"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?

Comments

I'm 8 hours in

[sokoban]

And have no bad bugs to report. A couple instances of things disappearing and reappearing, but no hard crashes or getting stuck.

Re:I'm 8 hours in

[geekmux]

And have no bad bugs to report.

Well, roaches usually take a little longer to start collecting around the cheeto dust.

A couple instances of things disappearing and reappearing...

Yeah, that's called blinking. Over the course of 8 hours, humans tend to do it more than twice. Helps keep you from going blind.

...but no hard crashes or getting stuck.

Nerdcore! No sleeping for at least another 12 hours! Oh, and towels work best to keep fat from sticking to vinyl...

Re:I'm 8 hours in

[Darinbob]

This is a hobby of some people. Trash a game for having bugs, calling it the worst game of all time (seriously, that was in the forums), etc. But they'll point to other games that have had bugs and praise them. There have been bugs in computer games since they first existed, and there have been patches that have come out to fix them. I don't see the big deal. There's certainly zero *ethical* problems with giving a positive review here. Fallout 3 is a great game, I highly recommend it, and it has bugs. Fallout 1 is my favorite game of all time, and it's extremely buggy.

There's also the wannabe professional reviewer corps. Even the ones at professional web sites aren't really trained critics with a journalism background. A lot of them seem to think that criticism means tearing something down. I mean if they're comparing Fallout 4 to popular console FPS shooters, which many have done, then they've sort of missed the entire concept of what Fallout is.

The ultimate problem is that you have to eventually release the game. There will be bugs. If you wait until it's perfect then it will never be released. Compound the problem by announcing a release date long before the development is seriously underway. Compare to the rushed out yearly-franchise of Assassin's Creed, the latest was vastly more buggy than Fallout 4.

Re:I'm 8 hours in

[Gr33nJ3ll0]

Either way it's going to be a bunch of crazies waving things around and talking about the end of life as we know it!

Re:I'm 8 hours in

[Noah Haders]

It should be said, polygon has been giving games 'provisional reviews' and then updating a final review after a month. This is especially relevant for online multiplayer games that are most functional when there's a large community.

Yes?

[dmomo]

"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?

Re:Yes?

[Kjella]

Disclosing or dismissing? "Sure it has a few bugs, but I'm sure they'll get fixed soon and it's a great game 9/10", please put me on the exclusive interview/preview/kickback list and not the shit list for your next game. Game reviews don't have the greatest reputation for integrity, to say the least. Oddly enough launch sales are crazy high despite except for first to level in MMORPGs there's rarely any hurry. So if you give it a kick in the teeth because it's buggy and not very playable right now the publishers tend to not like you. And content is king, if you don't have anything special except the post-release reviews everyone can do you're likely to go out of business.

Warts and all

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Not very ethical

[known_coward_69]

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.

Meh. I bought Skyrim pre-release...

[Radical Moderate]

...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.

Reminds me of this quote

[ThePyro]

I find myself reminded of this quote:

MILLIONS OF BUGS! We're only eliminating the crash-bugs, everything else is hilarious and we're keeping it

- Goat simulator devs

Re:Not very ethical

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Rational basis

[allquixotic]

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.

Re:Rational basis

[bulled]

Sure, they will likely fix these bugs eventually, but why couldn't they fix the bugs _before_ release and ship a working product? As I said earlier, Bethesda has always worked this way. I have never played a Bethesda game that worked on release date (to be fair my first was Morrowind, maybe the earlier ones were better). Instead they throw out this thing held together by chicken wire and chewing gum with the promise to fix later. That is the problem, there are no consequences for shipping broken software because you can patch it later.

Re:Rational basis

[allquixotic]

Actually, from my understanding of my own personal experiences on release day with Fallout 4, and the experiences I've read about so far, overall the game IS currently a "working product". Sure, there are bugs, and certain system configurations are partially or severely broken, but I'm running a GTX 980 -- a recent, but not the fastest video card, by any means -- and I don't have any lag or crashes.

Once you are able to keep the game running lag and crash-free, in my opinion, as long as the main quests can be completed, it's fundamentally a "working product". If there are conversation bugs or NPCs that get stuck on a telephone pole or whatever, that's stuff that can be fixed later.

Face it: with a game as hugely complex as this, with an uncountably huge number of different variations and sequences of the quests and the quests' interaction with random NPC wandering and so on, you're never going to be able to ship a product that's as tight and polished on release as, say, Witcher 3, which is designed from the ground up to be MUCH less dynamic and significantly more linear. Each quest is in its own separate, isolated sandbox of sorts, like a universe in a bottle, where random deathclaws can't wander up and murder the quest-giver. That's Witcher 3. This is Fallout 4, where the aforementioned deathclaw can, and will, kill your quest-giver out of pure random chance.

And that unpredictability is part of what makes Bethsoft games fun. It also makes them frustratingly difficult to ship bug-free, but then, if their engine weren't designed in a way that's so incredibly moddable, we'd have a legitimate complaint that the game sucks. Instead, we take matters into our own hands and we FIX that telephone pole bug and we FIX that stupid deathclaw's pathing.

This is a game for people who are patient, technically oriented, and willing to deal with a product that is flawed initially but continually improving, and shaping up to be closer and closer to the individual player's ideal experience as they install mods and download patches. This is a game for people who prefer flexibility over polish. There are other games out there that accomplish the spit-and-polish, near-bug-free holy grail much better than Bethsoft ever could, but the closest those games can come to an open world experience is probably Witcher 3 (and the fact that they managed to make the game as dynamic as it is, without making it as buggy on release as a Bethsoft game, is *astouding* and a true feat of game development.) If you expect the same of Bethsoft, we'd be waiting until Christmas 2017 to get our hands on Fallout 4.

I can appreciate both types of games, myself. I definitely enjoy Witcher 3 a great deal, as well as other, even less moddable, even more linear games, like the Mass Effect series. But I find myself spending a lot more time on open world games where I can play a part in shaping the design of the game by choosing which mods to install, or even little forays into modding projects of my own.

If you want to disparage a developer who's contributing to the dilapidated state of the game development industry, complain to those who make perfectly linear FPS games that are bug-ridden, slow, crashy, and unplayable on release. Complain to those who release games that are so broken that even 6 months of patching doesn't help its case at all, like EGOSOFT and their X: Rebirth game (as well as most other titles that preceded it in that franchise). Complain to the publishers that buy up publishing rights to old, low-budget games from the 2000s and flood Steam with thousands of games that are utter garbage and not even worth the bits they're stored on.

But don't complain to Bethsoft about Fallout 4, when they're bumping up against extremely hard problems in software engineering that are necessarily exposed by the type of game they choose to build. Because the liberating freedom and long-lasting appeal and replayability of their games (ESO excluded; what a disaster) more than make up for a month or two of annoying bugs. That's why I feel the reviewers are 100% justified in giving the game a good rating despite bugs.

Terrible User Reviews

[Coren22]

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.

Re:Release now patch later give CEO big bonus

[PhrostyMcByte]

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.

Re:Not very ethical

[nitehawk214]

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.

Kotaku? Ethics?

[EvilSS]

So a Gawker property is posting an article about ethics and journalism? Wow. Pot meet Kettle.