Gamer? Beta tester!

OPINION

For a while I have felt that the quality of games was improving and that real technical duds were becoming rarer. However, some of the games that I have played in recent months are making me feel like a Beta tester instead of a gamer or game reviewer.

January 14th, 2007 by Sergio Brinkhuis

It is no secret that some games are rushed onto the market before they are actually ready. It is hard to judge each situation seperately but generally speaking we can say that this has everything to do with marketing and money. Publishers start gearing up the marketing machine many months before a deadline and not meeting the deadline can render some of this effort ineffective. For some companies it may even be a matter of survival, needing the cash influx that comes with the release of a game to make payroll. Other reasons such as saving face and lack of actual skills to deliver a quality product may exist but are probably not often the reason.

This feeling started with Jowood's sequel to The Guild. Released in October 2006, The Guild 2 was eagerly anticipated by fans of the original. The Guild (also known as Europa 1400) was not a big game, sales wise, but many who played it were instantly taken by the fresh, almost genre-bending approach that the developers had taken. I was one of these people and for a year or so I kept hoping that Jowood and 4head would properly fix the bug-ridden game. Such a fix never arrived and I am sure that fans of the series had their fingers crossed the entire time between the moment that the sequel was announced and its release. Now that the game is out, it appears people didn't squeeze their fingers hard enough.The game is buggy and has horrible performance.

With the second game that I became 'retail version beta tester' for, I did not feel the need cross my fingers for at all. Created by the legendary Sid Meier and developed by Firaxis -a company that has a great track record for delivering quality games - no one could have conceived that Railroads! would be released with so many problems. Minor bugs aside, the game has a tendency to crash when you are trying to lay or remove tracks for your trains and in the later stages of the game, its performance slows down to a crawl. Firaxis is not Jowood and subsequent patches have ironed out most of the serious issues but... wouldn't it have been better if the game had spent some more time in the QA department?

The next game that had me testing was Gothic 3. Another title published by Jowood and it is easy to see how Jowood has earned its reputation for releasing rushed games. In my review, I was yearning to give the game a 9 or even a 10 but now it got stuck with a 7, simply because of its many problems and its performance issues in particular.

The red thread in all the above seems to be performance. I recently bought a new videocard because my trusty old Radeon 9800 Pro really couldn't hack it anymore. After installing the new card, I have yet to read the recommended system requirements on a game's DVD box that my current machine does not easily surpass. I have another PC with specs that usually get pretty close to the recommended system specs. It is quite different in setup (one is AMD based, the other Intel), and this machine has the exact same problems. I have done some tests with Oblivion and other games before writing this piece and each of these games ran flawless on both systems. I feel confident saying that I have done everything I could to confirm that it is not my main PC that is responsible for the horrible performance I have been experiencing.

Each of the above games would have been great. Taking away the performance and other issues, they would have scored a full 2 points higher in their current overall score. Whether or not magazine scores have any influence on how well a game sells is a much debated issue, but I cannot imagine that gamers buy buggy games en-masse if the press would make you more aware of these problems.

Don't get me wrong, I fully understand that with the huge variety in PC hardware, it is virtually impossible to deliver a bug free game. However, performance issues are all about optimizing the engine and if a serious bug appears across a wide range of PCs and is experienced by almost everyone who plays the game, then the game has not properly been tested.

The above leaves a lot of questions such as 'Are we gamers (customers) being used as Beta Testers by these companies?', 'How can we best convince these companies that we don't want them to treat us this way?' or even worse 'Why do we let these companies treat us this way?'.

None of these questions have simple answers and it is not in the nature of this article to discuss this. Yet I am getting tired of feeling used as a Beta tester and I would like game companies to delay their titles until they are ready for release. I am certain that I am not the only one feeling this way and I am wondering how many of you feel the same way. Do you? Are you of another opinion? Let your voice be heard in this thread in our forums.