Recently I’ve been playing some old classic Nintendo 64 games on my console, and we all love those classic’s right? Such as Banjo-Kazooie, Banjo-Tooie, Goldeneye 007, Legend of Zelda, Super Mario and much more. However there’s one major difference between those games and games made today such as, Fallout 3, Modern Warfare 2, and the Halo series, and that is the Nintendo Games came out on cartridges that you plug into the console, not discs that almost every game today comes out on.
Prior to these discs each game had to be tested many many many many, times to rid them of any bugs that they could have missed or show themselves later in testing, this had to be done because once the game was shipped there’s no way to fix the bugs. An example of a game with almost no bugs is Banjo-Tooie for Nintendo 64, all the above Nintendo games also have very few or no errors but i’ll focus on Tooie. I’ve played this game through many times on my classic Nintendo and enjoyed it thoroughly without coming across a single bug, testing back in those days was truly amazing.
Compared to a game such as Fallout 3, where if you don’t come across an error the game’s broken, shows the declining ability to test games properly before releasing them. The major reason they aren’t properly tested is the lack of time they have to actually test the games, due to extremely close deadlines they must meet. They also have an excuse not to test before they ship it because they can just wait till users find the errors and just put a patch on the internet to download. However this deducts from the immersion of the game when it crashes to desktop and you have to restart it at the last save, and i’d prefer to have a bug free gaming experience even if it takes a little longer for the game to be released.
Fallout 3 is also a much bigger game than it’s Nintendo counterparts so finding all those errors would be a pain to say the least, having to do every interaction multiple times with every possible setting, and even then there are almost limitless pc configurations you could have which need to be tested. Even on modern console games where hardware isn’t a factor there are still multiple errors in games, if these base errors were fixed that would only leave incompatibility errors and seeing as components work almost flawlessly in a Ps3 or Xbox there shouldn’t be any errors at all left in the game.
An example of a game where the developers couldn’t be bothered looking for errors is Fallout New Vegas. Instead of letting the player free roam every part of the map they set up invisible walls around the whole world and regions the player couldn’t enter such as mountains, which stopped a free-roam RPG game to be able to be roamed on. In my opinion this is MUCH worse than having errors in the game, I would rather become stuck behind a tree and be allowed to free roam the ENTIRE map, than be blocked off by completely un-realistic invisible walls. That is also one of the reasons that Fallout 3 surpasses New Vegas, you were able to roam everywhere anytime of the day, and even though you became stuck sometimes it beats staring through the wall wishing you were on the other side.
If every company focused on having a fully completed and tested game just like putting it onto a cartridge games would be much more enjoyable and you wouldn’t need to spend hours trying to find a “pixel shading” graphics card or downloading the latest DirectX version. Games would be almost bug-free again and gamer’s would spend less time configuring the game and more time playing it.
I’m hopeful that game companies will pick up their game (No pun intended) and extend the release date’s of games to fully check the game for errors instead of taking the lazy way around no matter how big the game.
