Big-budget, blockbuster games had a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day on Tuesday. Was it an unfortunate fluke? Or the beginning of the end?
Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed Unity shipped Tuesday, and it wasn't long before players started finding all kinds of bugs and glitches---so many that Ubisoft created a "live updates" blog specifically to keep players abreast of fixes to game-breaking issues.
And then there was Halo: The Master Chief Collection on Xbox One. It won early praise for its single-player collection of four Halo titles, but the ambitious multiplayer mode---more than 100 maps, spanning the entire series---shipped out totally busted. "I was unable to access a single match of any kind, encountering various error messages or endless queues, and even one full game crash to the Xbox One dashboard," Arthur Gies wrote at Polygon, downgrading his review from a 9.5 to an 8.0.
But wait. There's more. Sega's Sonic Boom, the latest in its long-running Sonic the Hedgehog series, shipped with bugs that dwarfed Creed and Halo in terms of impact on the game. One huge gaffe in particular: You can jump infinitely into the air by pausing and unpausing the game. Sonic speedrunners discovered this almost immediately and used it to complete the game in under an hour.
There was also this touching scene, which makes one think that Sonic Boom may simply be a misunderstood work of postmodern genius:
In an age of cloud servers, mandatory online multiplayer and the ability to patch flaws with updates, big games shipping busted is nothing new. Three of them hitting on the same day, though, makes one think things are getting worse for some reason. As if there was something intrinsic to the triple-A, blockbuster gaming business that was starting to bust apart at the seams.
I wasn't alone in thinking this. "Issues in major AAA games shipping lately [equal] leaks in the bubble that is traditional AAA development," former Gears of War design director Cliff Bleszinski tweeted Friday. I pinged Bleszinski, now CEO of independent developer Boss Key, with an email to follow up.
"Making a videogame is really, really hard," he said. "The fact that games even ship could be deemed an outright miracle … even in the last generation of Xbox 360 it was impossible to ship the mythical 'bug free' game."
Gamers' expectations for what they get for their $60, Bleszinski said, have only grown since the Xbox 360 gave way to Xbox One.
"In 2015 and beyond, the expectations for a traditional AAA game’s feature set in an established franchise are so immensely high that when you couple that with the added graphical fidelity you’re looking at an increased budget, increased risk, and the potential for more bugs and problems," he said. "You can put 10,000 of the best [quality assurance] folks on your game for years before the game ships and I can guarantee they’re not going to find every problem or issue; you’re going to ship with some. The key is to get rid of the major game breakers, but even now, we’re seeing some of those problems on ship."
Bleszinski noted that perhaps the "early access" model being explored by many indie developers (and an official feature of Valve's Steam distribution service) could be a solution: "Put a version out there and see what sticks. Worried about bugs? Let your community report them. Worried a weapon or ability is overpowered? Look at the data that’s currently in the wild, and pivot."
But in the blockbuster biz, when games are developed in secret and unleashed with a major marketing blitz on a carefully chosen launch day, this may never catch on.
Even if Assassin's Creed Unity had shipped bug-free, players would still have been in for an unsettling surprise, since the game ships with microtransactions that let you speed ahead in the game without having to grind. (Come to think of it, the developer of Sonic Boom might have missed an opportunity by not selling that infinite-jump glitch for $5.)
In an age of "free" games that hit you up for money at every turn (as skewered by South Park last week), one of the arguments for the traditional game model is that, yes, you have to pay your $60 up front, but you get a whole game for it that you can enjoy at your leisure. Real cash creeping into these games' virtual economies is a growing trend, and who knows what that will do to the games' designs if it continues to tendril in?
Then again, perhaps it's not inevitable: Microsoft tried microtransactions with Ryse: Son of Rome, an Xbox One launch title, but removed all the cash-for-gold elements when it released the game on PC.
"What we’re looking at is a very precarious situation right now in the traditional space when you add in the mix of hype, game budgets, marketing budgets, and scope," Bleszinski said. "You start to see, yes, in-game purchases in the midst of a $60 brand-new game. Massive DLC campaigns. Things like a season pass. All the bullshit that no one really likes … is put into the games in order to try to keep the studios afloat with these massive game and marketing budgets. It just doesn’t add up."
There's simply a tremendous amount of pressure on any given triple-A game these days, much more so than in the past. By and large, publishers have spent the last few years aggressively narrowing their game lineups. They're releasing fewer games, and pinning more hopes on each. Sega has one foot out of the console game business, releasing just a few titles a year and putting most of its efforts into PC and mobile gaming. I would not be shocked if by the end of this console generation the Sonic franchise shifted entirely to mobile.
Assassin's Creed is an annualized franchise, it could not be delayed. Based on what now appear to be credible leaks on the NeoGAF message board in January about Microsoft's 2014 plans, Tuesday's release date for Halo: Master Chief Collection was locked down before Microsoft had even decided what games would be included.
There are no fallback plans anymore. No B-games to hold the lineup or get promoted to A-game status if a big game slips. The show must go on, the game must ship. Too much is riding on it. It's not a game with a marketing strategy, it's a marketing strategy with a game. If that means it ships busted, well, chain the social media team to its desks and order pizzas while they weather the storm. (Pizza optional.)
How many more days like Tuesday can the industry endure?
