PC Games are way too buggy!!!

[OneOfTheseDays]

this is getting out of hand. I spent good money on GTA 3 and we all know what a FINE job they did on that port. I also picked up Neverwinter Nights and although I'm impressed with the game, it constantly stutters (this is actually a documented problem even for people with 1 GB of RDRAM).

it seems as if it takes a good 3 months AFTER a company releases a game before they get around to patching it up the way it should be when it first ships. By that time, unless it has some significant replay value, i have already moved on to the next game. The PC gaming industry will never reach the popularity of consoles if it keeps up this shoddy programming. While there are great PC game companies that put out great non-buggy software, they are far outnumbered by the crappy all glitz no heart companies that exist today.

 

[Nothinman]

So buy a console, I was playing GTA3 on PS/2 since it was released and didn't have a single problem.

 

[RudeBoie]

Most people probably didn't have that much in problems with GTA3 other than poor performance (not necessarily a bug) or things that turned out to be solved by that one XP patch and didn't read.

Stability is always a question of, is it the GAME that's buggy and coded wrong, OR the drivers and the OS (we all know about our own problems on both things ).

After all, most of these same companies do fine on a static platform, like game consoles. Do they suddenly become lazy on the PC side? Likely not. It's an issue on both sides.

Sure, there are stable games out there, but going into why X can do it and Y can't is something a real game programmer should go into. There are so many vars after all..........

Even games from ID, which are released fairly stable, are patched/modified/improved/whatever u may call it for a long time after released.

I think most companies do a good job with trying to address stuff while also trying to satisfy the bottom line (ie if we release this in 6 months and make it supremely optimized and crash proof, we may lose 50% revenue). Some though, are just flat out piss poor.

Shame to hear about NWN though.

 

[duragezic]

And the amount of quality PC games just seems to be dropping... And the damn consoles get the good games. Originally I thought CMR2 was PC and PS2 but now I seen it was PS2, maybe Xbox, and no mention of PC. But I don't want a console...

 

[YaKuZa]

How many different kinds of PC's are there? By that I mean, how many different ways can you build a PC? How many different types of drivers are there? A LOT. Now how many different kinds of PSX2's are there? Does one PSX2 differ from another?

 

[FlowerMan]

I tend to make a habit of only purchasing games from reputable software developers/publishers. Take Blizzard for example. WC3 isn't even out yet and they have a patch out today They're generally great with patches and support. It's harder for smaller companies to devote a lot of time towards fixing their products, so buying games that you know are reputable will save you some headaches later

 

[Nothinman]

How many different kinds of PC's are there? By that I mean, how many different ways can you build a PC? How many different types of drivers are there? A LOT. Now how many different kinds of PSX2's are there? Does one PSX2 differ from another?

But it should work out that the differences don't matter (except for hardware speeds of course). Drivers all implement the same functions, libraries like OpenGL and D3D expose the same functions for apps to call and everything funnels down the API chain the same manner with same effects. Obviously some things can be attributed to bugs in the software, either the drivers or the higher level APIs, but most of them come from developers doing just plain stupid things. By developers I mean MS most of the time, they're software is the most inconsistent in the world, from version to version you have no idea what's different and what's not. If MS could produce a consistent platform to develop on, I would bet most of the problems in general, not just with games, would go away.

iD software produces games like Q3 that perform exactly the same on Linux, Win32 and Mac OS (OS 9 and X IIRC) and I think that is a testament to iD (obviously) and to the OpenGL API spec. Of course there were a few platform specific bugs, but from what I've seen they've been pretty scarce.