Watch Dogs finally gets patch from Ubisoft

[Wlad]

It seems I made the right decision by getting this on PS4 instead of PC. I've finished the game now and I haven't really experienced any issues, except for the game crashing once, and one time I couldn't connect to an online game. Other than that the game ran perfectly fine and I enjoyed it a quite a bit, although it did get a bit repetitive towards the end. I might even still play the multiplayer every once in a while.

Hopefully they (or the community) fix all the problems on PC and the rest of you guys can enjoy the game as well.

 

[The Joker]

Not one of those games have nearly the scope of Watch Dogs I'm afraid. Although I didn't play all of the games on that list, the ones I did play definitely had issues. Tomb Raider for example. That tomb of the lost adventurer is a buggy nightmare. It pissed me off so much that I refused to buy any further Tomb Raider DLCs.

Really?

So a DLC was buggy and you claim Tomb Raider had issues.
Tomb Raider had no issues, the core of the game was perfect at launch. Played and completed it multiple times, not once was my progress halted because of stuttering, insane frame drops, random crashes, server connection issues.

Let's move on to Crysis 3, that game's engine cost more to develop than the entire Watch Dogs game so yeah..."scope" lol. Crysis 3 is a graphical masterpiece, the game runs flawlessly and has done so since day 1, the maps are incredibly detailed and diverse and actually massive. There is still no game currently available that comes close to it and I suspect we'll have to wait for Witcher 3 to see anything close to Crysis 3 levels of details.

You mention scope but you have nothing to show??

 

[Snare]

Really?

So a DLC was buggy and you claim Tomb Raider had issues.
Tomb Raider had no issues, the core of the game was perfect at launch. Played and completed it multiple times, not once was my progress halted because of stuttering, insane frame drops, random crashes, server connection issues.

Let's move on to Crysis 3, that game's engine cost more to develop than the entire Watch Dogs game so yeah..."scope" lol
Crysis 3 is a graphical masterpiece, the game runs flawlessly and has done so since day 1, the maps are incredibly detailed and diverse and actually massive.

You mention scope but you have nothing to show??

Actually total Dev cost including marketing puts Crysis 3 as Cheaper than WatchDogs so an even greater blow against it.

 

[Snare]

Not one of those games have nearly the scope of Watch Dogs I'm afraid. Although I didn't play all of the games on that list, the ones I did play definitely had issues. Tomb Raider for example. That tomb of the lost adventurer is a buggy nightmare. It pissed me off so much that I refused to buy any further Tomb Raider DLCs.

....So besides the 1 TR DLC that was buggy, (No one had any significant issues with it but whatever), what else on this list is significantly flawed and broken in some way?

 

[Neo]

Hmmm, games that I couldn't play due to bugs:

GTA 4 for the PC.
Max Payne 3.

Not even Battlefield 4 gave me the amount of showstopping bugs that the above 2 games did. Luckily Max Payne 3 was patched quickly with some new drivers from Nvidia as well and turned out to be an awesome game. GTA 4 though, yikes, massive patches (lots of them) and it still never really worked well. That along with the GFWL virus included in the game didn't help. I think the game because reasonable a year after launch though, but that game left a bad taste in my mouth.

Watch Dogs seems to bring back a lot of memories of that first GTA 4 PC port. I can understand the frustration.

 

[James]

I was a victim of GTA 4 on PC at launch (although thanks to a relatively powerful rig a the time I could struggle through playing it) - and that launch made me mad as well. Time and patches have done nothing to mitigate the fact that it was launched as a wreck. Now that GFWL has been stripped out and it's all patched up, it runs quite nicely and still looks great. So I dropped R450 for a game at launch that was borked and then a few years later when it was finally patched up it goes for $10 on Steam special with the stand-alone expansion games in a bundle... Great argument for not buying games at launch

 

[Wyzak]

Sigh; what the actual fuck Wyzak?

You were the one that proposed they were busy adding features close to the time of launch. Now I must provide proof that they didn't lock down features? This is not not something I even asserted in the first place; what I actually said is it's unlikely they decided to add features at a late stage because that typically is not how development processes work (day-1 DLC anybody?).

Can we have a discussion and not resort to swearing please?

I suggested that there is a conflict between the publisher who wants to add more features to the game, and the developer who wants to release a finish product. A compromise is normal and you end up with some new features and a few bugs, which are then patched during the support time. Unfortunately the larger the project is the longer it takes them to perform a proper quality control. They obviously underestimated this and released the game too early, or added a couple too many features prior to launch.

In fact with the language you used, you created a neat little dichotomy in which they either had the game working 100% stable and then botched it by adding new features close to launch, or by inference they never got it working 100% stable in the first place. Of course this is a false dichotomy at any rate, so it's dismissable out of hand, but I'm trying to illustrate the absurdity of this stuff you are coming up with.

Everything we are discussing is speculation, none of us were there, none of us experienced the pressures that go with a project of this magnitude.

Egads man! What exactly is unrealistic about expecting a company with the aforementioned $100 million+ development budget and hundreds of developers on the team to actually be able to deliver a decent working product? For the umpteenth time, we are not talking about minor glitches and bugs - the game is quite frankly running like a piece of shit for a lot of people who can quite happily run any number of other demanding games without problems on the same hardware.

There are many people playing this game and enjoying it. They are obviously not as vocal as those who are having issues. If the game is really so bad, why haven't we seen a similar campaign to that of Simcity where people were demanding refunds from EA and when that failed went directly to Visa / mastercard?

I wonder, do you realise what it is that is actually getting up everyone's nose with your arguments? You're defending a company that delivered a botched product. Once again, it's great that your experience is satisfactory to you, and broadly speaking, it's nice that many other people also had relatively few problems with the game. It's valuable for us to know this.

I am speaking on behalf of the (seamingly) minority of people who are actually enjoying the game. Most of my gaming colleagues have also bought Watch Dogs. Not one of them are experiencing anything near to what you guys are experiencing. They've all said how they are actually pleasantly surprised by the story and how the game is fun.

If MyGaming does not welcome the opinion of the minority I will stop posting, but be warned with only one-side of the story these threads will quickly die down. Would this thread have been nearly this busy if we haven't been able to have such a debate on the subject? Isn't it doing a good job to drive web traffic, and to invoke debate?

But once again, a working game is the default position - it shouldn't be news and praiseworthy that a company delivered a game that mostly worked. Heck, if this was the case I'd be running articles headlined: "Call of Duty Ghosts launched with barely any problems on most platforms. Developers say they are pleased with the results because making games is hard man and $60 is basically a bargain for the customer".

Surely by know you should know that "a working game" is relative. Jay Wilson would argue that D3 was a working game at launch, other's would say it was a complete disaster and it only become a working game when he was replaced as project lead and replaced with somebody else. Others would argue with the release of loot 2.0. Others with RoS.

....So besides the 1 TR DLC that was buggy, (No one had any significant issues with it but whatever), what else on this list is significantly flawed and broken in some way?

Crysis is a PC exclusive game, it does not include the complexities of multiple platforms. It's also a beast and requires a big machine to run it which reduces complexity by removing permutations.

I loved every second of Tomb Raider, and I will definitely be interested in a sequel. But the point I was trying to make is that it still wasn't perfect. Every game has issues.

But Tomb Raider doesn't have nearly the scope of Tomb Raider. It is a very linear, single-player (for the most part) game. It does not have the same challenges as optimising an imitation of a city in an open-world game.

 

[Graal]

Wyzak, nobody said your opinion is unwelcome. What we take issue to is you continuously attacking us for not sharing your opinion. The only person who wants a one-sided opinions here is you. You don't miss an opportunity to tell everyone else why they're whiners for complaining about having a broken game on release and you keep telling everyone why it's acceptable for games to release like this. You even attacked MyGaming (multiple times) for reporting on the issues surrounding the release of this game.

You keep telling us all you want to do is give an opinion from the other side of the coin, but that's the exact opposite of what you've been doing so far. You've been trying to silence the one side of the coin.

But let's ignore all that for the moment. We acknowledge your opinion. You've stated your case, so now what? What point are you trying to make? What do you want from the rest of us? To shut up and not say a word about the issues surrounding Watchdogs?

What is your endgame here? Because what you claim to be doing and what you're actually doing don't match up. You keep arguing but at this point I don't think even you know what you're arguing for.

 

[Lycanthrope]

Once... could be a typo. Twice, could be coincidence. Three times?

Patch does seam ridiculously small.

Edit: For what it's worth my game seams to be running very nicely after the patch.

I am speaking on behalf of the (seamingly) minority of people who are actually enjoying the game.

Can we have a discussion and not resort to swearing please?

You guys, you know you can't win right? I mean, he keeps changing his argument, throwing different straw-men out and when a new person joins the fray, it starts all over again.

For example, his latest is "why u no let me has muh opinyun" which, last time I checked, isn't even part of the argument. Again, argument is that the game is fucked for many people. This makes people unhappy. Round we go, "Y u buy it den"; "because of the marketing, promises and expectations raised"; "den u stoopid"; "So it's the customer's fault?"; "It's good game"; "No it's not." "Y u buy it den"; rinse, repeat. I R A VICTUM, U NO LET ME HAS OPINION!

Throw in a few other silly arguments between that for kicks.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kettle_logic

 

[MetalSoup]

Once... could be a typo. Twice, could be coincidence. Three times?

 

[Lycanthrope]

@ Eugene -- You're sew funny

 

[Saint_Dee]

Here's an observation that may or may not interest you guys.

Sure, it's prudent to avoid day one purchases because hey, it seems quality assurance is not what it's supposed to be today. So we should rather wait for reviews from gaming publications, and early adopters to give their opinions so we can gauge our interest in a game or at least gauge the working nature of the game (this is a sad state of affairs if you ask me). But the idea of waiting for a few days to gauge what the internet thinks (reviews from publications and users) is flawed conceptually (at least in my opinion), because it relies heavily on a big enough test group of consumers (guinea pigs, I guess) buying this game as early adopters. If a game is broken, these are the guys getting screwed over, and their input will obviously give pause to us "prudent spenders" or it actually saves us from making a horrible purchasing choice. So on one end these guys were being silly and reckless for buying a game at launch and ending up with complaints and rants about the broken game, but on the other end this same feedback (positive or negative) is part of how we gauge whether or not we should be buying some games?

These guys aren't paid to be doing Quality Assurance, in fact they're essentially paying to debug these games (if the current state of the industry is anything to go by), anyway this has already been kind of mentioned in the thread, what hasn't been mentioned though is what would happen if all gamers were all part of this group of prudent spenders. What then?

Would reviews from gaming publications be enough to judge a game? Sometimes not even following the development of a game is enough to raise red flags (I think Alien Colonial Marines may be one such case if memory serves me well, but I do speak under correction).

I know that this is an unlikely scenario, but I don't think there can be any scenario where there aren't early adopters (for any product, gaming related or not). So I don't think you can blame one can blame early adopters for... well, being early adopters.

My 2c.

*My point may have been lost somewhere in the sea of words (It kinda made sense in my head)

 

[czc]

Hmmm, games that I couldn't play due to bugs:

GTA 4 for the PC.
Max Payne 3.

Not even Battlefield 4 gave me the amount of showstopping bugs that the above 2 games did. Luckily Max Payne 3 was patched quickly with some new drivers from Nvidia as well and turned out to be an awesome game. GTA 4 though, yikes, massive patches (lots of them) and it still never really worked well. That along with the GFWL virus included in the game didn't help. I think the game because reasonable a year after launch though, but that game left a bad taste in my mouth.

Watch Dogs seems to bring back a lot of memories of that first GTA 4 PC port. I can understand the frustration.

That is interesting, Max Payne 3 was surprisingly unbuggy for me. And the biggest issue I had with GTA IV getting it to start because of GFWL/Rockstar social club combo.

 

[Wyzak]

LOL, thanks for pointing out the typo guys.

Here's an observation that may or may not interest you guys.

Sure, it's prudent to avoid day one purchases because hey, it seems quality assurance is not what it's supposed to be today. So we should rather wait for reviews from gaming publications, and early adopters to give their opinions so we can gauge our interest in a game or at least gauge the working nature of the game (this is a sad state of affairs if you ask me). But the idea of waiting for a few days to gauge what the internet thinks (reviews from publications and users) is flawed conceptually (at least in my opinion), because it relies heavily on a big enough test group of consumers (guinea pigs, I guess) buying this game as early adopters. If a game is broken, these are the guys getting screwed over, and their input will obviously give pause to us "prudent spenders" or it actually saves us from making a horrible purchasing choice. So on one end these guys were being silly and reckless for buying a game at launch and ending up with complaints and rants about the broken game, but on the other end this same feedback (positive or negative) is part of how we gauge whether or not we should be buying some games?

These guys aren't paid to be doing Quality Assurance, in fact they're essentially paying to debug these games (if the current state of the industry is anything to go by), anyway this has already been kind of mentioned in the thread, what hasn't been mentioned though is what would happen if all gamers were all part of this group of prudent spenders. What then?

Would reviews from gaming publications be enough to judge a game? Sometimes not even following the development of a game is enough to raise red flags (I think Alien Colonial Marines may be one such case if memory serves me well, but I do speak under correction).

I know that this is an unlikely scenario, but I don't think there can be any scenario where there aren't early adopters (for any product, gaming related or not). So I don't think you can blame one can blame early adopters for... well, being early adopters.

My 2c.

*My point may have been lost somewhere in the sea of words (It kinda made sense in my head)

It's not a perfect system sure, but it's better if it's somebody else's money than your own. Is there a better alternative? Please don't say perfect games...

 

[MetalSoup]

Is there a better alternative? Please don't say perfect games...

Quality Assurance.

 

[czc]

View attachment 11599

You guys stitch me up.

 

[Lycanthrope]

You guys stitch me up.

Quilt being silly!

 

[to0kenZA]

Eugene, did you go and edit the Wiki article?

"This article may be too technical for most readers to understand. Please help improve this article to make it understandable to non-experts, without removing the technical details. The talk page may contain suggestions. (August 2013)"




It seams that this whole debate is coming undone at the seams.


/runs

 

[qornea]

Haha you guys are too much to BEAR.

 

[Saint_Dee]

LOL, thanks for pointing out the typo guys.



It's not a perfect system sure, but it's better if it's somebody else's money than your own. Is there a better alternative? Please don't say perfect games...

I can appreciate that it's not a perfect system, but we should also appreciate that these vocal early adopters who "throw" their money at these products and get burnt at times, aren't really at fault, especially when you consider that their input, at times, helps improve the overall product post-launch. So I would argue that they're an important segment of the gaming community and to an extent they're needed.

Alternatives? Longer development cycles or willingness to delay your games significantly (or at least the testing phases, since more time may not = better products), betas where it's applicable.

Hell, give us more demos! Looking on the origin store, you'll find literally 5 demos, 5!!! On Steam there are a few more, but very few demos of high profile AAA games.

Transparency is another huge thing that would be highly appreciated. EA's recent "tell the gamers about the games sooner" is an interesting prospect (it's hard to trust EA after my BF4 experience, but it's a step in the right direction, if they pursue that line of thinking). "In a world where you just don't share, you never get feedback"

Anyway, I'm sure there are more things that could be suggested, but my point is something needs to change in the way publishers/developers release their games to the consumers, and being vocal about problems is about as good as consumers can get when it comes to helping them make better games since we don't actually have much of a foothold in the development of the game.