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Five Worst Ways For Devs To Not Finish A Game
By Pete Haas: 2008-08-27 17:15:05
While a company like Valve is allowed to take as long as it damn well pleases in making their games, other developers aren't so fortunate. They're sometimes forced to rush their products to market and often it results in an outright butchering of the game. Here are some of the most disgusting shortcuts they take:
1. Not enough play-testing - I'm all for surprises in games but having my character fall through the floor and die isn't exactly cinematic. Glitchy games are unfortunately very common; many developers are guilty of poor quality-assurance even if they aren't trying to meet a deadline. Sometimes they get lucky and the game is coded just fine but other times the players end up with an unplayable, buggy mess. One of my "favorite" bugs of all time was in Neverwinter Nights 2, a great RPG which unfortunately didn't have enough polish. When moving from one zone to another, occasionally a member of your party would just vanish into thin air like the older Cunningham brother from Happy Days. Funny but also really frustrating. 2. "Don't worry, it'll be in the downloadable content/expansion pack/patch!" - To make sure their game releases on time, some developers will just ship whatever they've done so far while they work on the unfinished portions. This has happened with essentially every MMO ever released. While developers often deliver the missing content (in some cases releasing patches even after their company is belly up), it's not fun to bring a new game home and realize it only has half of the announced features, and that you have to wait six months and/or pay money to get the rest. 3. Repetitive gameplay - This shortcut is an ugly stepsister of #2. Upon realizing they won't have time to complete a game, some developers decide to simply milk the completed features for all their worth. "Okay, we only finished half the game...so let's take the half we finished and just double the size of it!" An example of this copy-paste mentality is found in Daikatana, where you'll spend the first level slogging through a dull-looking marsh and fighting an unending army of robotic frogs. 4. No multiplayer - These days, the multiplayer component of a game is often more extensive than the single-player campaign and developers can save themselves a huge amount of time by simply scrapping it altogether. The upcoming action game Prototype, for example, has been stripped of its intended multiplayer features by developer Radical Entertainment. While a game doesn't necessarily need multiplayer content (BioShock), online play adds countless hours to a game and its absence is very conspicuous. Fun fact: Gears of War almost had its multiplayer cut completely. Can you imagine if that game consisted solely of a five-hour single-player campaign? 5. No ending - Providing little to no conclusion to their game is probably the saddest of all the shortcuts a developer can take. One of the most recent examples is Knights of the Old Republic 2, which was an amazing game all the way up until the last hour or so, which was a half-complete mess. It sucks when this happens with any kind of game but with a role-playing game, it's an even harder blow because the genre is so story-driven. KOTOR2 fans have dutifully tried to piece together the intended ending with unused source files but the lack of closure in the original game left a bad taste in a lot of gamer's mouths. The fate of the game is even sadder when you look at companies that intentionally make shitty, abbreviated endings just to provide a cheap "cliff-hanger" for the next game in the series. These companies don't know how lucky they have it.
RELATED: knights of the old republic 2, gears of war, Bioshock, prototype, daikatana, editorial, dlc, neverwinter nights 2, valve
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