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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.
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.
I'll chime in on nVidia's side. Been using them ever since I switched to Linux, and thanks to their 100% consistent, solid Linux support since like 2000 or something, I will almost certainly never switch away. Out of the probably more than a dozen nVidia cards I've had, each one has worked flawlessly with great 3D in Linux and Windows alike.
In contrast to that, my friend who used to be an ATI fanboy had nothing but issues with both the open source and the ATI-provided Linux drivers until like 2006, when he finally gave up and switched to nVidia chipsets on everything.
The performance leader seems to trade off between nVidia and ATI depending on generation, but nVidia always has the driver support. There's just no reason to risk the driver issues by going with ATI.
You can mod your friends, you can mod your nose, but you can't mod your friend's nose.
Funny you should bring up driver quality; the latest nVidia driver update for my Win7 laptop (9600M GS) broke suspend (to RAM) and an older one (for a Vista laptop, 7600 GO) broke hibernate. I'm used to this kind of garbage with proprietary drivers on Linux, but on Windows I really expect better.
Furthermore, during Vista's beta period, ATI already had solid, functional, stable, and fast drivers. By comparison, at least for the GeForce 7600 GO in my older laptop, it was some 6 months after Vista RTM before I could get a driver that would give me decent performance (the drivers at release ran at about 40% the proper framerate) and features (many things, such as scale but maintain aspect ratio, were unavailable) without using hideously unstable beta drivers (that would crash every time I switched out of a full-screen 3D app). Even once drivers were available, they were initially only for desktop cards (modifying the .INF, or using downloads from laptopvideo2go.com, were workarounds that shouldn't have been required).
I will grant you that if a game is going to have problems with ATI or nVidia graphics, it's more likely to have a problem with ATI. However, in light of nVidia drivers managing to break parts of the operating system, I really don't think they can legitimately be considered better than ATI. Cost for performance, especially in the mid-range, they are also much worse - and in my experience you really don't get what you pay for there.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
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.
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.
From a non-biased GAMER who's still sees both sides, I would say consoles (as an experience) today suck!
Consoles today are basically the worst of the PC world and the worst of the old console world.
Consoles used to be about highly polished games that the developers (not the artists & marketing) put a lot of work into. Now a days with the net connection, most games deliver as betas (like the PCs), and then after 2 updates become... ok. The graphics are better, but the controls, storylines, action, and overall game play has gone down the crapper. We have games that are cross platform on the PSP, Xbox360, and PS3! So those games basically cater to the lowest common denominator of all three and not take advantage of any specifics. Xbox360 ports to the PS3 look like crap (I am looking at you EA)!
The worst of the console world... the price tag. Cause its on a "console," there is a huge upfront price tag. And with the net connection, you get the rest of the game delivered via additional charges! There is also the bombardment of marketing (which I think is the major reason for the price tags) that drone on and on about the latest upcoming game that is either a sequel or must have new concept. Which of course rarely lives up to the hype. Not to mention, we mostly lose that big benefit of consoles... local coop play. With the net, every bloody stupid game wants you to connect to some random 12 year old to play what should be local coop, or a rip off of counterstrike.
All consoles today are: locked down, controlled, 2 year old proprietary hardware... PCs! The only advantage is the massive number of games made for it (cause its a great way to lock in customers).
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.
I've got a bunch of old N64 and SNES cart (yes, spot the fanboy*) but why I cant play these in my Wii. Yet I can play Mean streets and Martian Memorandum on my new gaming PC. Not a problem via DOSBOX, I can also run Half Life 1 and System Shock 2 without a problem on XP.
* - Yes I still have an N64 and SNES, although the SNES was not my first one.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
How sad that you got modded troll when what you say is true.
I've been playing The Saboteur on my XBox for a week now without any problems, despite being a PC gamer for years I switched to the 360 in 2006 and have never looked back. The key drivers have been no fucking around with drivers and stuff to make things even work, and also no real serious issues with cheating. Sure you get people exploit game glitches but at least there are no aimbots, radar or anything stupid and game destroying like that.
I have tried PC gaming since 2006 on multiple occasions, but it's just not as good and I end up back on my 360. Shit like Crysis ran like crap even on a £1500 PC and still didn't look as good as games like Gears of War 2. Then there's the fact you have to deal with DRM shit from the likes of Steam and on EA games.
Contrary to popular belief amongst PC gamers, FPS and even RTS games are just as fun with console controls, I always figured I'd never play an RTS on the 360 because I thought it wouldn't be as good without a mouse, but it's just not true, when you get used to using a console controller it's just as easy. Some games, like Overlord for example actually worked better on the console in terms of controls than they did on the PC. In terms of RTS games I complete C&C3 and RA3 on hardest difficulty on the 360 no problem and find no issue playing online either.
The issue is for PC gaming that it's getting worse rather than better too- if I buy a 360 retail game I can still sell it on second hand, I can't even do that now if I buy a game in a shop for the PC and have to activate it on Steam. Some issues are the fault of the platform- the PC's openness is the reason it's easier to cheat and cheat more spectacularly, whilst others are the fault of game developers- i.e. DRM, and other problems again are half developer, half platform fault- i.e. bugs like this caused by hardware with millions of combinations of different configurations to cater to and developers not catering to them.
Then again, I haven't heard of a notebook being rendered useless due to ATI's inability to properly specify the package for their GPU. That very thing happened to me with a NVidia IGP. Experiences like that or NVidia's horrible OS X CUDA drivers (that may or may not work and may or may not negatively affect regular rendering) tend to make one suspicious of the quality of their offering.
Note that I didn't have many issues with their discrete graphics cards under Windows and Linux but that was before I used Mac notebooks almost exclusively for a while; plus, my current desktop's ATI IGP (didn't yet have the time and money to go discrete) also performs without any issue.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
There's a lot of games that can't be run on DOSbox...
And there are a lot of games that CAN be run on a modern system. Just for a laugh, I tried one of the oldest games taht I could find in my collection under Windows 7 (beta). It is Microsoft Fury 3, released in 1995 (before the N64). It played perfectly! The game never came with an option to change the resolution of the game, so it looked better when playing it in a window rather than full screen.
I have tried some older ones under DOSBox before, but they were non-action ones so they didn't really stress the system. So at least you have SOME chance that a game that old will play on a new PC system.
Also, it should be pointed out to the GP that you can still play some old SNES and N64 games on the Wii using Virtual Console. But this requires that you buy the games again, which annoys me when I still have the original in my hands. At least there is no hassle having to transfer the games from the old catridges.
Uuuuhhhh...you DO know that the same argument applies to a PC, right? Cost of a 2 port KVM switch? Around $10 at Newegg. Cost of a Win2K era PC? Under $30 but can usually be had for free at places like Freecycle or just watching your local curbs. Being able to run Redneck Rampage under actual DOS? Priceless baby, priceless.
I am sitting here looking at an old 733Mhz SFF Office box that came with XP that a local company was tossing, throw in a Geforce FX5200 Lo Pro and it makes a great Win9x/WinXP dual boot for old games that don't run correctly on modern OSes (like MechWarrior 3 and the bouncing APC bug) and the cost for the whole smash was $24 for a 4 port KVM. Considering how shitty some of the older consoles were, like the 3 NES (those early flip loaders sucked!), 4 Sega CDs, and 4 PS1s I went through before finally moving to PC for good, finding a decent running console for older games can be expensive or damned near impossible.
Comparing the 16 years I've been PC gaming (93-current) to the 18 years I spent console gaming (77-95) I'd have to say with the exclusion of the damned near impossible to kill woodgrain VCS that I've had less hassle overall with the PC. Of course I'm not stupid enough to try to surf on my gamer box so I don't have to deal with AV, firewall, or any of the other FPS sucking crap, so that may be why I've had better luck. Every customer I've dealt with that had serious problems with PC gaming were trying to do everything on a single box and just weighing the poor things down. I tell them to pick up a cheap PC for use as a "netbox" along with a KVM and save the gamer rig for gaming. They always come back talking about how much "nicer" everything works now,LOL! Like having over a dozen programs running at startup isn't gonna effect performance!
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
You say that as if I wasn't a PC gamer who knows first hand that if you give it a chance and get used to the controller just like you had to with mouse and keyboard originally then there is absolutely no issue.
Believe me, I've spent as much time with the gamepad as it took me to get used to the mouse and keyboard, and I'm not alone. The gamepad still feels like playing in quicksand.
Maybe you're an exception. Or maybe you were just never very good with the mouse and keyboard, so you don't notice a difference.
This is mirrored by the fact there are so many console players playing online now, enough to dwarf the PC playing population in just about every dual platform multiplayer game- because it's just not a problem, or at very least not enough of a problem to be unable to outweigh the rampant cheating issue on the PC.
The reason it's "just not a problem" is that they all have the same handicap.
And don't kid yourself about "rampant cheating". Few people choose consoles because of cheating; they do it because they want to play from the couch, or save a few bucks, or play with their console-owning friends, or avoid the hassle of drivers and OS upgrades. Personally, I've seen more cheating on console games than PC games, thanks to the fact that they're hosted on other players' consoles instead of impartial third-party servers.
But then, games like Shadowrun that had PC vs. XBox multiplayer worked fine and XBox players were certainly at no disadvantage, you really couldn't tell if you were playing against another XBox or a PC player from the XBox and vice versa.
I suppose you think that had nothing to do with the weak PC controls, the gamepad aiming assistance, and the fact that Shadowrun de-emphasizes quick aiming in favor of other skills anyway?
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