Early Access - Brand New And Still Broken | Feature Creep By Tarmack
40Somewhere over the last 10 years we've been conditioned to expect a day 1 patch. And it's not without its' own merits. Game development halts about a month before a game is released to the public. The game goes gold and then it's off to the manufacturer for printing the discs, packing the boxes and shipping to retailers so that everyone has their copies ready for the release date. The dev teams often take a bit of a vacation after release, but during that month it's still crunch time, sorting out bugs and dealing with the lesser issues. With online connectivity being normal for most gamers, the patch that is ready on release gives the developer that one extra month of time to sort out any issues.
Now, publishers mandating release dates is nothing new. Developers are constantly having to remove features and streamline their process in order to hit those targets and release on time. Often, this will result in a less than ideal game experience. And even then, companies like Blizzard with a "when it's done" attitude, still seem to pump out content that has release date issues.
But along the way we've simply just come to expect that this is normal and ok. Frankly it's not. It's not ok that when you buy a console as a gift, you have to make sure to open the box and get that giant update done before repackaging it so they have their Christmas day fun without a 30 minute patch job. It's not ok to buy a game on its' release date using basic common hardware and have it simply not work. In no other industry is this acceptable, the idea of purchasing incomplete products, not even other aspects of software development. They're releasing games that they can just fix later, but by then we've already ponied up the money.
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