Experience Points is an opinion piece series by Ben Bayliss, all opinions are in fact, my own, and though they may be published on the website, they do not speak for the website. Feel free to discuss the piece in the comments below.
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Recently, we’ve seen, Mafia III, Battlefield 1, and FIFA 2017, hitting our PC’s or consoles, but rather than reporting on how great the game could be, there seems to be a huge collection of glitches and bugs that have been captured during a gamers time with the game(s).
Mafia III is possibly the most bug ridden game I’ve come across to date – if you know of any more, fire them my way, not Skyrim though, everyone loves the glitches in that – Mafia III has fallen bodies bouncing off the floor, boats spinning out and flipping into the sky, players characters chests stretching out a stupid amount of feet from them. FIFA 2017 players morph into each other, get stuck in an animation, or have no heads. And Battlefield 1 can have players falling through the floor, Horses stuck in windows, animations frozen in time. These are all highly anticipated titles that players were waiting for with great anticipation.
And sure, players have made a joke about these bugs, and sure, some players have complained about them ruining their time with the game, or disrupting their progression; but it brings forth the questions, are games these days becoming too rushed? Are games trying to cram too much information in that it’s essentially breaking the game?
There’s obviously a huge demand for video games, and with social media allowing players an easier way to pester developers, the pressure is on. My one theory for the bugs being so prominent these days is perhaps the games are being rushed to meet the demands of players.
We all know there’s magic moments to release a game, Q1, Q2, Q3, and Q4 are all times games get released with some quarters releasing more than others. That’s due to stats showing that those are the best time to release that game, so if those developers are trying to rush a game to completion so it can be ready for release, could they be missing out on some crucial coding moments?
My other theory is one I believe more than my first. We may be living in a world of advanced technology, but with the recent announcement of the latest CoD hitting over 100GB, I think half of these bugs are coming from the computer and consoles struggling to process all the data. There’s a crap load of polygons to create, there’s shading to render, there’s hundreds, and hundreds of animations to process, there’s events being scripted around the player. It’s never ending. FIFA shows some players acting out an animation suddenly, possibly because the computer has got so much to organise. It’s going to be mayhem in that machines brain!
Either way, people love bugs. Videos are all over YouTube, and Facebook hitting 100,000’s of views. They make great videos-for-views content, and spread happiness and laughter. I don’t want them to ever truly go away, but the amount of bugs that have been coming forth from those three games I mentioned in particular are a little bit…much. Not only that, but it seems that you can’t really appreciate a glitch, or a bug unless you’re sharing it with someone. So if you’re playing in solitude, it’s just a nuisance.
What are your views on this?
And of course, who can forget Assassin’s Creed: Unity with it’s absent faces? Horrifying and hilarious at the same time.