Wait or Beta Test?

[JLoZeppeli]

The creativity behind the downer debbies has reached a new high. This game is hardly a beta and if you think it is then you have never played a beta in your life.

He is not speaking of Civ V, but of the modus operandi of some Software Houses to release poor tested or heavily flawed games.

 

[Jolly Rogerer]

Would not mind playing a game during beta on one condition... It's advertised as a beta release.
I'll take my copy of Diablo III now please

Exactly. Advertising instead how great the AI is...

I learned the hard way with Civ 3 when I bought it on release. I put it away after about a week and didn't buy the expansions. I bought Civ 4 with its expansions for significantly less than I paid for Civ 3 broken. Fireaxis could make a lot more money from me, and make it sooner, if they didn't release beta quality junk.

 

[Tylerryan79]

I voted yes for beta testing. Obviously I don't mean this literally, but as it is asked towards civ v. I don't want all my games asap, and unbalanced etc.

Now that the game is here, I'm having a fun time "beta testing" the game. I can overlook all the flaws, because I can see it's potential and really am having fun playing. Sure every game I see something that makes me go "Doh!", but I can see past that. If they were never going to fix the game I would be much more upset, and would stop playing as soon as the "honeymoon" ended. I'm a grown up, and can take thingsas they come. I know what can be, and will gladly "test", and as each new fix comes be even more grateful.

Or I could just let this ruin my day, stop playing, and tear the dev team a new one!! Nahh! There's plenty of people doing that, and I know they(devs) have got the message. Until then I'll play, have fun, help out if I can.... And act like a mature adult.... most ofthe time . Lifes too short to waste complaining about something that will be fixed in no time. If you still aren't happy then, well..... there's always golf!

 

[Collic]

I have to disagree.
Playtesting and balancing is completely independent of any hardware.
Either, my design works, or not.
Either, the implemented units/buildings/whatever are balanced, or not.
Either, pathfinding works, or not.

All of this is completely independant of NVidia, ATI, Core2Duo, i7/i5/i3, 2 or 4 or 8 GB of RAM and so on.

Therefore, I always give developers some kind of credit in case of *technical* issues, as painful as this may ever be for the one concerned. QA is related to all of those things because it isn't as separate as your posts suggests - the same people are bankrolling the development and testing it, all of the facets you mention are a part of the money spent on the retail product.

No credit I give for broken features, and only very low credit for missing balance.

You are missing the larger picture. A pc game with the same level of polish as a console game would take far longer, and therefore cost much more money to produce. I really don't believe AAA games on PC's receive bigger budgets than their console counterparts, so the slack has to come from somewhere.

I don't like it either, but it's a simple economic reality. To close all I can suggest is you either accept this is the way things are and move on, or continue to be disappointed by PC games that inevitably have a period of balancing and fixes after release. Personally, I've accepted it; life is too short to get frustrated over something that won't ever change.

 

[Ogrelord]

you guys should do this: Convince a friend with a desktop above the recommended system requirements and trick him into purchasing the product. Go play at his place.