Cold Coffee: Unfinished Games

As the video game industry continued to push forward, full throttle, games are becoming larger and much more complex. Massive teams of developers are working for months and sometime even years to create these larger than life games; it makes you wonder how they find the time to finish every little rock or tree. The answer is simple…they don't.

Often, while wandering open world games such as Fallout or The Elder Scrolls, players will discover trees hovering above the ground or other such unfinished visual errors. These are understandable and are rarely anything out in the open that most players will see immediately. Small visual blunders aren't the real issue when it comes to these games; it's the bugs that come with them.

Bugs are the term for coding errors that result in anything from broken pixels to game-breaking crashes. Skyrim is probably the latest and greatest example of these little critters. Players around the world still claim to find glitches and other such atrocities throughout their gameplay experiences such as NPCs without faces or characters falling through the ground. I'm not a huge fan of these and will now wait a month or so before picking up the latest game just to avoid the major game-breaking bugs.

I made the exception with Borderlands 2 and have yet to encounter any sort of bugs whatsoever on PS3 but the reports are coming in almost everyday of new glitches. There was the golden chest glitch, the co-op saving issue and now the latest reports that rank tokens are randomly disappearing, along with the stat boosts they offered.

Should these games be delayed until the developers have a chance to play through thoroughly and remove these bugs or do you prefer a highly anticipated game to be released on time with the bugs included? It's a natural thing now to expect big games to be full of issues that will affect your experience. I understand that the gaming community frowns upon video game delays and more time in production means more money but shouldn't a product be at least playable before it's released to the public?

Yes, developers will work their asses off to fix these issues with a ‘patch' as soon as they're discovered but new ones seem to arise with every update that's released. Does anyone remember Skyrim's update that made the view underwater much more realistic and visually appealing? I do. I remember updating and then walking into the water, only for the game to freeze up completely and crash. This happened every single time you entered any body of water for a majority of players. While it was later fixed, many issues have yet to be resolved and it's really just a shame that fans are coughing up their hard earned money for an unfinished game.

What's your opinion on the matter? D you believe video games should be released on time with all their bugs or delayed further in an attempt to fix as many of these issues as possible? Hit us on Facebook and let your voice be heard.