Delays, bugs, day-one patches and broken online components: several big-budget games have launched in a compromised state recently. Why is this happening? And is it likely to change any time soon? games™ investigates…
DriveClub was supposed to be one of PlayStation 4’s big hitters. Every console needs a flagship racer, and with the next edition of Gran Turismo likely to be years away from release, that mantle passed to Evolution Studios. More significantly, it was a game at the centre of Sony’s socially-focused vision for the console. We were promised that this would be truly connected, next-gen racing. Just ahead of PS4’s arrival, Sony announced that DriveClub had been delayed until early 2014. At the time, Sony Worldwide Studios boss Shuhei Yoshida said: “The team requires more time in order to deliver on their vision – and I’m fully confident the game will surpass your expectations.”
When DriveClub finally arrived, almost a year to the day of the original delay announcement, expectations were not surpassed. In fact, they weren’t even met. Despite the developer running a series of pre-launch stress tests, the servers simply couldn’t cope, with players regularly unable to connect. Evolution Studios decided to operate a one-in, one-out policy, which was understandably greeted with anger and disappointment on forums and social media. Meanwhile, the promised free PlayStation Plus version of the game – which Sony had extensively used in its promotion of the service – was postponed until further notice in order to ease the strain. By the end of November, players were still experiencing technical issues, and there was no sign of the free version materialising.
Yet DriveClub’s disastrous launch is far from the only recent example of a big-budget game releasing in less than ideal condition. Assassin Creed: Unity’s glitches are legion, widely criticised along with the game’s inconsistent frame-rate. Ubisoft responded by releasing three patches in short order, while the publisher’s Montreal & Toronto CEO Yannis Mallat issued an apology, promising that the upcoming Dead Kings DLC would be free for everyone, with existing Season Pass holders given the option to download one of a handful of Ubisoft games for no extra charge. Halo: The Master Chief Collection and World Of Warcraft expansion Warlords Of Draenor also both suffered at launch, with the former’s online component all but inaccessible and the latter suffering from long queue times.
Games launching with significant problems isn’t actually a new phenomenon, as experienced designer Sam Barlow (Silent Hill: Shattered Memories) points out – it’s just that in the internet age they come under much closer scrutiny. “It’s human nature when you have projects with huge engineering complexity that people end up underbidding and responding to pressure from above by estimating optimistically,” he says. “These projects always then take longer.
Think about high profile construction works, any large infrastructure projects – the pyramids probably missed their ship date. So games have always been buggy, but now we have social media and YouTube to share the bugs. In the Eighties, bugs were urban myths, a bit magical. You heard about them second hand, they weren’t plastered over the front page of every gaming website. Speaking to developers who made the 8-bit games of my youth I’ve heard so many confessions — about the games that shipped unwinnable because they ran out of time, so they made the game so hard or just put literal brick walls in the way.”
This issue is naturally exacerbated by the complexities of modern games: when you have a product with so many moving parts, you obviously increase the chance of one or more of those parts breaking down. In turn, quality assurance becomes more challenging, because testers have much more ground to cover, many more ways to try to break the game. Games can be released with 99% of their content in full working order, but it’s the 1% that will be picked out and pulled apart, as the internet collectively turns its harsh spotlight on the glitches and flaws.
Johnnemann Nordhagen, a veteran of Sony and 2K Marin, who programmed Gone Home and has since founded Dim Bulb Games, says that in his experience game developers know everything that is wrong with their game – and that it’s often more than players will ever see. “They will be the ones fighting passionately against the publisher-imposed deadlines in order to try to get more time for their features, bugs, or other issues to be resolved,” he says. “There’s definitely a realisation that games need to sell well – or the whole team might be laid off – but when you’ve poured years of your life into a project, you want to ship something that you can be proud of. And that means both putting in tons of hours or crunch time to try to fix those issues, and pushing back against the publisher or business folks, trying to get more time or more resources to be able to bring the game out in the best [condition].”
So why don’t publishers delay games more often when they’re clearly not going to be finished in time? In truth, over the past few years we’ve started to see projects slipping by a few months or more – Battlefield: Hardline’s launch being shifted back into 2015 is merely the most high-profile of recent cases – but these are still the exceptions to the norm.
Brett Douville is a former lead programmer at Bethesda Game Studios, who worked on Fallout 3 and Skyrim. Though he’s reluctant to give specific examples, naturally, he’s been privy to a number of publisher decisions of this nature. He agrees with our other interviewees that these decisions are driven almost exclusively by economic issues. “Publicly-traded publishers who establish business expectations based on annual product models expect a certain amount of income every year from these franchises,” he says. “Quality can suffer as a result.”
Part of the problem is a financial need to hit that crucial holiday launch date. A pre-Christmas release really is that important, says Nordhagen. “I’ve heard amazing figures bandied about,” he tells us. “Many things for that season have to be prepared well in advance – ad buys, store placement, so on, all have to be negotiated and paid for months ahead of time. Missing the deadline doesn’t only miss out on sales, it impacts the marketing campaign and the relationship of the publisher with the retail partners.”
“Annual expectations and track records cut both ways,” adds Douville. “Developers know that they are expected to deliver at that time, and who wants to be the lead producer or programmer who is the one to break that schedule and let down the company?” This, he says, can lead to a range of communication problems, from overly optimistic scheduling to misread signals about what can reasonably be expected.
The sheer scale of the modern triple-A title means a huge marketing investment, and that can ultimately outweigh any development concerns. But marketing can also actively infect the development process in a very damaging way, as Barlow explains.
“The proportion of budget spend necessitates getting marketing sign off earlier in the process, and requires that external parties commit to sales targets,” he says. “This means that early development work is increasingly steered to help this process. It means that important milestones such as the classic ‘vertical slice’ have changed beyond all recognition. What used to be a development-focused milestone is now a slave to marketing. Game mechanics are sidelined and dropped in the priority list in order to amp up spectacle and streamline the experience to produce a ‘playable trailer’. Money is spent on razzle-dazzle and the whole development process is upturned.”
With more time and effort invested in spectacle instead of the more important – though naturally less marketable – preparatory work, it’s little wonder that development teams are increasingly struggling to cope with the workload, and that’s before you factor in the pressure of crunch periods. Only consumer response, it seems, is capable of forcing a change in approach. Until we see a widespread rejection of the practice of ‘release first, patch later’, it’s likely that this problem is only going to continue – if not worsen.
You can read our review of Assasin’s Creed Unity HERE, and keep up with the latest debates in the games industry in each issue of games™.
