Board 8 > Target is apparently shuttling their stock of Mass Effect Andromeda to Good Will

(+) Yeah! (+)

https://twitter.com/mombot/status/887173524326043649

'yikes'

I knew it was bad, but not that bad.
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jesus what the fuck

I know the game has problems but there is no way it's THAT bad
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i like to imagine the entire pallet is being sold as one unit as a home decoration since you can see housewares in the background
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It's not that bad, but the internet had a field day with the game and it developed a massive hate campaign.
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I look forward to getting this game for $5 on black friday
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X_Dante_X posted...

i like to imagine the entire pallet is being sold as one unit as a home decoration since you can see housewares in the background

new age modern art, I dig it
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Bane_Of_Despair posted...

jesus what the fuck

I know the game has problems but there is no way it's THAT bad

I finished it last night. It's a really good game. I'm puzzled by the venom quite frankly. I'm not an apologist, I'm not saying "well it's ok if you ignore this and this and this", it's just genuinely pretty good. Not without flaws, no.

They just shouldn't have released it with all the stupid glitches. Or the bad facial animations - I don't really care about that, but it clearly helped ignite this vicious campaign against it. I'm acutely aware that the version I have is somewhat enhanced thanks to updates but that doesn't really excuse what has happened here.

And I was constantly reminding myself in my playthrough that it will likely never get a sequel, but even then I find myself very interested in solving the various mysteries that are still out there. There are loads of intriguing, dangling plot threads that I really want to be able to pull on.
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even without the hate, EA probably thought it was gonna sell more than it did and printed more copies than they should've
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Also I love the lighter, jauntier, more adventurous tone it went for. I was so on board with the whole exploration aspect with the military stuff kind of second.

Man it just makes me sad to see it go down like this.
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My interpretation of this is that they just produced way too many copies and the game being a disappointment means they've got too much stock

not that they're just literally taking all copies of the game off the shelves

Bane_Of_Despair posted...

jesus what the fuck

I know the game has problems but there is no way it's THAT bad

a couple years ago, the second largest electronics retailer in Canada ordered way too many copies of Battlefield 4, AC Black Flag, and the latest Call of Duty. Unable to return stock to the publishers, and unwilling to hold onto the stock in their warehouses, the retailer shipped all their copies to stores and offered the following deal to customers: bring in any PS3/4, Xbox 360/One, Wii/U game, and trade it for any of the three games. No questions asked.

the resulting line-up was bananas.

the point is that holding onto the game at this point was costing Target money, so they moved it how they saw fit.
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that's how I have Call of Duty Ghosts

ToysRus sold it for $1 the last 2 black fridays
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Yeah, it's not rare for a retailer to order way too many of a big title, and they gotta get rid of them somehow.
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The personal attacks that a few idiots put against some of the game's designers aside, I'm kind of glad that one of these A-list games got lit up the way it did. If a game that was of inferior quality was allowed a pass, it opens the door for this kind of shit to happen in the future.

Game developers should use this incident as an example to make sure their games are as close to picture perfect as possible before launch.
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I would be very okay if we managed to eliminate the several GB 'Day One Patches.'
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I picked it up for $20. I've played a bit of the first main mission, but I've got a lot on my plate and haven't finished it. I'd be willing to play more but the game won't let me save until after I've finished that first main mission.

FFDragon posted...

I would be very okay if we managed to eliminate the several GB 'Day One Patches.'

Yeah I do hate how this is standard practice
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Not just day one patches, but additional future patches in this case. A console version should be ready at release, with little to adjust unless there's new content being added or a multiplayer exploit that needs to be patched.

That said, I'm curious to try this game if a really cheap copy stumbles my way. That isn't likely, though, considering I don't own a current gen console and there are probably, like, zero physical copies for PC anywhere.
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azuarc posted...

Not just day one patches, but additional future patches in this case.

This seems kinda crazy. People playing the game for hours on end are likely to find bugs that the testers may not have, just by the virtue of that's something people like to do. They try to break games. So saying there shouldn't ever be any patches and a game should come out perfect is insane.
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Games during the pre-digital era didn't come out perfect, but they were careful enough with testing so they could be released without updates. That's all I'm asking for. If you find something game-breaking later...well, it should be an edge case or a ridiculous exploit or a PC issue involving strange hardware configurations.
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azuarc posted...

Games during the pre-digital era didn't come out perfect, but they were careful enough with testing so they could be released without updates. That's all I'm asking for. If you find something game-breaking later...well, it should be an edge case or a ridiculous exploit or a PC issue involving strange hardware configurations.

Most games pre-digital era are full of bugs that frankly shouldn't exist, though, so I'm not sure that's an argument for "No patches." There may have been fewer cases of game-breaking bugs, but I can't think of any that didn't have atleast some bugs that were easy to find.

I agree massive Day 1 patches are silly, but to say there should basically be no patches at all is strange.
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XIII_rocks posted...

Bane_Of_Despair posted...

jesus what the fuck

I know the game has problems but there is no way it's THAT bad

I finished it last night. It's a really good game. I'm puzzled by the venom quite frankly. I'm not an apologist, I'm not saying "well it's ok if you ignore this and this and this", it's just genuinely pretty good. Not without flaws, no.

They just shouldn't have released it with all the stupid glitches. Or the bad facial animations - I don't really care about that, but it clearly helped ignite this vicious campaign against it. I'm acutely aware that the version I have is somewhat enhanced thanks to updates but that doesn't really excuse what has happened here.

And I was constantly reminding myself in my playthrough that it will likely never get a sequel, but even then I find myself very interested in solving the various mysteries that are still out there. There are loads of intriguing, dangling plot threads that I really want to be able to pull on.

I'm pretty psyched about all this though since it means I'll be able to get the game for cheap. the internet hate machine is good for something, at least.
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hopefully it drops the price of the PC version too. aka, the only good version.
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I'm not anti-patch, I'm strictly anti-D1patch. Because we've gotten to the point where companies use it as an excuse and escape hatch to ship a game they know is not finished and unplayable out of the box.
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It seemed more to me like an internet lulz machine than an internet hate machine. People couldn't stop laughing at those facial animations and I don't blame them.
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Goodwill is a better choice than dumping them in New Mexico to be forgotten until an archaeological excavation thirty years later.
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Andromeda has lots of problems, no doubt, but I still had a lot of fun with it.
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We just need to get rid of physical game releases. Then there won't be any more day one patches.
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HashtagSEP posted...

azuarc posted...

Not just day one patches, but additional future patches in this case.

This seems kinda crazy. People playing the game for hours on end are likely to find bugs that the testers may not have, just by the virtue of that's something people like to do. They try to break games. So saying there shouldn't ever be any patches and a game should come out perfect is insane.

Testers also try to break games. That's part of the point of a tester.
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SupremeZero posted...

HashtagSEP posted...

azuarc posted...

Not just day one patches, but additional future patches in this case.

This seems kinda crazy. People playing the game for hours on end are likely to find bugs that the testers may not have, just by the virtue of that's something people like to do. They try to break games. So saying there shouldn't ever be any patches and a game should come out perfect is insane.

Testers also try to break games. That's part of the point of a tester.

Right, but they have a specific timeframe to do so, and there's a significantly smaller number of them than there are players.
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SupremeZero posted...

HashtagSEP posted...

azuarc posted...

Not just day one patches, but additional future patches in this case.

This seems kinda crazy. People playing the game for hours on end are likely to find bugs that the testers may not have, just by the virtue of that's something people like to do. They try to break games. So saying there shouldn't ever be any patches and a game should come out perfect is insane.

Testers also try to break games. That's part of the point of a tester.

He's not wrong that players will find things testers did not. Especially games with many weird circumstances and outcomes, like Bethesda's usual problems. However, that's no excuse for the sort of silliness we saw with Andromeda. The testers should certainly find the most egregious, common issues and the dev steam should stamp them out, instead of having all kinds of highlight reels of stupid graphical glitches and clipping errors and whatever else that game had going for it.
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azuarc posted...

SupremeZero posted...

HashtagSEP posted...

azuarc posted...

Not just day one patches, but additional future patches in this case.

This seems kinda crazy. People playing the game for hours on end are likely to find bugs that the testers may not have, just by the virtue of that's something people like to do. They try to break games. So saying there shouldn't ever be any patches and a game should come out perfect is insane.

Testers also try to break games. That's part of the point of a tester.

He's not wrong that players will find things testers did not. Especially games with many weird circumstances and outcomes, like Bethesda's usual problems. However, that's no excuse for the sort of silliness we saw with Andromeda. The testers should certainly find the most egregious, common issues and the dev steam should stamp them out, instead of having all kinds of highlight reels of stupid graphical glitches and clipping errors and whatever else that game had going for it.

Oh, I absolutely agree. There's no excuse to have those kinds of issues and that many. A game absolutely should not be released in that state.

I'm just saying that over time, it's reasonable for players to find bugs that were missed, or enough small things to warrant the existence of occasional routine patching.
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I see the game was released in march.

Question

Was the game released in March in a less than ideal state because they had to get it out within the fiscal year?

The game would have likely been better if released at a later date, so wondering if they released it then for that reason?
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HashtagSEP posted...

occasional routine patching.

I'm okay with that. Especially in game genres that lend themselves to it. After all, people seldom play 2D platformers and arcade style games any more. Complexity does lead to weird stuff.

But day 1 patching? Eh, I dunno. It should be for things that are discovered after release, not things that the developer realized because they were still doing their bug testing after production began. And, as I suggested earlier, for console versions it should be primarily for unlikely-but-disastrous scenarios (like corrupting a save file) or for multiplayer exploits.
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voltch posted...

Was the game released in March in a less than ideal state because they had to get it out within the fiscal year?

The game would have likely been better if released at a later date, so wondering if they released it then for that reason?

While I don't explicitly know the answer to this because I haven't followed the game too closely, consider the publisher. Regardless of what BioWare wants, I don't doubt EA's breathing down their necks constantly.
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Hey, at least it's better when companies are able to make patches at all. As opposed to, "game breaking bug? We're sorry, but you'll just have to start a new game." Here's to you, cannon room glitch in Twilight Princess.
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azuarc posted...

HashtagSEP posted...

occasional routine patching.

I'm okay with that. Especially in game genres that lend themselves to it. After all, people seldom play 2D platformers and arcade style games any more. Complexity does lead to weird stuff.

But day 1 patching? Eh, I dunno. It should be for things that are discovered after release, not things that the developer realized because they were still doing their bug testing after production began. And, as I suggested earlier, for console versions it should be primarily for unlikely-but-disastrous scenarios (like corrupting a save file) or for multiplayer exploits.

Eh, whatever gets these games out the door I say. That's not the big issue with Andromeda. It's that they did their chraracter modeling on the cheap after being forced to overhaul it at least once.

They purposefully went lower quality in pursuit of doing a No Man's Sky style thing that they ended up being unable to deliver on. Once they pulled back on the scope they should have overhauled the character graphical choices they made but by then this thing was in danger of becoming an impossible to profit on game because they squandered so many resources on a doomed approach.
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HashtagSEP posted...

SupremeZero posted...

HashtagSEP posted...

azuarc posted...

Not just day one patches, but additional future patches in this case.

This seems kinda crazy. People playing the game for hours on end are likely to find bugs that the testers may not have, just by the virtue of that's something people like to do. They try to break games. So saying there shouldn't ever be any patches and a game should come out perfect is insane.

Testers also try to break games. That's part of the point of a tester.

Right, but they have a specific timeframe to do so, and there's a significantly smaller number of them than there are players.

@ChaosTonyV4 whats the inside scoop here bro
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they also hid their troubles behind "Bioware Montreal," which was code for "C-Team" as we later found out. the game was stuck in dev hell with a team who couldn't do the job when it came to the game's assets so it suffered. it was a pretty clear cash cow attempt by EA and Bioware as opposed to a legitimate effort.
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It's just... Mass Effect should have been an untankable series, but they managed to find a way.
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well yeah, EA is the nega-Cena of the industry. they'll always find a way to fail, rip the soul out of something, and leave you with a shell.
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Eddv posted...

HashtagSEP posted...

SupremeZero posted...

HashtagSEP posted...

azuarc posted...

Not just day one patches, but additional future patches in this case.

This seems kinda crazy. People playing the game for hours on end are likely to find bugs that the testers may not have, just by the virtue of that's something people like to do. They try to break games. So saying there shouldn't ever be any patches and a game should come out perfect is insane.

Testers also try to break games. That's part of the point of a tester.

Right, but they have a specific timeframe to do so, and there's a significantly smaller number of them than there are players.

@ChaosTonyV4 whats the inside scoop here bro

It's pretty much exactly what you'd think.

A coordinator makes a spreadsheet with info given to them by the developer, they assign the testers in a way so every class/weapon/gender combo is utilized, and then give enough instruction so different people have to play the game in different ways.

Then they say "do everything at least once, multiple times if possible."

Xenoblade Chronicles X, for example, I beat three times, one of those times basically 100% completing the game.

Splatoon I only beat once, but that was because I was on the multiplayer team.
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Andromeda was a 'perfect' storm. People have been looking to vent their Mass Effect 3 disappointment for years. Combine that with a game that didn't meet series' standards, and the awful models/animations that made the rounds weeks before release, and you get a situation where the game was doomed to fail. It had a much tougher time that it should have when compared to the games intrinsic quality.
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-FFDragon- posted...

It's just... Mass Effect should have been an untankable series, but they managed to find a way.

Why?

From what I understand, ME games weren't huge in the sales department.
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Wanglicious posted...

they also hid their troubles behind "Bioware Montreal," which was code for "C-Team" as we later found out. the game was stuck in dev hell with a team who couldn't do the job when it came to the game's assets so it suffered. it was a pretty clear cash cow attempt by EA and Bioware as opposed to a legitimate effort.

Reading about it was a legitimate effort - but after it became clear that frostbite could not - WOULD NOT - do what they wanted it to do the project needed to be restarted from scratch and instead of putting it back into Dev Hell to do so they just tried to salvage the assets they DID have into something playable.

And they succeeded. But thanks to the ME3 fallout thus game needed to be more than playable - it needed to be better than Witcher 3. And it just wasnt.
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Eddv posted...

And they succeeded. But thanks to the ME3 fallout thus game needed to be more than playable - it needed to be better than Witcher 3. And it just wasnt.

The craziest part of this is that ME3 is actually REALLY GOOD, but that ending controversy tanked it in the public perception.
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Like shit. I was just watching a video of some gameplay on YouTube and the comments are so fucking vicious. I'm really just confused. I'm not saying the writing is Naughty Dog level but it's not "complete garbage". Damn.
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I'll agree there was some residual me3 hate being fired at it, but they knew that was coming. If anything that knowledge should have never let them release this in the state it was.
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