Prepare your eyes for poorly worded and articulated rambling, 'cause it's RANTING TIME!
I've been looking at the news for AMS2's latest updates and I'm like, "That's awesome" and then am reminded of how touch and go things are. And then I looked at the latest RF2 news and had a similar quandry of, "this is neat, but why did it take this long for this to get fixed?"
Follow that up to looking at the latest Pokemon game, Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl. Looked cool, but then found out it was a buggy mess. And don't get me started on NASCAR 21: Ignition. My brother then tells me about the state of the latest Battlefield, and COD games, not up my alley, but once again a similar trend of ideas being poorly implemented. And then the sorry state of the Madden games. Again, not a NFL fan but I feel bad for the schmucks who buy the same broken garbage every year.
And it dawned on me. This is simply the reality of late 2010's/early 2020's video game development. Release cool stuff to drive engagement, realise you didn't cook the turkey long enough, MAYBE patch some of the issues while focusing on dropping new content and DLC, all while the game may take 2 years to become good.
I'm getting sick and tired of this trickle dripping partially fulfilled ideas, using the consumer as a beta tester, and basically waiting for a few years for rough spots to get smoothed over. And this is not a simracing gripe, it is a whole damn game industry gripe. What happened to the days of firing up a game, and most things working as intended and everything you needed to have a damn good time included day 1, rather than waiting for key features a year down the line, basically buying into a promise?
Now I know I mentioned Reiza, but as far as devs following this model, I give them a lot of credit for getting fixes out as fast as they do, even if somethimes they are things that should have been looked at in the first place, they show that they genuinely care for both the customers and their product, and I massively respect that. S397 is the opposite, taking 2-3 years to address an issue, there is basically an entire thread on their fourm deidcated to listing off the myriad of issues with the game, many of then AI related, and some of which were INTRODUCED by S397 and most of the bugs existing for 5-6 years no if not longer. And most of your major AAA Devs(EA, Take2, Activision/Blizzard etc.) are basically hopeless piles of human waste that prey on the general public's lack of knowledge. Shame on them.
I just want to buy a game in this decade that works as supposed to when I fire it up, and doesn't require hours of tweaking, obtuse solutions and workarounds to problems, mucking about with config and text files, or simply hoping the devs have the cajones to fix their releases.
/end rant.