How the Internet made game devs lazy

You don’t have to be that old to remember the days when playing games over the internet was a peculiarity of PC gamers, only used for weirdy-beardy RPGs and First Person Shooters. It involved dealing with weird and scary stuff like TCP/IP (what’s that?) and a frightening telephone bill if you played for hours. Not to mention your mum and dad probably yelled at you to get off the line so they could make calls.

Most people played console games for their immediacy and simplicity. There was no setup involved, just stick your cartridge/floppy/CD into the console and play. No pissing about with DOS, or the dreaded DirectX if you had Windows (by the way, the very first version of DirectX could actually screw up your picture settings – lovely). It was a simpler age.

Yet there were games released on the consoles that were unfinished. Often rushed out by their publishers to maximise revenue, they were glitchy and buggy hellish messes. Yet, the word would normally get out and people just wouldn’t buy the glitchy unfinished games for their consoles. There was little tolerance for releasing badly bugged games on systems where patches couldn’t be applied. On the PC, this was a never-ending nightmare. The Fallout games were great, but bugged to high heaven and Fallout 2 was pretty much impossible to beat without patches. Bethesda’s Daggerfall was a fantastic game, way ahead of its time, but was designed for hypothetical turbonuttergit future computers and was glitched beyond belief.

The worlds of PC gaming and console gaming have been merging over the last decade, with PC developers either abandoning the format entirely in favour of the more lucrative console market or simply ‘consolifying’ their games by simplifying them for the ‘broader’ (let’s be kind) console audience. Consoles moved closer to PCs by becoming internet-capable and as a result acquiring hard drives (and often mouse and keyboard peripherals too).

And this is where things start to go wrong, gentle reader.

The prevalence of high-speed internet and consoles with hard drives meant that developers of both console and PC backgrounds realised that if their games were unfinished they could be patched after release. Release dates could therefore be met, with quality becoming a lesser concern. Games magazines (both online and off) preferred not to rock the boat and so partly-finished games received glowing reviews in the press. If you need examples, then I need simply to point you to the fiasco that was Gran Turismo 5. A game that Sony eventually demanded to be released unfinished as it had massively run over schedule, it was laughably lacking in content and required a stonking patch to be downloaded. Yet it was critically lauded by most online and offline publications.

And of course, Bethesda’s at it again too, with games like Fallout 3 and Skyrim needing patches after the fact (Fallout 3 needing some serious patching to make it playable). And it’s not just patching. Some games come half-finished and requiring players to download the final chapter to see the true ending. Games come without all the characters unlocked, and some you have to buy online.

This needs to stop.

Just because you can rush a game to meet the deadline and patch it after the fact, doesn’t mean you should. It’s getting into lazy habits and encouraging a mentality amongst publishers of releasing half-done games and gouging the consumer for extra content as DLC.