A disturbing trend: Buggy Games

[TinyGrasshopper]

I've recently purchased Assassin's Creed Director's Cut for PC and Mass Effect for PC. I also bought and played through Gears of War for PC awhile back.

Gears of War uses the Games for Windows thingy and apparently you need at least a free silver Live account to save the single player game which is ludicrous in and of itself. Logging it in to Live was the most error-prone buggy thing I had ever seen. I had to download two patches and try it a million times. lame.

Assassin's Creed shipped with a known issue stated in the readme where sound wouldn't play because of the hardware accelaration on the on-board sound controller. I have a on-board SoundMax HD Audio controller which has to be relatively common. weak.

Mass Effect however is the worst. It's the buggiest steaming load of crap I've ever come across. It literally crashes every 3-5 minutes. Often in predictable spots. I've tried it with every combination of graphical settings I could think of. Don't these fools know anything about QA. It's been out for months and only had one patch that barely updated or fixed anything.

I heard that GTA4 is another suspect, also sporting the weak Games for Windows infrastructure and being really buggy.

And they wonder why the PC audience is dwindling. Has anyone else had these kinda problems?

[Notnice]

Windows live did f**ked up GTA 4 bad in gta 4 u can not even give anyone else your saved games + modding that game is the worst.

[TinyGrasshopper]

Here's the Mass Effect is buggy forum thread. It's giant.

[Bone]

yeh i was getting that same problem with A CREED but its fixable
control panel/ sounds and audio divices/ advance/ proformance/
then just lower d Hardware acceleration
die with XP anyway

with Mass Effect, when i had my 8400gs then my 8600gt i was getting crashes and blue screen and thing but less with d 8600gt so i say is d card or drivers or somthing cause i try GTA4 with a 8800gt with latest Drivers 180. and it buggy but then i use 169. it working nice but just a lil laggy

[Nephilim]

guess i'm one of the lucky ones, never had a problem with any of them save GTA4, which i never run

[Philosophical45]

hmm never had a problem with assassin's creed, haven't played out mass effect, just tried it, never experienced a problem. GTA4 is d mc culprit though, i feel i'm gonna have to wait till i get a quad core to run that game a bit better. dang the frames suck.

[TinyGrasshopper]

with Mass Effect, when i had my 8400gs then my 8600gt i was getting crashes and blue screen and thing but less with d 8600gt so i say is d card or drivers or somthing cause i try GTA4 with a 8800gt with latest Drivers 180. and it buggy but then i use 169. it working nice but just a lil laggy

I have a 9500gt. The minimum version that works with the card is 177. rolled back to that and mass effect still didn't work. so far, it's gotten frozen consistently in the very first cutscene right after some fancy gun shoots a blue beam. I got around that by lowering graphics settings.

The next point that it's been freezing is right after that when you take your guy and starting talking to the very first weird alien dude right after. no amount of changing graphics or audio settings has fixed that so far.

[Archer]

Anyone played Mercs 2 for PC? well that another buggy title with main bug being memory leaks, which slows down fps at times. Real annoying.

[Nephilim]

sup archer.

welcome to the forums, introduce yuhself in the newbie corner, hit we what games yuh into, tech etc, maybe how you find the site too, remember to read the forum rules, there is a summary in the BIG NO NOs of gatt thread (gonna have to search it - top right hand corner), its pretty straight fwd.

mercs 2 on PC?

will investigate.

[Archer]

Hmmmm, next potentially buggy game; Saints Row 2 ( PC version). Dunno about this one , as i have yet to pick up my own copy but from what i've read there have been some incidents of drops in fps on the PC version. But still running a lil better than GTA4.

[Bone]

u wasted your time with mercs2, played first stage of that game then uninstalled it. d game just 2 buggy, laggs for no reason

[Archer]

u wasted your time with mercs2, played first stage of that game then uninstalled it. d game just 2 buggy, laggs for no reason

Yeah i know i said it has memory leaks, though it was still playable for me. The lagging is caused by the memory leaks.

HELLO! GAME TESTERS.........DO YOUR JOBS.

[Eroo]

Socom for PS3. It actually just a collection of bugs packaged as a game.

[shivadee]

u wasted your time with mercs2, played first stage of that game then uninstalled it. d game just 2 buggy, laggs for no reason

Yeah i know i said it has memory leaks, though it was still playable for me. The lagging is caused by the memory leaks.

HELLO! GAME TESTERS.........DO YOUR JOBS.

1. game testers are actually as dumb as posts (some of them)

quoting a comment from a form one did for SOCOM for PS3
""When i play in multiplayer other people keep sniping me and i lose the round. I dont understand why such and unbalanced weapon like the sniper rifle is even in this game. Nobody should be allowed to mill me instantly like that with one shot just because they practiced at the game and now have the skill to aim the gun while its zoomed in and precisely target my head, its just not fair"

This is the level of intelligence we are dealing with at times people.

2. as for relations analysts and PR

"Sad to say alot of the game just doesnt look good, especially when compared to games that are on the shelf now- in fact, it almost looks like a game thats not finished! When do you think we can see some graphics that are completely and totally representative of the final product? If you could put something together for next tuesdays marketing review that would be great"

This is 18 months before the game is done. Initially in prototype stages. ONE week? what you smoking? Do you even KNOW the production cycle of this title? yet alone ANY title?

this list goes on from articles on Game Developer.

The problem is management. You dont manage your team you dont have the time to fix your bug issues.

Its also a BIG part of the CEO board to purposely release a game with bugs now with the state of the US economy. (this is for PC). The reason being to prevent piracy, allowing the people who downloaded this game via torrent to have to wait months (or weeks) for a hacksite to release a 1.1 patch update to fix an issue resolved one week after launch (meaning you know that patch was just sitting there waiting on purpose).

this is not always the case though. Sometimes the team just sucks at interacting and end up with garbage.

PC games are in for a big hit this year because of piracy mind you.

[Nephilim]

just so you know, the new nividia vista drivers out fixed mass effect for me, i assume you guys on vista so it should work there too.

[Archer]

yeah i downloaded some new graphics drivers from nvidia, works, helps performance in Gta 4 and my other games. Oh yeah im on vista so will work for other vista ppl. Look at that one driver solve so many problems,  . Game on ppl.