Ai in MGS 5 is pretty darn good. Farcry introduced some excellent animal predator/Prey Ai's I also credit the Radiant Ai system used in Bethesda's games. FEAR and Crysis had a pretty decent flanking system. Assassins Creed has pretty good A.i. Project Cars has one of the better Ai systems in racing games but there's only so much you could expect computer drivers to do anyway. Sports games today definitely have good Ai compared to old ones. Chess Ai is amazing if you look at the Deep Rybka engine or even Fritz.
I've seen a clip in MGS5 where they followed the player who was on a ladder and fell down instantly upon touching the ladder and died one after the other. Radiant AI is so convoluted that its a mess, great in theory sh*t in practice. Fear does have some good AI, besides fear maybe stalker comes close to well done and hard AI.
I didn't say any Ai was perfect because there isn't one single Ai system out there that is. I mentioned those as being very good. Who cares about some NPC on a ladder somewhere? I never saw it nor would I care if I did, the enemies responded to my actions outstandingly
I'm 45 and would say that it was your younger mind back then helping you to get more immersed into the games. Immersion was easier because a.) we didnt have to deal with all the stuff we deal now as adults and b.) Games were tested & designed with love & made 100% out of the tech that was available. Games were perfect because the industry wasnt as greedy as nowadays, senior designers had a lot of influence when dealing with publishers and - a big part - games weren't thrown out as beta versions because your clients couldnt just download 1 gigabyte for a day1 patch. Also the game devs were prob more experienced when it comes to game theory. You couldnt learn computer games development, many talents came from other areas like tabletops etc. The theory behind the games was deep and it worked. So long story short, it's actually both ways: you were younger and could get more immersed into games and games in general were done with more attention to detail and would work perfectly out of the box, along with printed maps & other materials.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HF-XwRy-sfA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPFbhUeM8As I wouldn't call it very good. Its alright.
We all had much lower standards back then though, so I dont even believe the comments that games were less buggy back then. People just accepted it as a game "quirk" While I agree with the comment above about the golden era being based upon your age, i don't think I made it as far as 22 as for me as for me that era is the 80s and 90s and I was born in 1980. That pretty much includes games, movies and music. Gaming is better than ever these days, we have the huge budgeted games that are based on making a profit and a large selection of indie games, good and bad.
I can talk of the games and genres I play, project cars AI is garbage. You can literally grab a track and a car, restart several times, and see the AI make the same mistakes again and again and again, even if cars get pushed at the right angle you can see them driving instantly backwards just like in shift 1. If you practice enough you can see that the fastest cars always keep hotlapping one of two times (one hell good or a garbage one ) depending on some bogus reason, basically, if you want a fast AI again you have to quit to menu and launch the race again. Assetto Corsa, it has been AI on rails since the beggining, they have been improving it but still. Codemaster games on hardest difficulty, another hotlap record paper retriever. The new gran turismo to be released, ai cars on replays still look like drones like 20 years ago.
Exactly. There are tons of games that people look back on with nothing but positive memories. But... in reality, Deus Ex... released with lots of bugs and performance issues. System Shock 2, was riddled with bugs and glitches. The original Thief also had it's far share of problems. Look at Bethesda, their games being buggy isn't something new that started with Oblivion or Fallout 3. Or what about one of the biggest cult favorite games ever. Vampire: Bloodlines. The game was basically released unfinished. And people loved it then, even when it contained game ending bugs. Some may think people had lower standards then, personally... I think some have just gotten jaded now. Back then we dealt with issues and problems because the game was worth it. And, today... fantastic games get released with issues, and some of the first responses are "This is garbage! Screw these developers!!" and on and on.
So it´s fine that we get buggy games today because we got buggy games 20 years ago. Game ports were already getting really good in general in the era of the xbox360, but now we are in the generation of x86 consoles (they can put cheap average programmers to good use now) and of course the gigantic patches, results, mediocre after mediocre port in such short periods of time. Launch today patch tomorrow seems to be their motto now. Ps.- I still can´t believe that we are getting fighting games without re-bindable keys :3eyes::3eyes:
Very much this, which can be very frustrating when it's a singleplayer game, you would think testing a product before release would be a good thing to do but it seems like a lot of the big devs treat players as beta testers to find bugs, and not just hard to find bugs, bugs that can be found by an average joe within half an hour of gameplay. I am starting to not buy games at release because of this, it really ruins the fun.
No. A game should be as polished as possible when it's released. Optimized, with as few bugs and glitches as possible. But, people need to be realistic and understand that there will always be games with problems. Always. And, it just is a little sad that some years ago... people would deal with issues if the game was fun and a good game underneath. Now, if a great game has even just a few issues... well it's garbage and the studio is crap and on and on and on.
I usually only blame them when they start doing the same mistakes again and again, they stablish themselves as the usual suspects... it´s like they start from zero every time, learn nothing and don´t care.
Look at a game like FF3 for snes (ff6 if you prefer Jap numbering) and then look at FF15. Look at the bugs you encounter now. Have a PS4 Pro? Great! Here's 4k with lots of hitching. Don't have a Pro? We still have bugs for you! Here's a patch, and another and another. Then the milking of the series. Get some DLC. Followed by more. Don't understand this part? Well you didn't watch our CGI movie! Buy that over here and then buy this.. Meanwhile FF3, play it, enjoy it, beat it. For me, that's gaming in a nutshell. It's become obsessed with greed and giving gamers as little as possible for the "core" game, to suck more out of you financially for the rest. Most of it isn't original. It isn't heartfelt. It's done by a 200 man team of hipsters pushing out pixels to buy their Starbucks and pay their bar tabs. The small teams with vision are dead. It's all EA structured, corporate crap with graphics first, story second, game play third. The industry will implode. It has to. It's not going to sustain these changes for the long-term and most of these companies know that, they're grabbing what they can before another gaming crash happens. Then you have the hopefuls looking for a new experience to change things. Like VR or AR. The problem with those is, they may look promising, but the content provided comes from the same greedy companies ruining regular gaming. 25% of it is, as a child, everything seems great when you think back on it as an adult. 75% of it is, the industry is in the toilet, it just hasn't been flushed yet. EDIT: And I constantly read people defend games today as being bigger and with more scope and more complexity. I say BS. FF3 was a HUGE game with scope and complexity for it's time. It was just as big and daunting back then, but done with more effort.
It is still your responsibility as a consumer to get informed about the products before you spend your money on them. If a game has performance issues or bugs, it's usually well documented by multiple reviewers. In the information age, feigning ignorance is an obvious cry for attention. Don't like buggy games? Here's what you do: 1. Stop pre-ordering games. Just because you're excited about a game doesn't mean it will be good. 2. Read a few reviews, or at least look at a list of review scores so you can get some idea of where the game landed. 3. Go pull up a "first impressions" video on youtube and see what the game looks like in action. Games in the 8 and 16 bit era were made by a few people in a single room. Games these days are orders of magnitude more complex, and frequently made by hundreds of people, running on code that they did not build themselves. It is only logical that the number of bugs and problems will be similarly magnified. If you have a problem with that, then you need to get educated on how game development happens, what the challenges are, and adjust your expectations. "Lazy devs" is just a lazy excuse to be a lazy consumer. If a game you're excited about has issues, there's a very simple solution: wait to buy it. Wait for a year or more. Wait until the game drops very low in price, and has been patched multiple times. No one is holding a gun to your head telling you to buy games at release. You can always chose to vote with your wallet and let Publishers/Developers know that buggy games are worth less than excellent performers. And if you feel pressured to buy a game that has bugs at release so you can feel like a part of the in-crowd, then getting screwed will come with that territory. Deal with it.
That's a whole lot of assumption. I've been gaming for almost 3 decades and I can count on one hand, how many times I've pre-ordered a game. Also, telling people to go listen to other people's opinion of a game is rather eye rolling. We all have our own tastes. I don't wait for IGN reviews, because I'm not IGN. While teams have grown in size, there is still a number of issues that can be corrected. You cannot tell me having a day one patch isn't lazy. You simply cannot. You can justify it however you want, troll me with links, articles and your all knowing opinion, possibly a few youtube videos from the sound of you, it's lazy. Pushing a game out the door to hit a date and worrying about a patch later is lazy, shoddy, sloppy development and before the age of the internet, it was not a thing. With technology comes a certain amount of complacency ...even apathy. As I said, an 80 hour rpg for snes was just as large of a game for it's time. It may have had a smaller team, but you're assuming that team knew how to do everything as if it was 2017 and not 1992. There were risks to take, bugs to squash, choices to make, dates to hit, money to make, etc back then just as much as now. There's a little thing called quality control. It's lacking nowadays because everything is a download away from a fix, when they get to it. And who buys a game to be in the "in-crowd"???? That's probably the dumbest thing I've ever read on here. I don't know anyone on this forum that's that shallow. Seriously, you're reaching just to be a prick. Take your meds and chill out. Considering your specs and the constant bugs and lack of support with sli, one can just as easily assume you're just as unable to wait and also want to be part of the "in-crowd". I wouldn't touch sli if nvidia paid me. But who am I to judge? I actually understand my opinion doesn't mean everyone should think my way. Take notes.
I'm not assuming all people who complain about bugs are also pre-ordering every game they play. But some percentage of people who complain about technical issues at a game's launch are also people who pre-order games. I didn't tell you to listen to someone else's opinion of a game. I said look at some reviews and some first impressions videos to see if anyone is mentioning technical problems. If there are technical issues, they are typically spoken about publicly at the game's launch, which means anyone buying the game can find that information and save their money. The test case here is Mass Effect: Andromeda. There are people out there who were butthurt over the game's many technical issues, who also pre-ordered the game, then complained about it on the internet. I'm not saying you did that, but some did. The same goes for every Bethesda game in the last decade. This is really simple: How much money do these publishers stand to lose by hitting their date and patching a game after the fact, vs. hanging onto the game until it's bug free, but missing their ship date? Answer: More than they stand to lose by releasing a game that's got some issues and patching it after the fact. They simply make more money in the long run having a long marketing campaign that leads up to a well publicized ship date, and hitting that date weather the game is "done" or not. You can make a moral case for why Publishers/Devs shouldn't release games with bugs, and that moral argument might make you feel like the good guy who is standing up for what is right, but that moral argument means nothing to a business who is looking at the raw financial data. The prime directive of any Publisher is to maximize revenue on the products they sell. We as consumers are buying games from businesses. It is illogical and unreasonable to expect a business to act like your friend. They aren't our friends - they're a business trying to sell you a product. No matter how good the marketing campaign or the buzz around a game, it's still a product. We as consumers should take the time to inform ourselves so we can make good decisions. If you don't like games with day one patches, then don't buy them. It's that simple. Wait until they've been patched enough that the performance is acceptable to you. I've had games I waited well over a year to purchase for this very reason. You know full well there are people out there who will gamble on a pre-order, hoping a game is good. Why do they do that? What reason do they have to risk wasting their money on a bad or broken game? Again, my post was not directed at anyone in particular. I'm speaking generally to the idea that it's acceptable to complain about bugs in games. SLI has never been a problem for me, except when it doesn't work at all. But I also tend to wait for 90-120 days because I know most games get some amount of patching, and there's typically a sale around that time. Of the major titles I've played since Q1 2015 when I bought my cards, everything has been fine. Going forward, I'll go back to one strong card. At the time I bought my 970s, the 980 wasn't enough to drive a 1440p monitor. That's the only reason I have SLI.
In no way is a day one patch lazy, a day 30/60/90 is lazy but working on a game up until release day isn't lazy. I can't understand the logic, would the alternative be delaying the game going gold instead if just releasing a launch day patch. How is this even relevant outside of consoles when PC gaming is entirely different digital anyway. People in the past had much lower standards and accepted less so put up with more crap, these days everyone is a critic and full of their own self importance. I would love to be a teenager gaming now, even with nostaligia I can't play childhood "classics" for any more than a few minutes at a time.
When buying a new game... I judge it off of certain things. The developers history. The game's they've released... did I enjoy them, did they amaze or show promise. Stability... things like that. Also, tone and style of the game plays a part. Even if it's a studio I've loved in the past, they may put out something now that simply doesn't interest me at all. And, as far as reviews go... I tend to ignore what is considered "professional" reviews. IGN, Gamestop... and, even though I love a lot of Giantbomb's content, I hate their reviews. And, I avoid STEAM reviews like a plague. The only "review" I may watch is ACG's on youtube. But even then, I take what he says very lightly. I'll either form my own opinion completely, or see what a few friends with similar taste think. But, I view it simply as... it's a gamble. No matter what the game is. No matter how makes it. There is no certainty. No promise of guarantee. The best developer can release a crappy game, and the bottom end studio can release a gem. It's a gamble. If I decide to drop 50 to 60 bucks on a game, that's on me. Not the studio, not the publisher... not the shop/site I bought it from. I made that decision. Yeah, if the game sucks then the developer dropped the ball. But, it was still my decision to buy the game. And, if I can't afford to take the gamble on a game... I don't. I wait for a sale or simply ignore it. EDIT: Yeah, Day One patches are not the sign of a "lazy" developer. Even the best developers with the most polished games have released day one patches because they continue to work on the product even after it's been submitted for release. Or, would people rather the studio simply stops working just because a Gold Master was handed off to the publisher? Day One patches help us. And they are in no way a sign of a poorly made game or a "lazy port".
