Back in June of 2015, the gaming world was treated to the release of the final installment of the Batman Arkham series, Arkham Knight. By treated of course, I mean the PC users were treated to horrendous mashup of bugs, frame rate issues, and a general clustermess of unfinished disappointment. We are in October now, and promises of patches to finally finish fixing it up are finally coming down the pipeline. I'm sure many of you had words with at least a few other people on where the blame lay in the situation, be it Warner Bros, who published the game, Rocksteady, who developed the game, or Iron Galaxy, whom Rocksteady actually outsourced the PC version to. If you were like me, you could lay the blame at the feet of all three. Now once again, we find ourselves in the situation of a game coming out that falls very, very short of being called finished being released at full price. I'm speaking of course, about Tony Hawk Pro Skater 5.
Released September 29th of this year, the first sign of danger on the horizon the the release of review codes and copies only being made available on day 1. This is almost always a bad sign, as publishers to do this avoid negative press for what they are already aware is a poor game that likely won't sell well after the first initial rush. Very quickly, videos began releasing showing a game that certainly looked like the original Tony Hawk Pro Skater games...by which I mean the graphics look like someone developed the game for mid PS2 era engines at best. Poor textures, grainy images and odd clipping abound, and on the subject of clipping, the bugs! Falling through ramps, getting stuck in the floor, combos ending for no reason, being launched from your board like a rag doll after a jump for no reason! This is all assuming you can get past the credits, since many people have experienced crashes and freezes during even this seemingly simple step of start up! Perhaps the biggest shock to me wasn't the bugs or graphical issues, or even the asking price of a full $60 USD, but that the game was unfinished. I don't mean that as unpolished in terms of the glitches, I mean the game was released as only a 4.6GB install, which contained only the park editor and tutorial missions. A 7.7GB day one patch was released that contained the REST OF THE GAME! Which means people were fully aware that the game wasn't done being made, and they decided to ship it anyway. Activision did release a quote on the matter, stating, " We are aware of the issues that players have experienced following the launch of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5 and are working with the developer to address these so that we can continue to improve the gameplay experience for all of the Tony Hawk fans who have known and loved this franchise for more than 16 years." Which, personally, seems like a really long way to say " We'll get to it."
So whose to blame here? Do we point fingers at joint developers Robomodo and Disruptive Games? Or is it the fault of publisher Activision? This time, I'm laying the blame on Activision. I truly considered putting the blame on everyone again, but the fact is, if Activision wanted to they could have said 'No, the game isn't done, we need to push the release back.' They didn't however, and they stamped approval on a game that was quite literally not completed. Robomodo and Disruptive, I don't know what kind of crunch schedule they were given, so i'll be nice to them on this, but the fact that this kind of situation has happened twice so far this year is absolutely unacceptable. So what do you guys think? Is my outburst of impotent nerd rage justified? Who is really at fault in all of this? Let me know in the comments!
Thanks everybody, and stay Kultured!
-Kuma
Released September 29th of this year, the first sign of danger on the horizon the the release of review codes and copies only being made available on day 1. This is almost always a bad sign, as publishers to do this avoid negative press for what they are already aware is a poor game that likely won't sell well after the first initial rush. Very quickly, videos began releasing showing a game that certainly looked like the original Tony Hawk Pro Skater games...by which I mean the graphics look like someone developed the game for mid PS2 era engines at best. Poor textures, grainy images and odd clipping abound, and on the subject of clipping, the bugs! Falling through ramps, getting stuck in the floor, combos ending for no reason, being launched from your board like a rag doll after a jump for no reason! This is all assuming you can get past the credits, since many people have experienced crashes and freezes during even this seemingly simple step of start up! Perhaps the biggest shock to me wasn't the bugs or graphical issues, or even the asking price of a full $60 USD, but that the game was unfinished. I don't mean that as unpolished in terms of the glitches, I mean the game was released as only a 4.6GB install, which contained only the park editor and tutorial missions. A 7.7GB day one patch was released that contained the REST OF THE GAME! Which means people were fully aware that the game wasn't done being made, and they decided to ship it anyway. Activision did release a quote on the matter, stating, " We are aware of the issues that players have experienced following the launch of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5 and are working with the developer to address these so that we can continue to improve the gameplay experience for all of the Tony Hawk fans who have known and loved this franchise for more than 16 years." Which, personally, seems like a really long way to say " We'll get to it."
So whose to blame here? Do we point fingers at joint developers Robomodo and Disruptive Games? Or is it the fault of publisher Activision? This time, I'm laying the blame on Activision. I truly considered putting the blame on everyone again, but the fact is, if Activision wanted to they could have said 'No, the game isn't done, we need to push the release back.' They didn't however, and they stamped approval on a game that was quite literally not completed. Robomodo and Disruptive, I don't know what kind of crunch schedule they were given, so i'll be nice to them on this, but the fact that this kind of situation has happened twice so far this year is absolutely unacceptable. So what do you guys think? Is my outburst of impotent nerd rage justified? Who is really at fault in all of this? Let me know in the comments!
Thanks everybody, and stay Kultured!
-Kuma