THE ART OF THE PREMATURE RELEASE
Are games arbitrarily released too early?

I would like to discuss what I believe is a very worrying trend in the gaming world today. On 11.11.11, the highly anticipated Skyrim was triumphantly released to an excited public desperate to lose themselves in the latest masterwork from Bethesda Softworks. It enjoyed near universal acclaim from critics and no doubt will bask in many awards in the not too distant future. Awards that I personally believe will be fully deserved.

So, what is the purpose of this post? Well, I also happen to believe that game developers (Bethesda included) are not doing themselves any favours when it comes to release dates, and that they need to tread carefully, lest they slip into the territory of selling goods that are not fit for the purpose for which they were made.

Now before anyone starts screaming for my blood, or a moderator decides to delete this thread because I am making accusations of illegal behaviour, Skyrim does not fall into this category. It is certainly fit for the purpose for which it was made, which is of course to play and enjoy. It is, in my opinion, an excellent game, despite its well documented flaws. But ... and there is a big but ... it seems that game developers have for a while now been knowingly selling goods BEFORE they have been satisfactorily completed.

In the case of this game, Bethesda decided last year that 11.11.11 was a really 'cool' date to release and stuck to it rigidly, and there was never a cat in hells chance of any slippage on such a great sounding date, no matter what the state of the game was.

Today, sadly, the vast majority of games are released this way, mainly because of strict publishing schedules, but it needn't be the case. 'People Power' can (and does) successfully bring governments to their knees, but only if enough people actually use it. The practice of releasing video games too early, for whatever reason, would cease very quickly indeed if enough people simply refused to purchase until the games were properly completed.

This is just an ideal of course. The real world plays differently and impatience dictates that the games are purchased en masse, the moment they are released. You cannot change this. It's just the way things are nowadays. But let's just pause and consider an anology for a moment:

A famous pop star releases a new full priced album. Upon playing the disc, it is discovered that it contains only three tracks. The artist then makes a public announcement: “Sorry, but I didn't have enough time to record any more songs in time to meet the publishers release date, and will therefore finish recording the tracks at some point in the near future. Oh and by the way - thanks for your money!”

This would of course not be tolerated and would open the artist and/or publisher up to prosecution in the courts.

But are not game developers now doing this very thing, right now?


Stannie

Release dates are a complicated issue. The publisher really ends up with the final say and dates are selected by taking many factors into account. One of the biggest factors is money, which is also what people are most vocal about, but it is not the only factor by a long shot.

If a publisher says the game comes out 11/11/11 then the developers need to have it done by then. Usually the devs and publishers agree upon the dates far ahead of time and use milestones to measure progress as it develops. If it's not done one time, at best the dev studio risks losing investment (salaries for your developers) and at worst it risks cancellation of the project. There are very very few devs that can get away with pushing back dates without substantial penalties (Blizzard).

Pretty much any project anyone has ever worked on ends up going slower than what was planned, so most of the time there is a huge crunch near the end to get it done on time. Penalties for late milestones are usually also addressed in the original agreement. Like I said earlier, a late game might mean you get less cash from the publisher, which means you might not be able to pay your employees, which obviously would be a hue problem for a developer.

So, could a company push back a game to work out all the bugs? Yes. Can they do it without bankrupting the studio? Maybe, but maybe less often than you think.
It is a much better bet for a studio to release a game as close to complete as they can then to delay it and risk dissolving itself.

Unlike music CDs, the Xbox 360, and PS3 are capable of free downloads and patches (assuming the person can hook the thing up to the internet). The concept sanctions the "I'll fix it whenever I want" mind set. There is also more slack among the jaded gamers who get what they want when they want it and be damned at what cost. The 360/PS3/PC/Mac game publishers love this as they don't have to follow standards to the letter to get your money. bliviongate:

When a huge amount of players play the game (millions upon millions of players), issues within the game will come forth that were unable to be seen with only a few testers, even if they'd be near one thousand.

And, your argument fails to come up with any actual evidence to back up your claim. You say most games out there are released on cool release dates when they aren't even ready? Name a few and your argument might even have something behind it, instead of sounding like a complain about why this and that wasn't included and why there's so many bugs everywhere.

As for your anology, it's not at all like that. What was not in Skyrim (or other games) that they added later, which were "supposed" to be in the original version? You can't count bugs to that. You cn't count design choices to that. What can you count there?

As somebody that has made a fairly large third party add-on for a game, I can truly say that even with a group of playtesters reporting, thousands of hours of research and checking my own work, and dozens and dozens of play-throughs of my own, I can point out over a hundred flaws in my own project. Some of the "OMGWTF was I thinking" variety. It's not as easy as people seem to think, to ferret out every bug or error. I will say that in my own project, playability was never reported to be an issue

While I agree with the OP to an extent, as one who has done a fair bit of modding I know from experience that the above response is dead-on. I'm a firm believer in testing any mod I make into the ground, however there are certain play styles I simply can't do (for example, the 2H Berserker); as a result I don't have the hands-on experience to know whether or not a given alteration I made is working properly with those styles, so until someone who is experienced enough at it to know tells me so I can only go by what I do know, so I will miss things without even knowing I missed them.

And that's just for simple mods, such as alteration of attack rates or weapon weights (I'm a big fan of realistic weapon behavior), which have a fairly small number of possible results; when attempting to test the interaction of as few as three quests with each other, however, that number can escalate into the thousands or even higher, with a probability rapidly approaching 100% that something will be missed because the exact combination of stages needed to trigger it simply doesn't occur.

Unfortunately, even without a rigid release date some things will be missed, because almost nobody (aside from maybe Blizzard, and possibly not even them) has a big enough bankroll to fund several thousand testers for several months in an attempt to squash everything. Even if they did, it still wouldn't catch everything, as some bugs are either platform-specific or configuration-specific, and as such cannot be tested for as they cannot be reliably duplicated since not all iterations of said platform or configuration (save for known graphics card driver issues on PCs) are afflicted by it.

Some games are rushed out, yes (Dragon Age 2 comes to mind.)

I don't think Skyrim was. And I don't think delaying it much longer would have changed much - every Bethesda release I've played has been plagued with bugs. (And with patches that really broke stuff - Fallout 3, v1.4 or 1.5, for example).

Great many games are released too early. Time is money. Schedules are tight. That's how it goes.
Some games are even released completely unfinished and broken, and with no intention of patching them up. (Silent Hunter 5 by Ubisoft comes to mind)
Unfortunately crying about it does not help, so I vote with my wallet.

That said, I don't think Skyrim release was all that early. Could have been better though.

Skyrim would have benefited dramatically from an extra 3 months of testing.

Dragon Age 2 comes to mind. Whole questlines were cut, Fenris doesn't have a naked body model because they had no time to make one (he has those glowy things, so they couldn't use the default elf) there were some broken quests in act three that you could never finish, because the devs didn't finish them...
Well, I guess identically cloned Lemming-Bandits might count as a design choice, but I'm not sure. If it was indeed a design choice, it wasn't the only questionable one (the wheel of WTF comes to mind), no archer for your party - he came as a DLC later.

I like Skyrim a lot better. I doesn't feel rushed out of the door, the fights are there when I want them (and they are epic) - and if I don't want to kill people because I've got my good clothes on, I sneak. The landscapes are breathtaking (I think I just let my character stand there for five minutes and just stared at the northern lights)...

What I find more worrying than the premature release is the model of the DLCs. Especially if they sell things that should have been in the game from the start - like a second tank for Dragon Age and the archer for Dragon Age 2.

I don't think anyone has mentioned that console companies, microsoft and sony namely, like to have the game a month or two in advance before release, from what I understand. No idea why, but thats what I understand.

However, I do feel it is horrible when one of two things happen:

- trailers cause massive hype, and the publishers hastle the devs to get the game out much faster while the effect lasts, resulting in some VERY buggy games (Dead island is a good example of this)

- Game is released buggy, and most of it is cut off from the game and sold as day 0 DLC, which is just plain greedy. That time could be invested into a further look into a day 0 patch. Plenty of examples of this.

Skyrim was NOT rushed.

Anyone who believes that games made in the past weren't as buggy as they are now need to get hit by Nostalgia-be-gone.

The difference between Then and Now is:
1. Back then, if a bug was there, it was there. Lack of rapid patch-distribution meant that the games were rarely "fixed" - if you're lucky, you'll get one or two patches that fix only the biggest issues (Like Daggerfall's main quest). Now that games have much more distribution, and more rapid bug-squashing patches, the flurry of patch releases can be (mis)interpreted as "New games are Buggier than Old ones"

2. Lines of code: Every byte of data has a chance of causing a bug somewhere else. It's not always the same. Older games used to have only a handful of megabytes of space and memory: Now, games have 5-20 Gigabytes of storage space to retrieve data packets from, and have 1-4 gigabytes of RAM to lose data packets in. When you add in processor speeds (Some things don't get retrieved in time or processed immediately) and multithreading (Which can be a mess for some systems to sort out: What threads should be run simultaneously, can't execute some threads before another is processed, it's a nightmare!)

Keep in mind that programming is now too complex to even try line-by-line checking, or even checking dozens of lines at a time. Bugs in the programming tools needed to create the kilobytes-at-a-time of programming information become bugs in the end product.

At some point (Usually when the budget shrinks to the point it can't maintain a reasonable supply of Mt. Dew and Energy Drinks in the office refrigerators), developers have to say "GOOD ENOUGH! Let's release it, get paid, and hope that Byte #20144123125 doesn't accidentally swap places with Byte #32191241 during playtime!"

Since Skyrim was developed and published by Bethesda, the issue of a publisher setting a release date that the developer must somehow make is a moot point.

Skyrim will be a good game when it gets properly patched up. But I think Bethesda did in fact put too much emphasis on the cool release date. The game should have been cooked a couple of months longer at minimum.

There are quite a lot of bugs being reported on these forums. But really there is just 1 bug that is keeping me from playing the game until it gets fixed. Namely the bug that breaks quests when you find quest objects/npcs BEFORE you get the quest. This kills freely exploring (the whole point of TES games no?) because I will constantly be concerned I will break a quest. So I will wait until this is improved.