Comment by Repulsion9513
9 months ago
> a crashing released game is better than a half-finished "perfect" game
For who? I, and I'm pretty sure most other gamers, would rather a fully-finished "perfect" game that took twice as long.
9 months ago
> a crashing released game is better than a half-finished "perfect" game
For who? I, and I'm pretty sure most other gamers, would rather a fully-finished "perfect" game that took twice as long.
> For who? I, and I'm pretty sure most other gamers, would rather a fully-finished "perfect" game that took twice as long.
Evidence suggests otherwise. Of all demographics, gamers appear to be the most tolerant of buggy software.
I'm playing a 2020 game right now that has (in about 30 hours of gameplay):
1. Crashed twice 2. Froze once 3. Has at least ONE reproducible bug that a player would run into at least once every mission (including the first one).
Since this game is now so old it's not getting any more patches, these bugs are there for all eternity, because they just do not move the needle on enjoyment by the gamer.
Searching forums for Far Cry 5 Bugs gives results like this: https://www.reddit.com/r/farcry/comments/1ai4jzx/has_far_cry...
Gamers just don't care about bugs unless it stops them playing the game at all!
In order for bugs to have an effect on gamer enjoyment, it literally needs to make the game unplayable, and not just make the player reload from the last savepoint.
> Evidence suggests otherwise. Of all demographics, gamers appear to be the most tolerant of buggy software.
Evidence suggests otherwise. Of all demographics, game studios appear to be the most tolerant of buggy software. bladeblablabla
Just go look at CP2077 or BF2042 or Fallout 76 or ...
So many games out there that no one wanted to play until they finally actually made a game that was ready for release, a year or more after they released it.
> 1. Crashed twice 2. Froze once 3. Has at least ONE reproducible bug that a player would run into at least once every mission (including the first one).
Sounds about on par even for enterprise software, in cases where shipping quickly is prioritized over overall quality, doubly so for gamedev which is notorious for long hours and scope creep.
The problem is we would have a lot less games and the games we would get would not be as fun. Rust appears to have the following problems:
1) As the article pointed out, game developers are less productive in Rust. This is a huge problem.
2) Game budgets are not going to get bigger. This means that if Rust reduces productivity, games are going to be less polished, less fun, etc. if they are written in Rust.
3) Game quality is already fine. 99% of the games I play have very few noticeable bugs (I play on an Xbox Series X). Even the games with bugs are still fun.
Basically, gamers are looking for fun games which work well. They are not looking for perfect software which has no bugs.
> As the article pointed out, game developers are less productive in Rust. This is a huge problem.
I don't think it's limited to just game developers though. Unless you are writing something in which any GC time other than 0ns is a dealbreaker, and any bug is also a dealbreaker, you're going to be less productive in Rust than almost any other language.
Oh, come on, we're yet again extrapolating from "Rust is bad at rapid iteration on an indie game" to "Rust is bad at everything". If Rust were really that astoundingly unproductive of a language, then so many developers at organizations big and small wouldn't be using it. Our industry may be irrational at times, but it's not that irrational.
5 replies →
Have you written much Rust?
Uhh, no, the games we got 15 years ago and before were definitely just as fun.
Hell no. Lots of these games take 5-7 years to make. You want to turn that into 10-14? I can live with the rare crash bugs.
What if it's 5-7, but only after there is a deep enough dev pool and language tooling to address some of the productivity issues mentioned in the blog? Why make up arbitrary x2 factors?
IDK, seems to me like studios did just fine putting release-quality games out at release 15-20 years ago shrug
"rare" LOL
No, the game doesn’t take twice as long. It just gets abandoned half-finished.
The world is full of half-finished games, it takes time and money to push to a finish.
Ah right that's why no games existed two decades ago.
It's a chicken-egg problem. You won't even see 10% of the bugs lurking in your game without releasing it to a wider audience, no matter how long you worked on it or how good your QA process is (that's what Steam's Early Access is for after all). YMMV depending on the complexity of the game of course.
But even if your game code is perfect and completely bug free, there are so many weird PC configs and buggy drivers in the wild that your game will crash for some users. And for the affected users it doesn't matter whether that crash is caused by crappy game code, or some crappy 3rd party software interfering with your game. For the user it's always the game's fault ;)
> You won't even see 10% of the bugs lurking in your game without releasing it to a wider audience, no matter how long you worked on it or how good your QA process is (that's what Steam's Early Access is for after all).
Just because they like to say that doesn't mean it's true. I've had access to see the list of known issues considered "critical" around release time for a few games. They know the bug exists, they just want to release it more than they want to fix it.
> But even if your game code is perfect and completely bug free, there are so many weird PC configs and buggy drivers in the wild that your game will crash for some users.
Which in no way invalidates the point that most modern games are absolutely unplayable for most users at release.
Oh yeah, and also that's why beta testing exists
perfect is the enemy of good. You never release anything thats perfect.
Perfect is impossible.
> "perfect"
> perfect
See the difference?
> I, and I'm pretty sure most other gamers, would rather a fully-finished "perfect" game that took twice as long
I have recently completed Cyberpunk Phantom Liberty. The game crashed 4-5 times during 100-150 hours of gameplay. The crashes were pretty much painless because I quick save often.
The game was amazing.
The development of the game started in 2012, 12 years ago. I’m not sure you or most gamers would rather want a fully-finished "perfect" Cyberpunk 2077 game released in 2036.
> 4-5 times during 100-150 hours of gameplay
Great, thanks for proving my point! If you had played CP at release, how many times would it have crashed?
Do you really think it would have taken them another 12 years to get to the point they're at now if they hadn't released it 4 years ago? SMH