[conspire] Dept. of Fsck It, Ship It: Cyberpunk 2077

[Nick Moffitt]

On 19Dec2020 07:29pm (-0800), Rick Moen wrote:
> I'm not a gamer, or, to put a different way, when people inquire about
> my favourite online game, my standard answer is 'Usenet'.  But I can get
> endless amusement from, say, a very recent, decade-long-anticipated
> major online game release ending up being buggy as a naturalist's
> specimen drawer.

The funny thing is, this may actually work out for them in the end.  We're no longer in the era where a dog's breakfast of an E.T. game cartridge is a sure-fire sinking event for a company like this.  We don't need to bury the ROMs in the foundations of a building in the desert, because modern game consoles and gamer PCs will update and apply bug fixes as they come out.

The downside to this is that the producer of this game is no doubt back into counter-productive 'crunch' processes to try and send out updates that fix the most egregious bugs.  And they may even get something that works on older hardware a bit better soon (albeit at much-reduced quality) and re-open sales to those customers (perhaps with an apology discount to those who had their purchases removed and refunded this month).

Personally, I remain unattracted to "AAA" games.  When the late Roger Ebert publicly doubted the medium's capacity to produce art, furious nerdboys loudly dunked his head in the proverbial toilet and hailed their favourite big-budget monstrosities as proof that it could.  I think this was a mistake, and the smaller independent games are where the real artistry can be found.

Games tend to have several main drives: exploration, accumulation, and destruction are the three big ones I see.  AAA games tend to focus on the accumulation and destruction, while I find the pure unalloyed exploration of old Infocom games or something like Knytt Stories far more to my liking.  That's what I love most about roguelikes, such as Brogue: the map unfolds and you wonder what's around the corner and what new landscape is possible with the primitives that the level generator has.