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."

Comments

Saboteur, hey?

[scdeimos]

Sounds like they've been sabotaged.

Re:Saboteur, hey?

[Cryacin]

I get very tired of these sorts of bugs. I had experienced a title screen bug for Fallout3. After spending 4 hours trying to get it to work, I just gave up and returned the game.

It seemed that I was not alone either. Unfortunately, the games industry is being pushed by customer demand and sabotaged by shrinking budgets from the corporate side. In the end the only thing that can be cut from the budget is QA, which is a fatal mistake.

Worse still is places where you cannot return your product. Talk about non efficate product.

Re:Saboteur, hey?

[nacturation]

Try Costco. They'll take back Windows 3.1 and give you a full refund.

Re:Saboteur, hey?

[arQon]

For all that "the industry is being pushed", it's not ALWAYS the game developers' fault. For a "real" game (ie "not a crappy movie tie-in generic copypaste with new art") you can easily go through dozens of driver revisions during years of development, all of which work fine, and then have a new set come out after you ship the master which suddenly doesn't work with your game.

ATI, much though I love their hardware, border on completely indifferent to driver bugs, and nvidia aren't really that much better. Unless your game is a "showpiece" for their hardware, they simply don't care if something doesn't work the way it's supposed to or even has catastrophic errors in it. Case in point, every ATI driver release from April through OCTOBER this year *hemorrhaged* memory if you used VBOs a certain way. 6 months to fix a bug that critical is pretty miserable.
Yes, modern graphics drivers are horrifically complex, but still...

Sometimes it works the other way too. There's a tiny little bug in Quake3 that can make an invalid GL call at times: it "worked" for 7 years because the drivers gracefully ignored it, then suddenly started to cause *massive* slowdowns on nvidia cards (from 400+ fps to 100). Technically, it's id's "fault", but it's pretty hard to blame them for it - or to blame nvidia for the drivers going into Sulk Mode, since it IS an invalid call.

That's an extreme example, but the point is that you're dependent on drivers that you don't "own" for your game to work, they frequently don't, and you've got no control over them at all.
If you're id / Epic / Valve, and pushing a AAA title that will prompt players to upgrade their cards, you can doubtless get someone at the IHV to look into the problems. If you're at a company like Pandemic that basically folded before even finishing the game, good luck with that even if you actually have any developers left to try to get a fix or hack up a workaround if a driver rev pulls the rug out from under you.

Of course, the developers COULD have been so completely half-assed that they didn't run a single build on an ATI card, in which case they should indeed be beaten to death with cluebats. :P

Re:Saboteur, hey?

[eulernet]

Unfortunately, the games industry is being pushed by customer demand and sabotaged by shrinking budgets from the corporate side.

Definitely no.

I worked for the video game industry, and this has nothing to do with QA or anything...
The period of the year when the games sell well is Christmas.
But selling your game at Christmas means that the game MUST be ready by the end of September.
If you miss September, you can say goodbye to make money with your game (especially if it's crappy).
There is also a small period at the beginning of January: parents gave money to their children, and the children tend to buy games.

In general, the company does not care if the game is ready for launch or not, because it does not want to miss the launch date, so the game is sold in the state it is in September.
Also, the company believes that a patch will be available by December and won't affect most of the customers, since the game is scheduled to be played after the Christmas sales.
Only the early customers will discover the problem.
Note also that when a crappy game is published, the company behind the game does not send the game to the magazines, since it does not want to ruin its Christmas sales.

QA has probably found the problem before September, but the marketing department told that the game must be available whatever the circumstances are.

So, instead of blaming QA or developers, blame the marketing department instead !

I tested Saboteur

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:I tested Saboteur

[Renraku]

This is exactly the problem and I don't blame you for posting anonymously. Every single EA game I have owned after a certain point shipped with horrible bugs. Things that you could have caught in testing after about an hour of play time. Game stopping bugs. Only to be fixed a MONTH later when I shelved the game or had taken it back and swore off EA. It's getting harder and harder to avoid their games, though, since they keep buying out good ideas and then turning them to shit.

You know, EA, games take a while to develop. If you don't have the resources, time, or patience to deal with it, you're welcome to go eat a bowl of dicks. I'm tired of promising games being snatched up by EA, only to have them lay everyone off at the last minute and skip testing. They've done this with pretty much every single game, even their successful ones.

Wasn't that the exact experience with GTA SA?

[Hurricane78]

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??

Because most gamers have zero awareness

[trawg]

...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.

Re:This is where consoles win

[orlanz]

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).

Re:This is where consoles don't win

[mjwx]

As an avid non-gamer, mostly because PC gaming sucks and console gaming is too costly,

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.

Re:This is where consoles win

[mjwx]

Luckily there are not only some good console games still being released, but there's also little hassle generally with running older games.

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.

Re:"EA released Pandemic Studios' final game"

[shutdown -p now]

If they ever revive the Pandemic name (why? what notable titles have they made?

Battlezone 2. Though that franchise seems to be long forgotten (which is a pity... it was a very interesting genre).

Re:This is where consoles win

[Gadget_Guy]

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.