It is never OK and I suspect the guys who did put the time and effort into creating this game are upset also. They develop, the penny counters tell them when to release....whether completed or not. We bear the brunt. I think UBI is making good with the patches. So far, I'm very happy with the game and the patches thus far.

I would bet it had a lot to do with the fact that broadband is widespread nowadays, and patches are easier to deliver to end users. In the old days, releasing a patch involved writing it to disks or burning it to CD's and mailing it to users, all of which cost money. Now that the costs of distributing patches have been erased by the broadband age, I imagine it's easy for software publishers to release a title with known bugs that they plan on patching later in order to realize immediate profits.

Stop with this. I used to thnk the same thing, but in reality it's nonsense and entirely false. Both the devs and the publishers signed on the bottom line, they both had contractual obligations to meet, everything was in writing beforehand.

The devs knew far in advance, probably before they even started, when they were expected to have the game finished. The publisher doesn't just pick any old day, call the devs and say "Today's the day! Dev time over! Drop what you're doing and ship it!"

Both sides are guilty to some degree, but if you want to pick a side point the finger at the devs. They're the ones developing the game under the timetable they agreed to beforehand and they're the ones who may or may not have provided a finished product worth your money (depending on your opinion on the state of the game right now).

Why isn't this thread locked already.

Pretty much when the first graphically-intensive game hit the shelves. Once upon a time games were reliably programmed from the get-go --- then again, they were also limited to somewhere around 540K of RAM, were rarely larger than a megabyte, and "cool graphics" meant they came in multiple colors and maybe some limited animation of still-frames. Aside from text, there wasn't all that much to screw up.

Nowadays, there are THOUSANDs of things that can go wrong --- and invariably, at least a few of them will. The real mark of a good game isn't that it's flawless out of the box, it's that the number of bugs that slip past QA are low and can be corrected in relatively short order.

Well said Mookie! IMHO, it's better to have a buggy (yet still playable and enjoyable) sub sim as opposed to no sim at all.

I'm hoping that we'll get one more patch that will get rid of the major bugs (radar, IDL, stopwatch among others) and maybe even some of the minor ones such as my sub appearing to fly thru the air when surfaced in heavy seas ;)

But even if we don't, I'm still very glad to have the opportunity to own SH4 and I don't regret a dime of the money I paid for it! Been playing and enjoying it, at least 2 hrs a night since the day it was released, so the cost per hour played is very reasonable.

Let's face it, it's in human nature to complain. It's gonna happen no matter what. If it isn't realistic enough, people will gripe.

However, if UBI had invented Star Trek type Holodeck technology, and released SH4 in that format, and the player perceived himself to be physically in the submarine, rocked to sea-sickness by waves, knocked to the deck by DC's, sweating like a pig in the sweltering heat and breathing the stench of his unwashed crew (enduring what the real submariners endured) they'd be complaining that it's "too real".

Just goes to show, doesn't pay to make games!

DH

When is the last time that any major project you undertook come off without a hitch? Without any unexpected delays or issues that needed to addressed? When everything went exactly as planned?

Doo doo happens. And that throws development schedules off.

Never. An error-free project doesn't happen. The day one of our jobs goes perfectly beginning to end is probably the day I'll get hit by a bus or something.

Yes it does. In most cases the doo doo doesn't delay the end date of the contract though. The contractor signed the deal, any doo doo that happens because of the contractor between beginning to end is the contractor's problem. The job ends on the date specified in the contract, doo doo or not.

Diggs has a right to voice his HONEST opinion!:yep:

well...not really.. if im building a building and dont finish up by the day i say i will i still have to finish it. i just dont get to charge the client for anything anymore.

And how many buildings have you built? It's a little more complicated than 'I just don't get to charge the client for anything anymore'. But building buildings is not what we're discussing in this thread.

I'm actually torn when I see "complaint" threads. Parts of me agrees with both sides.

On the one hand, it is true that games are a victim of our ever-rising expectations. In the past, we just accepted unrealistic or missing features as the inherent limitation of computer gaming, and what you bought was what you got, no patch. I admit, I'm getting spoiled. And I do believe that, when all is said and done, SH4 will be patched and modded to be an unbelievably great game.

On the other hand, I am getting very tired of the pattern where publishers rush devs to ship a product that really isn't quite there yet, and rely on buyers to beta test it and modders to bring it up to its full potential. This is NOT unique to Ubisoft or to SH4. In fact, it is becoming SOP. If you looked at a forum for Medieval 2: Total War about 6 months ago, you would have seen EXACTLY the same complaint threads flowing from a nearly identical situation. Personally, I put off buying SH4 until the 1.2 patch came out, and I'm glad I did. Right now, I'm playing off and on, but I'm really waiting for 1.3 to get serious. But I am tired of downloading fixes to this and that, and being a pawn in this entire process. As I've said before in other posts, I am willing to pay $100 (a 100% premium) for a game that works right out of the box, and I'm curious to see if a publisher will ever take me up on this.

One of the frustrating aspects of SH4, in particular, is how many features that worked well in SH3 got screwed up in SH4. Granted, often this is minor, but it does kind of make you want to bang your head and ask "HOW? WHY?" But there are also many great improvements that make it hard to go back to SH3, which is why I hope someone will ultimately mod the SH4 engine to run a German sub campaign.

Yes, it's sad. But there have been thousand threads on this already and frankly, I'm a little angry.

...8. Advertisement.
9. Sound effects.
10. Music.
11. Game testing.
12. Copy protection.
13...

Come on, let's make a complete list! This is fun!

I agree wholeheartedly with you on both of these points. Or as Homer Simpson so eloquently put it: "Hmm...your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter"

"As I've said before in other posts, I am willing to pay $100 (a 100% premium) for a game that works right out of the box, and I'm curious to see if a publisher will ever take me up on this."


Why should you have to pay double to get what you should have been getting all along?

have to agree with that, cant be said better