On the poor state PC games are in on release

[Atmos Duality]

I had the good fortune to have no significant technical problems with Deus Ex: HR....but I'll ignore that since I know from experience how consistent that claim can be...

It comes back to the issue of "crunch time".
There aren't many AAA games made native for PC these days, but there are shitloads of ports from the 360 and PS3.

Consequentially, the PC version usually gets the second-rate programming that comes with a port-job.
Today, it's common for developers to sub-contract another firm to port their game simply because they have more pressing issues on their hands (everyone's beloved Gearbox did exactly that for years before Bioshock), and most of these firms aren't all that great at what they do.

I think the hype and obsession over "AAA" titles has led to the expectation of greatness from the gaming community just because there's a lot of money going into it and a lot of hype orbiting it.

Well, that's the purpose of modern marketing; to add the illusion of value to a product that doesn't actually have that sort of value. To get people to spend on something regardless of its actual quality.
And it's generally accepted because the definition of "value" is primarily subjective.

 

[oplinger]

They added so much 3rd party gear to FO:NV because the engine was weak and could only handle giant plug-ins.
Anyway, the fact is that it was buggy and it should not have been and shows games to be poorly made.

As for rage, the PC version is meant to be more powerful and you can't just copy the game software over *facepalm*. Look at GTA 4 as a great example of a failed graphics port. The companies just have inexperienced people who fail to code the game correctly for the PC and their quick and cheap graphics boosts fail miserably.

BF3 is as buggy as an alpha and again, there is no excuse for that. Yes, it is beta.....but it's beta, not alpha.

I am amazed you claim to have few bugs in new games. GTA 4 for the PC is broken, FA 3 and FA: NV are so bugged they are unplayable, E:TW was again broken, Gran Turismo, SC2, Red faction: Guerrilla, Fable 3, Sins of a Solar Empire, Supreme Commander, STALKER's (take your pick), Split Second, DA 2 etc. Most of the bugs were all graphics related as the devs did not optimise them for the PC even though many came from large and well funded studios.

Yes, they did add a lot of third party software to it. But also if you notice the software they used, it wasn't about what the engine could not do, it was about automation, to make such a vast game possible. saying it "should not have been" is kinda awkward now since I explained that you'll never get all the bugs out of your software for every configuration of people ever going to play your game. In fact, New Vegas only crashed on me twice and that was before the first patch was released. Otherwise I have had no issues. Fallout 3 never crashed on me...until Point Lookout. Lord I have no idea what was wrong with that DLC...

---

No you can't just copy the game software over. I never said that at all. I was pointing out that consoles do not require drivers like PCs do. So the fact that it runs okay on consoles and horribly on PC is proof by itself that the issue is driver based. GTA4 also ran fine for me, the biggest issue with GTA 4 on PC is it's HUGE reliance on the CPU for most computations. Which since they made the engine...it's entirely their fault. It's never once crashed on me though, even on release. However the shitty graphics for GTA4 are more because consoles lack RAM...and it was a console port.

---

Betas can be just as buggy as alphas...the only difference is they're a more complete version of the game. Not a better less buggy version.

---

out of that list, the first three are above

E:TW I never had any bugs, but my computer wasn't all that powerful at the time, so I had to run it at 20FPS on lowest settings.

Gran Turismo? like...the playstation game? I was playing that last week...I wouldn't say it has any bugs, they just kinda threw everything out the window to make good car physics.

Red Faction guerrilla the only bugs I got were physics glitches, but that's what happens with dynamic physics calculations.

Skipped fable 3 because I haven't played 2.

Sins of a Solar Empire I have had an absolute blast playing, and not once have I seen a graphical glitch, an AI glitch, or any sort of game crashing bug.

Never played SC.

STALKER used to crash all the time on my old machine, it got worse with patches, and better with some patches. My new system? No problems at all, on any version. Couldn't explain why even if i wanted to.

Haven't played DA2 yet, but DAO was the same as STALKER, but backwards..It doesn't like 64 bit. Nothing I can do about that really.

---

Now, you want poorly optimzed?

Try the King Arthur collection. 80% of the systems it runs on, never go over 20 FPS, sometimes 15 is blazing fast for some people. Great game, terribly optimized.

Or try NWN2. It is a great game, but it has no LOD changes for the vast distance, so it processes every little detail no matter how far away it was. Very poorly optimized.

Gothic 1 and 2 are horribly optimized unless you have a very certain configuration of hardware and software.

Kane and Lynch has no sound when I play it, devs told me to fuck off.

Magicka crashed all the freaking time on release, it's gotten better, but boy it didn't like running on my system, or any of my friends' systems.

And then we can add any early UE3 game. The entire engine seemed to be poorly optimized...for anything.

Those are really the only ones I can recall that I couldn't easily fix myself.

 

[Atmos Duality]

No you can't just copy the game software over. I never said that at all. I was pointing out that consoles do not require drivers like PCs do.

Incorrect.

A "Driver" is simply a translator between the hardware input/output to the operating system (or sometimes firmware), which then passes it onto the software that interprets the function of that input/output.

Some very simple electronics (like a cheap calculator) do not use drivers because they lack a complicated operating system (the inputs are built directly into the Kernel/firmware), or run on a basic enough logic-generator that they aren't necessary.

It's safe to say that modern Consoles do NOT fall into that category.
For example: I can plug a USB mouse and keyboard into a PS3, and surf the web on it. Those use drivers.

A more accurate argument is that consoles do not require support for a very diverse set of drivers.

 

[Jimbo1212]

They added so much 3rd party gear to FO:NV because the engine was weak and could only handle giant plug-ins.
Anyway, the fact is that it was buggy and it should not have been and shows games to be poorly made.

As for rage, the PC version is meant to be more powerful and you can't just copy the game software over *facepalm*. Look at GTA 4 as a great example of a failed graphics port. The companies just have inexperienced people who fail to code the game correctly for the PC and their quick and cheap graphics boosts fail miserably.

BF3 is as buggy as an alpha and again, there is no excuse for that. Yes, it is beta.....but it's beta, not alpha.

I am amazed you claim to have few bugs in new games. GTA 4 for the PC is broken, FA 3 and FA: NV are so bugged they are unplayable, E:TW was again broken, Gran Turismo, SC2, Red faction: Guerrilla, Fable 3, Sins of a Solar Empire, Supreme Commander, STALKER's (take your pick), Split Second, DA 2 etc. Most of the bugs were all graphics related as the devs did not optimise them for the PC even though many came from large and well funded studios.

Yes, they did add a lot of third party software to it. But also if you notice the software they used, it wasn't about what the engine could not do, it was about automation, to make such a vast game possible. saying it "should not have been" is kinda awkward now since I explained that you'll never get all the bugs out of your software for every configuration of people ever going to play your game. In fact, New Vegas only crashed on me twice and that was before the first patch was released. Otherwise I have had no issues. Fallout 3 never crashed on me...until Point Lookout. Lord I have no idea what was wrong with that DLC...

---

No you can't just copy the game software over. I never said that at all. I was pointing out that consoles do not require drivers like PCs do. So the fact that it runs okay on consoles and horribly on PC is proof by itself that the issue is driver based. GTA4 also ran fine for me, the biggest issue with GTA 4 on PC is it's HUGE reliance on the CPU for most computations. Which since they made the engine...it's entirely their fault. It's never once crashed on me though, even on release. However the shitty graphics for GTA4 are more because consoles lack RAM...and it was a console port.

---

Betas can be just as buggy as alphas...the only difference is they're a more complete version of the game. Not a better less buggy version.

---

out of that list, the first three are above

E:TW I never had any bugs, but my computer wasn't all that powerful at the time, so I had to run it at 20FPS on lowest settings.

Gran Turismo? like...the playstation game? I was playing that last week...I wouldn't say it has any bugs, they just kinda threw everything out the window to make good car physics.

Red Faction guerrilla the only bugs I got were physics glitches, but that's what happens with dynamic physics calculations.

Skipped fable 3 because I haven't played 2.

Sins of a Solar Empire I have had an absolute blast playing, and not once have I seen a graphical glitch, an AI glitch, or any sort of game crashing bug.

Never played SC.

STALKER used to crash all the time on my old machine, it got worse with patches, and better with some patches. My new system? No problems at all, on any version. Couldn't explain why even if i wanted to.

Haven't played DA2 yet, but DAO was the same as STALKER, but backwards..It doesn't like 64 bit. Nothing I can do about that really.

---

Now, you want poorly optimzed?

Try the King Arthur collection. 80% of the systems it runs on, never go over 20 FPS, sometimes 15 is blazing fast for some people. Great game, terribly optimized.

Or try NWN2. It is a great game, but it has no LOD changes for the vast distance, so it processes every little detail no matter how far away it was. Very poorly optimized.

Gothic 1 and 2 are horribly optimized unless you have a very certain configuration of hardware and software.

Kane and Lynch has no sound when I play it, devs told me to fuck off.

Magicka crashed all the freaking time on release, it's gotten better, but boy it didn't like running on my system, or any of my friends' systems.

And then we can add any early UE3 game. The entire engine seemed to be poorly optimized...for anything.

Those are really the only ones I can recall that I couldn't easily fix myself.

What??
FA was buggy.
The only reason is due to poor development.
End of discussion.

Consoles don't need drivers? *facepalm*
All hardware needs drivers for software to operate on it, however consoles have fixed drivers. The reason they fail at porting is due to a change in drivers and software....and seeing that many games work fine, it is not a problem with the drivers..........

GTA 4 does not run well on any PC. This is a well known fact. Regardless of hardware or software, there is no optimisation for the graphics on the PC version. You saying otherwise has just made you lose all credibility.

Open betas are meant to be close to bug free and used as a way to balance guns and find obscure bugs. They should NEVER be as buggy as an alpha.

E:TW is known to be bugged to hell. From city walls not repairing, arrows and images now showing, kills not being recorded, to the AI getting stuck in stupid cycles. If you had ever graced their forums or played one or two campaigns you would have been aware of this. As you are not, you credibility has yet again shrunk.

GT 5 crashes all the time, has loading problems and deleted save. Seeing that you said it is somehow fine I will no longer bother replying as this just seems ludicrous and futile.

 

[Danceofmasks]

Ok, let me put it this way.
Oblivion, Fallout 3, Fallout: New Vegas ... one of the reasons they are unstable is if you use ffdshow for decoding videos.

A lot of people with identical setups as mine ran their games without a hitch, and mine did too .. soon as I put in the exceptions in ffdshow.

Also, you would not believe how many issues I've had troubleshooting for other people who have had interference due to everything from router protocols, proxy web servers, overzealous antivirus programs, etc.

In conclusion, PCs have different stuff installed on them.

 

[oplinger]

No you can't just copy the game software over. I never said that at all. I was pointing out that consoles do not require drivers like PCs do.

Incorrect.

A "Driver" is simply a translator between the hardware input/output to the operating system (or sometimes firmware), which then passes it onto the software that interprets the function of that input/output.

Some very simple electronics (like a cheap calculator) do not use drivers because they lack a complicated operating system (the inputs are built directly into the Kernel/firmware), or run on a basic enough logic-generator that they aren't necessary.

It's safe to say that modern Consoles do NOT fall into that category.
For example: I can plug a USB mouse and keyboard into a PS3, and surf the web on it. Those use drivers.

A more accurate argument is that consoles do not require support for a very diverse set of drivers.

Not incorrect, Developers have very low level access to hardware on consoles. They don't have high level APIs to hold them back like on PCs. (They still have APIs mind you...but not drivers)

What??
FA was buggy.
The only reason is due to poor development.
End of discussion.

Consoles don't need drivers? *facepalm*
All hardware needs drivers for software to operate on it, however consoles have fixed drivers. The reason they fail at porting is due to a change in drivers and software....and seeing that many games work fine, it is not a problem with the drivers..........

GTA 4 does not run well on any PC. This is a well known fact. Regardless of hardware or software, there is no optimisation for the graphics on the PC version. You saying otherwise has just made you lose all credibility.

Open betas are meant to be close to bug free and used as a way to balance guns and find obscure bugs. They should NEVER be as buggy as an alpha.

E:TW is known to be bugged to hell. From city walls not repairing, arrows and images now showing, kills not being recorded, to the AI getting stuck in stupid cycles. If you had ever graced their forums or played one or two campaigns you would have been aware of this. As you are not, you credibility has yet again shrunk.

GT 5 crashes all the time, has loading problems and deleted save. Seeing that you said it is somehow fine I will no longer bother replying as this just seems ludicrous and futile.

It was buggy, But it worked fine for me Many people had problems with all the bethesda games, but more testing wouldn't have solved all of it.

Drivers allow high level applications to have access to the hardware, as I explained above, developers have very low level access to the hardware, no drivers involved, they have access to exactly what the drivers would do for them. The driver would take a command, and tell the hardware how to do it. You skip that entire step by telling the hardware exactly what it needs to do.

Also, my credibility doesn't matter. I was telling you my experiences with the games.

As for GT5, I was curious why there was no number at the end, I thought you meant the original. That was my fault.

 

[Jimbo1212]

What??
FA was buggy.
The only reason is due to poor development.
End of discussion.

Consoles don't need drivers? *facepalm*
All hardware needs drivers for software to operate on it, however consoles have fixed drivers. The reason they fail at porting is due to a change in drivers and software....and seeing that many games work fine, it is not a problem with the drivers..........

GTA 4 does not run well on any PC. This is a well known fact. Regardless of hardware or software, there is no optimisation for the graphics on the PC version. You saying otherwise has just made you lose all credibility.

Open betas are meant to be close to bug free and used as a way to balance guns and find obscure bugs. They should NEVER be as buggy as an alpha.

E:TW is known to be bugged to hell. From city walls not repairing, arrows and images now showing, kills not being recorded, to the AI getting stuck in stupid cycles. If you had ever graced their forums or played one or two campaigns you would have been aware of this. As you are not, you credibility has yet again shrunk.

GT 5 crashes all the time, has loading problems and deleted save. Seeing that you said it is somehow fine I will no longer bother replying as this just seems ludicrous and futile.

It was buggy, But it worked fine for me Many people had problems with all the bethesda games, but more testing wouldn't have solved all of it.

Drivers allow high level applications to have access to the hardware, as I explained above, developers have very low level access to the hardware, no drivers involved, they have access to exactly what the drivers would do for them. The driver would take a command, and tell the hardware how to do it. You skip that entire step by telling the hardware exactly what it needs to do.

Also, my credibility doesn't matter. I was telling you my experiences with the games.

As for GT5, I was curious why there was no number at the end, I thought you meant the original. That was my fault.

Enough testing of ANYTHING will resolve the issue. It is that simple.
This is why many games use to have large numbers of betas testers as the chance of finding bugs are increased.

Devs dont need access to hardware as they should be able to make their software work with just the drivers. Being unable to do this shows the devs to have limited ability.
As I have said before, it is no surprise that buggy games are ones which are either cheap and quick ports, or games using a very old engine because the devs are cheap/lazy.

Regardless, there are far too many bugs in new games for the PC and there is no excuse besides crap programming and limited testing.

 

[oplinger]

Devs dont need access to hardware as they should be able to make their software work with just the drivers. Being unable to do this shows the devs to have limited ability.

Being unable to use something that consoles don't have makes them limited? You realize that by having low level access to the hardware, they program the instructions themselves, not having a driver translate high level commands for them into low level instructions? Not poking the shit out of the CPU with a screwdriver?

You are a horrendously misinformed person. And the fact that you think you're 100% correct and well informed is alarming on a level that I doubt any amount of words could possibly describe.

 

[Jimbo1212]

Devs dont need access to hardware as they should be able to make their software work with just the drivers. Being unable to do this shows the devs to have limited ability.

Being unable to use something that consoles don't have makes them limited? You realize that by having low level access to the hardware, they program the instructions themselves, not having a driver translate high level commands for them into low level instructions? Not poking the shit out of the CPU with a screwdriver?

You are a horrendously misinformed person. And the fact that you think you're 100% correct and well informed is alarming on a level that I doubt any amount of words could possibly describe.

So riddle me this :
Why do games that go straight from console to PC, or that use very dated engines, always have the most bugs?
Coincidence? *rolls eyes*
NB. I will be more qualified in this field than you

 

[oplinger]

Devs dont need access to hardware as they should be able to make their software work with just the drivers. Being unable to do this shows the devs to have limited ability.

Being unable to use something that consoles don't have makes them limited? You realize that by having low level access to the hardware, they program the instructions themselves, not having a driver translate high level commands for them into low level instructions? Not poking the shit out of the CPU with a screwdriver?

You are a horrendously misinformed person. And the fact that you think you're 100% correct and well informed is alarming on a level that I doubt any amount of words could possibly describe.

So riddle me this :
Why do games that go straight from console to PC, or that use very dated engines, always have the most bugs?
Coincidence? *rolls eyes*
NB. I will be more qualified in this field than you

*sigh* if you were at all close to qualified we wouldn't be having this conversation. Thank god you used future tense or I'd be laughing myself to tears.

And to "riddle you that" if you had any idea how it worked, you'd understand the main constraint with PCs is drivers and APIs, DX is actually extremely limiting, and OpenGL is even more limiting if you're not an expert with it. Even then it's tedious.

So going from programming everything at the hardware level, where you have ultimate control, to a very high level, limited view of what you can do, it causes a ton of problems. And a worrying amount of processing overhead as well. So PCs need more power to go through all that extra junk. Or in some cases, the API had to be used in a very creative way, and the system has no idea what the hell it's doing.

As for dated engines, those aren't the problems per se. It's the tweaking of the engines to make it do things they were not designed to do that causes problems. For instance, shadows. Now, in a newer engine, you tell the engine, hey that's a solid object, make a shadow there. It's generally a very simple thing to do, requires very few lines of code, it makes a texture map that darkens the area with a filter (shader). done.

Now take an older engine that can't do that. It is entirely possible that it will look at every single pixel within an area, and rewrite the value of each pixel as it renders on the screen. That takes a lot of power, opens up a huge door for bugs, and not just from the extra code. The extra power, on a system that can't handle it, would cause other resources to not be processed until it's done, the game would freeze, and crash. Or at least run very very slowly.

in very simple terms, that is about the gist of it, not accounting for things like the game looking for console hardware, backwards controls from poor mapping, incompatibility with the newer hardware on a PC, the API commands not quite lining up, etc.

 

[Jimbo1212]

Devs dont need access to hardware as they should be able to make their software work with just the drivers. Being unable to do this shows the devs to have limited ability.

Being unable to use something that consoles don't have makes them limited? You realize that by having low level access to the hardware, they program the instructions themselves, not having a driver translate high level commands for them into low level instructions? Not poking the shit out of the CPU with a screwdriver?

You are a horrendously misinformed person. And the fact that you think you're 100% correct and well informed is alarming on a level that I doubt any amount of words could possibly describe.

So riddle me this :
Why do games that go straight from console to PC, or that use very dated engines, always have the most bugs?
Coincidence? *rolls eyes*
NB. I will be more qualified in this field than you

*sigh* if you were at all close to qualified we wouldn't be having this conversation. Thank god you used future tense or I'd be laughing myself to tears.

And to "riddle you that" if you had any idea how it worked, you'd understand the main constraint with PCs is drivers and APIs, DX is actually extremely limiting, and OpenGL is even more limiting if you're not an expert with it. Even then it's tedious.

So going from programming everything at the hardware level, where you have ultimate control, to a very high level, limited view of what you can do, it causes a ton of problems. And a worrying amount of processing overhead as well. So PCs need more power to go through all that extra junk. Or in some cases, the API had to be used in a very creative way, and the system has no idea what the hell it's doing.

As for dated engines, those aren't the problems per se. It's the tweaking of the engines to make it do things they were not designed to do that causes problems. For instance, shadows. Now, in a newer engine, you tell the engine, hey that's a solid object, make a shadow there. It's generally a very simple thing to do, requires very few lines of code, it makes a texture map that darkens the area with a filter (shader). done.

Now take an older engine that can't do that. It is entirely possible that it will look at every single pixel within an area, and rewrite the value of each pixel as it renders on the screen. That takes a lot of power, opens up a huge door for bugs, and not just from the extra code. The extra power, on a system that can't handle it, would cause other resources to not be processed until it's done, the game would freeze, and crash. Or at least run very very slowly.

in very simple terms, that is about the gist of it, not accounting for things like the game looking for console hardware, backwards controls from poor mapping, incompatibility with the newer hardware on a PC, the API commands not quite lining up, etc.

So we agree that old engines which are pushed to do more then what the are meant to cause bugs.
And we know that no dev has hardware control, but seeing that many work with companies to help with this issue and numerous games don't have problems as they have the expertise to resolve any issue........

...why are you justifying that it is acceptable for games to have bugs again?

 

[oplinger]

So we agree that old engines which are pushed to do more then what the are meant to cause bugs.
And we know that no dev has hardware control, but seeing that many work with companies to help with this issue and numerous games don't have problems as they have the expertise to resolve any issue........

...why are you justifying that it is acceptable for games to have bugs again?

We agree old engines pushed to do more than what they are meant to do causes the resource usage to skyrocket. Which may cause bugs. It took WoW forever to become optimized enough to not have severe bugs in many of it's engine tweaks.

We know that devs don't control what kind of power the hardware has, but they have very good control over what the hardware can do, seeing as how they're the ones that makes the hardware do anything.

Numerous games aren't as ambitious as others. Fallout 3 is an extremely ambitious game, especially for one on a console. Other games that do not push technical boundaries or try new things are bound to have less bugs, because they're remain in the little safe area of things that work. It's not expertise. Which is where you seem highly confused. Indie games sometimes have very few bugs, how much testing do you think goes into them? Not a whole lot. But they don't really push any boundaries on a technical level. Also, saying John Carmack is an inexperienced bad programmer is...extremely ridiculous.

I never said it's acceptable for games to have bugs. I was saying bugs happen, it's almost impossible to release a completely bug-free game. you specifically may not run into any bugs, but no amount of testing will every clean up all bugs in your game. Getting bent out of shape for a game having bugs is stupid. Flat out stupid. Getting bent out of shape because a company won't fix their bugs? Go for it, I'm all for that.

My statistical points still stand from before as to why it seems like games are more buggy now. However, I highly doubt they are. Understanding why we get bugs, and understanding that they happen is pretty important imo.

 

[Jimbo1212]

So we agree that old engines which are pushed to do more then what the are meant to cause bugs.
And we know that no dev has hardware control, but seeing that many work with companies to help with this issue and numerous games don't have problems as they have the expertise to resolve any issue........

...why are you justifying that it is acceptable for games to have bugs again?

We agree old engines pushed to do more than what they are meant to do causes the resource usage to skyrocket. Which may cause bugs. It took WoW forever to become optimized enough to not have severe bugs in many of it's engine tweaks.

We know that devs don't control what kind of power the hardware has, but they have very good control over what the hardware can do, seeing as how they're the ones that makes the hardware do anything.

Numerous games aren't as ambitious as others. Fallout 3 is an extremely ambitious game, especially for one on a console. Other games that do not push technical boundaries or try new things are bound to have less bugs, because they're remain in the little safe area of things that work. It's not expertise. Which is where you seem highly confused. Indie games sometimes have very few bugs, how much testing do you think goes into them? Not a whole lot. But they don't really push any boundaries on a technical level. Also, saying John Carmack is an inexperienced bad programmer is...extremely ridiculous.

I never said it's acceptable for games to have bugs. I was saying bugs happen, it's almost impossible to release a completely bug-free game. you specifically may not run into any bugs, but no amount of testing will every clean up all bugs in your game. Getting bent out of shape for a game having bugs is stupid. Flat out stupid. Getting bent out of shape because a company won't fix their bugs? Go for it, I'm all for that.

My statistical points still stand from before as to why it seems like games are more buggy now. However, I highly doubt they are. Understanding why we get bugs, and understanding that they happen is pretty important imo.

Well we will have to agree to disagree with how common bugs have become in games as my experience has shown that this generations have been far worse, or more accurately, the severity of bugs have become worse.
Sure, it would take a long time to find every bug and most of the time it is not needed, however many recent games have bugs of such severity that they cause the game to become unplayable. This is when I think that the devs have not done enough testing as you should never release a broken product (that is what it is) as no other industry would legally allow that to happen. If it is that broken then it is simply not finished.

 

[dickywebster]

Been my distrusting self, id blame dlc as it seems to have made game makers lazy...