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"Fallout 4" Release Raises Questions About Reviews of Buggy Games (kotaku.com)
RogueyWon writes: Fallout 4, the latest instalment in the long-running video-game series and one of the most hyped titles of the year, was released on 10 November. The game has generally been reviewing well, currently holding a Metacritic score of 89. However, a number of reviewers have noted the very large number of bugs present in all versions of the game and have, in some cases, reflected on the difficulty that these pose for reviewers, despite still awarding positive overall write-ups. Can it be ethical to recommend a product to consumers on the basis of its strengths, despite knowing that it contains serious faults?
And have no bad bugs to report. A couple instances of things disappearing and reappearing, but no hard crashes or getting stuck.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 is the magic number.
"Can it be ethical to recommend a product to consumers on the basis of its strengths, despite knowing that it contains serious faults?"
Yes. Are you disclosing those flaws honestly, so consumers can make an informed choice? Unless you're lying about your endorsement, what's the problem?
>> Can it be ethical to recommend a product to consumers on the basis of its strengths, despite knowing that it contains serious faults?
Yes, as long as the first words of your review are something like, "you might like [product] in a few years, but don't plan on buying it now...[reasons for hope]...[reasons why it's currently broken]."
If it's fit to release, it's fit to review, warts and all. If the devs don't want bugs to bring their average down, perhaps they should spend more time on QA.
there is, it's called don't line up at midnight to buy a video game. don't pre-order it and change your store to australia just to play it at the first possible moment. wait a month after release to buy it after the first half dozen of patches have been released. i've bought games for my kids that they didn't like and they won't touch the next one in the series after that. some idiots out there continue to pre-order this stuff and put up with the first month problems. it's like stockholm syndrome or battered wife syndrome.
...and yes, it was buggy. But it was still fun, and patches came out pretty quickly. I don't have a problem with reviewers giving a good review as long as they note that there are bugs. If it's so buggy as to be unplayable, that's another story.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
- Goat simulator devs
They cannot break their streak now. Not a single TES or Fallout game they released was ready on release date, why would they want to tarnish that pristine record?
There is, and once they figure out how to solve the problem of ethics in games activism then maybe they can move on to dealing with journalism next.
I believe there is a rational basis for giving Bethesda the benefit of the doubt that the bugs WILL be fixed. In all of their previous games -- Fallout 3, Oblivion, Skyrim, etc. -- Bethesda has released a huge number of patches fixing bugs, bolstered further by an ardent community of modders to fix yet more bugs with their own patches, that make the polished game pretty close to bug-free 1-2 years later, and still quite playable and workable even after 2 or 3 months of major patches from Bethesda.
There is something to be said for a developer's reputation. In this case, I believe the reputation of the developer is one that gives us reason to trust them to fix the worst of the problems, and the game should be moddable enough that the community will fix the rest.
Also, this is a 64-bit native game on PC (not sure about consoles), which means that we won't be getting crashes due to hitting the virtual address space limit like we did on 32-bit. It makes a gigantic difference. Even if there's a slow memory leak in the game that persists for a long time, you can just have a large pagefile, even if you only have 8 GB of RAM, and eventually the leaked memory pages will get swapped out to disk, freeing up RAM for the pages actively being used by the game.
And having it be 64-bit gives us the advantage of being able to scale up the number of objects and mods to a complexity level never seen before in a Bethsoft sandbox game.
Basically I would advise everyone to take a chill pill about the bugs. If you're being bitten by bugs currently, and feel that it's too buggy to play, just wait 2 or 3 more weeks for the first major patch(es) to land, and it'll be good enough to enjoy the experience, at least. Then, on your second playthrough a month or two from now, it'll be even more polished, and we might even have a community bugfix patch by that time, depending on how quickly and fervently people work on it.
I would not give this same level of trust and expectation of bugfixes for just any developer or just any community, though. Most games are not nearly as moddable out of the box as Bethsoft games, and most games don't get nearly as much post-release support as Bethsoft and their community gives their games.
It is currently sitting at 5.3 User reviews. Reading through the negative reviews, they have a point. Many immortal characters (where is the kill anyone Fallout?), game on rails, only like 5 different enemies, terrible voice acting, horribly stupid AI, same quests over and over (go kill this many of this creature), refusing quests doesn't refuse the quests, the world is empty, only one city on the map, and a bunch of ruins with nothing there.
It sounds like Bethesda forgot to actually build a game and just built an engine.
I'll wait till it is $5 on Steam and has a ton of mods.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
I heard a movie reviewer last week saying a new Bond film was a lot like an election; that it was impervious to reviews.
Because, like an election, a good portion of people are going to see the movie no matter what some reviewer says. The reviewer cannot influence their decision.
At the end of the day, if the movie makes money and the critics hate it ... well, the critics have an opinion, and the movie going public may not care.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
>> Can it be ethical to recommend a product to consumers on the basis of its strengths, despite knowing that it contains serious faults?
Yes, as long as the first words of your review are something like, "you might like [product] in a few years, but don't plan on buying it now...[reasons for hope]...[reasons why it's currently broken]."
You don't need to tell other people when to buy or not, just the facts please.
From the sounds of it, game companies are now so reliant on shipping a broken product and then patching it later, getting a new release is like being the beta testers.
It's true, the best time to buy a Bethesda game is 18 months later when it is 1/3 the cost and most of the big bugs are fixed. Nothing beats paying release prices to get access to the large public beta.
Release now patch later give CEO big bonus for laying off QA (we have end users that pay to due that)
I've talked with enough folks in QA to know that in the majority of cases all these game-breaking bugs are known and reported by QA prior to a game's release. The problem is marketing has promised a specific date and they're damned well going to meet it even if it means putting out a day-zero patch and dozens of patches over the next several weeks.
Knowing this is why I'd be perfectly okay having reviewers down-rate a game for a buggy release. It's the only way we'll be able to show them this toxic behavior isn't what we want.
If those people were smart, they would wait a year and get the entire game plus, the day-0 DLC, and all the expansions for half the price.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
I have not seen any glaringly obvious bugs. But maybe I'm just not looking close enough, or I'm just too busy enjoying the game to focus on nit picking out collision errors and texture pop-in. I guess a "bug" I noticed could be the time Codsworth was hovering over some garbage in a ruined building and he clipped through the ceiling while I was talking to him? The only issue I have had were horrible frame rate drops until I updated the nvidia drivers.
And to be on topic: I think that review embargoes are unethical, I think reviewers being provided golden samples of hardware and early access to software is unethical. I think it would also be unethical for a reviewer to not mention any game breaking bugs. Minor glitches and things like that are expected, especially in such a massive game. Take GTA:V for example. Massive open world (62GB) its still completely riddled with bugs, and to no surprise it holds a 7.8 on metacritic, and many of the negative user reviews center around the fact that the game is available across 3 platforms.... This isn't nearly as bad as the AC:Unity fiasco where the entire reviewing community knew about horrible bugs but was unable to mention them until after people bought the game and found out for themselves, or the Arkham Knight shit storm that "will never be fixed" according to the developers.
You are right. It was my mistake to try and have a civilized conversation with someone on the internet, I should have known that I would touch off the shitstorm that followed.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
As long as you adequately highlight the faults, then yeah, it's ethical.
So a Gawker property is posting an article about ethics and journalism? Wow. Pot meet Kettle.
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
Maybe there's a market for someone who buys their own games (refuses press versions and the likes) after release and does honest reviews?
yes, and no.
If you ask people if they would like to see that, they say yes. But...then they all want the new hotness and don't want to wait months for an "honest review"
I've seen that sort of thing in the Second Life fashion community (virtual fashion is a thing, a very BIG thing in SL). The people the fashion community pays the most attention to are the ones that get the new stuff given to them from the designers themselves. Those who buy their own stuff and write about it after "test driving it around and kicking the tires" (to use a car analogy) are pretty much nobodies.