of gaming telling you to stay away if you have ATI...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Eve Online just introduced a new graphical problem (which actually results in a CPU spike too) in the latest expansion (Dominion) that's causing problems with a lot of ATI cards.
This is why I go with nVidia: my card may be slower than your ATI and I may have paid more for it, but I'll have driver updates twice a week that almost universally work flawlessly. Never had any luck at all with ATI's drivers for any product.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
It sounds like the developers choose to use the fastest and most reliable Windows version available for development.
It's Nvidia!
On a serious note, 29% to 63% market share is not even close to "nearly equal".
http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/
As an avid non-gamer, mostly because PC gaming sucks and console gaming is too costly, I have to say, this is why console gaming is where it's at.
Now, if they'd standardize on an architecture and throw a hardware abstraction layer into the mix, each new iteration of a console would be backward compatible with the old (X-Box seems to be pretty damned close), and the major complaint used by PC gamers to justify their sickness will be void. Once your new machine can do everything your old machine could do, PC gaming no longer has that advantage; upgrading your console no longer means having to keep the old or lose those games.
Console gaming FTW, from a non-biased non-gamer who's able to see both sides.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
I tested Saboteur across all platforms and, of all the titles I tested, the Pandemic devs were more open to fix issues than any development studio i've had experience with. Unfortunately the 360 and PS3 versions were much more thoroughly tested (we're talking a few weeks a piece). This was because 4 days into Saboteur PC testing (of which 4 of 5 testing stations were nVidia, btw) EA (the publisher and last end-tester before final submission) laid off 2000 people, which included almost all North American testers (essentially cutting the amount of testers globally by half).
The bottom line is this: the company's agenda is to release the product on a set day, and regardless of the quality of the product it WILL be out that day. You may see street dates pushed ahead a few months in advance but people test until a week or two until it hits the shelf, and if issues arise during the final hour most times the bugs will be swept under the table until one day they may get patched (if enough people bitch). It's sad that first day patches are not only considered acceptable, but are the norm these days.
The studio is being retired; there's no value in having the product work at launch. If it takes them a month to get the patch out, so be it, people will blame (the now defunct) Pandemic, and people will continue to buy EA games. If they ever revive the Pandemic name (why? what notable titles have they made? Dark Rein comes to mind, if only because my buddy was obsessed with Dark Rein 2 for so long in high school) nobody will remember this flop in 5-10 years time. The only flop anyone ever remembers is Duke Nukem Forever. I doubt most geeks could tell you the name of the rouge iD developer who made his own FPS (which failed miserably), or what the name of his game was. In two years nobody will remember the "Pandemic studios Pandemic of 2009".
moox. for a new generation.
This is the second game in just the past two weeks to suffer MAJOR headaches with ATI video cards... CCP's EVE-Online Dominion expansion has also been plagued by ATI-related video problems, artifacts, and outright crashing.
I suspect that one of these choices is incorrect. Correct.
I friend of mine bought it, back then. And it hat not one, not two, not three, but four points in the loading of the game, where it could crash. Which means that pretty much everyone got into one.
And then, on all nVidia cards, all triangles were messed up. With one of the 3 points of each triangle being wayy off in its position, moving all over the screen. Like a ton of spikes.
There was not a single comment from Rockstar. Let alone a patch.
And now for the funny part: I loaded it of bittorrent, and as always, I went to gamecopyworld.com, to look for a crack.
They not only had more than one working crack. No. They hay patches for every single of those four crash points, *and* the nVidia bug!
I couldn’t hold back to laugh at him. ^^
With GTA 4 it was not much better. Right from the start, the input lag was around 3 seconds! The intro was full of weird graphical errors. And the game still runs slow as hell, even on computers that have the power to run a game with those weak graphics and physics twice or thrice!
18 fps at 1024x786 with a Radeon 4850? Are you fuckin’ kiddin’ me??
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
...about the games they're going to spend money on, and then find out too late that it has problems (ie, after they've paid for it).
Gamers need to get over that urgent, gripping need they have to rush out and buy a new game the second it is released. They've become too complacent and accustomed to game developers not releasing demos, and - sadly - this has become the status quo. Instead of a demo being something that absolutely has to happen before people even glance at your game, publishers have figured out that they can release some PRs, screenshots, and trailers, and slap anything in a box and it will /still/ sell enough to justify doing it that way.
Once they've gotten your money, it's basically too late (unless you have the energy to go and demand a refund).
BE A DISCRIMINATING GAMER. Read reviews. Try demos, and if they don't have one post on their forums asking where their demo is. Check out their forums and see what people are complaining about. It's all about knowledge.
Further, anyone that has touched an EA game in the last 10 years should know by now that they make games based on a deadline. Unless a game is catastrophically not ready, then it will be shipped and shelved, and any problems will get fixed later (maybe). They make a lot of great games, but a good rule of thumb is to only buy them after it's been out for a month and they've fixed all the critical bugs (a good rule for PC games in general).
Note: I'm not trying to justify shitty development practices. Far from it. I'm trying to make sure people understand the most effective way to vote on this stuff is with their feet - don't buy broken video games.
And just who are these "people"?
It's not like EA is any stranger to releasing games with major issues that prevent a large chunk of their customers from playing them. EA is a huge company, and not every subdivision has people who type with their fingers. Many of them lick the keyboard.
This is why I started waiting at least 3 months before buying a game.
You find out if it is a piece of crap. Bugs are fixed. And the best part is that the price tends to go down (after more than 3 months)
I violated this rule for Neverwinter Nights (trusting BioWare), and NWN at release was a buggy nightmare. I also returned it.
Wait until the game has been properly tested in the wild.
Patches? What patches? In order to release the patch you would actually have to have the developers to write it and since EA shut down Pandemic studios and fired its 200 employees shortly before they released the game... well you can draw the conclusions on whether there will be any patches any time soon.
Bow before me, for I am root.
This is offset by PC games being cheaper to buy. A$10 cheaper in fact. Lets look at Modern Warfare 2 shall we, Xbox 36 = A$119, PS3 = A$119,PC = A$99. OK that's A$20 dollars cheaper but I'll argue at A$10 because I'm nice.
I buy two games a month, that's A$540 off the cost of my A$2000 gaming rig over two years. So that reduces the cost of the rig to A$1460. The cost of a PS3 is still $600, a new HDTV is A$1000. The price of a PS3 when I built my gaming rig in Feb was A$999. A$2000 is a top of the line gaming rig, Phenom II 955BE with a Geforce 985
This is of course ignoring digital distribution. I can pick up steam and Impulse games for A$50 easily.
Beyond price there's usefulness. After the Xbox 360 is superseded the Xbox 360 is useless, my PC can be re-rolled into a word processing/email machine.
There's also the question of graphics, As FarCry 2 proved the PC is still the superior graphics machine. I also get flash games for free, a superior control system, cheaper add-on packs and strategy games. In fact I just bought the latest add-on for Sins of a Solar Empire for US$10.
PC gaming is only more expensive for those who do not know the real costs.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Sorry, I've tracked my spending. At least for me, moving games to the living room has been way, way cheaper. I never pay full price for the games, though.
The game is playable (low FPS) with ATI cards if you revert the processor to single core, either through task manager / process affinity, or right at boot with (e.g.) the msconfig utility.
Of course, you're better off exercising some patience and waiting until a proper fix comes out than running with a crippled game. The game isn't exactly *gorgeous*, but running at 800X600 and all settings at minimum is a surefire way to sabotage the experience
I just had a thought about this. Remember the thing about the 95% piracy factor or whatever bullshet number the ESA made up?
Here's a free way to get the game tested. Deliberately leak an unfinished version, label it pre-alpha or "E3 Demo" or something with none of the storyline, only the finalized game mechanics/engine and have it "phone home" all the crashes.
Once the crash report rate dwindles or few people are reporting, release another demo that "demos" a different part of the game. Repeat until people are not reporting bugs with it. Keep internal testers for the storyline, use external players for multiplayer tests.
This worked so much better in the day of shareware because if the first episode was terrible, you didn't buy the rest.
Win-win here, you get a bunch of free beta testers, and they can't excuse pirating it later for the game being crap.
ZOMG! EA shipped a game that was not ready for prime time! OH NOES!!!! Give me a break. The day EA ships something that doesn't suck it'll be a vacuum cleaner. I quit giving them my money a long time ago after waiting months if not years for them to fix crap that should never have shipped that way. Oh, and for the apologists: The shipped that crap hugely broken without caring about their customers. And you want the customers to "understand" how difficult life is for poor little EA games? Get a life. I'll give a shit about their problems in the gaming industry just as soon as they show an iota of concern for their customers. We don't owe them shit other than the profit (that BTW they already got from thousands of users for their broke-dick product).
Has anyone even considered the possibility that the blame here lies with Microsoft or ATI? It bothers me how most Windows users blame an application when a library or driver is at fault. Just because only one app crashes doesn't mean that app is broken. If MS says some_rare_function() works, and it really causes one game to crash on particular systems, that's MS's fault.
Why pay for expensive bug testing when you can just sell the game to consumers and release patches for months after. You have their money, and the box is open so they can't return it. Its win win win for executives looking to save money! Also if the game isn't popular, then they can just not release any patches at all and blame the problems on drivers and configurations, because it works fine on their computers!
No one has any pride anymore, except maybe open source projects.
I said PC gaming sucked.
I said console gaming was too expensive.
Further, once the x-Box 360 is discontinued, I'm fairly sure all the old games will still play and it won't magically stop begin able to stream and play video across the LAN. Media center PC, anyone?
Certainly not useless.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
So now you've paid for a PC, which you still use for PC things, AND a console, which you can only use for movies/games. You do know that you can plug a PC in to your TV right? the one in your living room?
But you pay full price for the console, right?
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
Wait, so the game should be pushed back so that the people who *don't* have any problems can't play it either?
Given that a patch'll probably be out post haste, I don't understand that "logic". I live in the UK, so in the past I've had to wait for games that my friends across the pond are already playing, and it sucks. Hell, I imported MechWarrior 4. A *PC game*. I wasn't going to pirate if I could avoid it. I'm really disappointed if the community's viewpoint is quite so bitter as to deny other gamers.
Do you see what I did there?
...a class action suit. Go the USA.
EA, take heed: consumers are _not_ your beta testers. That's what you hire people for - oh wait, you fired them all. EA need to be punished for this sort of carry on, we all remember the mess that was Battlefield 2, and that's just for starters.
Digital distribution and patching has made a number publishers lazy. Patches are for fixing and enhancing, _not_ for finishing an incomplete game. I object to downloading 500MB "patches" for a NZ$99 game - bearing in mind that internet traffic in New Zealand is capped - will EA refund me the cost of my internet traffic? I don't think so.
Some of the most successful software companies held back the release of their games until they were 100% happy with them (not just Marketing Dept). Valve/Half Life 2 is a prime example and look at it's success. Gamers were stoked to have a game that actually worked and it certainly did not impact the sales of it, in fact the effect was opposite and made it look like a worthy purchase. Valve took a lot of flak for the delays but it does not matter when they ship a quality product that is worth the purchase price.
So long as the hardware is still working, which isn't good considering the problems the Xbox 360's had already.
Once the HW dies then everything magically stops working. However on PC's I can still utilise my old games and programs from 1993 on my current PC even though the hardware and operating environment has been out of date for 16 years.
Yes there are things like the Virtual Console but I don't really want to have to buy the same game again, especially if I've got the original cartridge.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
So you use an emulator?
Cartridge-era games are among the only games ever designed for console play that are actually comfortably playable on a PC.
When I do get that gaming itch, I usually whip out Sonic the Hedgehog or Mario Bros. because those games don't suck on a PC.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
You totally ignore other important factors.
Less pervasive DRM for example, one not relying on keys and/or authentication.
Meaning one important thing...it is much more realistic to resale console games, or even buy them used outright (and resale is also an option in the latter case of course, if you don't feel like keeping the game; usually you can do it at around the same or even slightly higher price, meaning that the cost of such consoles games is better then ZERO)
Console gaming is dirt cheap. Getting a console and a laptop for work - still cheaper.
One that hath name thou can not otter
It's certainly disgraceful that this game should be released in this state, given than around half of PC gamers use ATI cards. That said, I find it a little unfair to single out this game or even EA for the problems. Yes, most EA titles are highly buggy upon release (I was fuming about the problems with ATI cards and Sims 3), but I don't think many other publishers do much of a better job. Most games released over the past 10 years on the PC have been highly buggy. Just off hand I can name Sims 3, The Golden Compass, LA Rush, GTA 4, GTA San Andreas, Kane and Lynch.
Developers and publishers will tell you that this tendency towards more bugginess is a result of the more complex development procedure arising from the games themselves becoming more and more complex. This is, of course, utter tripe. They will also tell you that the wide variety of PC configurations makes it impossible to cater for all. While there may be some truth to this, there is absolutely no excuse for bugs arising from highly common hardware or logic errors in the game.
The reason that console games are less buggy than their PC counterparts is simple - money. Tight deadlines and budget constraints mean that developers and publishers are not sufficiently inclined to release a game on the PC with proper testing because they know that they will be able to subsequently release a patch to address the inevitable uproar. The consequences for releasing a buggy game on consoles are much more severe. On consoles like the PS2, GameCube and XBox, this would have meant a full-scale recall. And not every PS3 or XBox 360 gamer has an internet connection. Remember the farce that was Need for Speed Undercover on PS3...?
Unlike you I have an understanding of the subject.
PC gaming does not depend on DRM, there is no forced component, it is a third party add on that is entirely optional. The point is that the hardware DRM for consoles is enforced on every single game, for any game that does not have a disk requires online activation.
Please get your facts straight in the future.
Hmmm.. this does not happen on consoles? I think not. There are plenty of abandoned console games. In fact all console games are abandoned as soon as the hardware gets too old. At least with the decent abandoned PC games you get a community that fixes it, take a look at Evil Planet for Evil Genius or Armada Fleet Command for an ancient Win98 game called Birth of the Federation. I'm certain there are support communities out there I've never heard of.
You are thick aren't you, I've already said this is their stated goal on all platforms that's why 2nd hand sales are used as part of the piracy statistics. The only difference is that they are trying to kill 2nd hand PC sales on the software but attempting to kill 2nd hand Console sales by going after retailers. This is due to the fact it's cheaper to harass retailers then it is to pay MS to monitor you. Also remember that there is reigion coding on the Xbox meaning I cant import games from Asia or the US and expect it to work in Australia, PC games do not have this restriction.
Now I know you don't understand the meaning of pervasive. Here it is.
Hmmm... PC DRM is an easily defeated optional component, console DRM is a difficult to defeat mandatory component. This makes console DRM both more pervasive and more invasive.
How, your post was full of logical inconsistencies and half truths? at least point out the bits that were wrong and provide evidence to back it up.
Here's the brilliant part, I can have a floppy drive on a modern PC if I want to. If you must know I'm a sysadmin, every now and then I have to read a floppy at work thus I have a USB floppy drive. There are two types of fools in this world, the first says it is new therefore good and the second says it is old therefore good, you have just proven you are the first type of fool.
I said demonstrate this, find me an example of being able to sell an old game at above retail. Your entire point hinges on this. Otherwise it costs you.
Yes it does
So you not only propose buying used games but you also think that you can resell those games for a greater price. Basic economic theory says this cannot be done, you are proposing that retailers not only make no profit on used games but actually take a loss on buying them back off you.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.