5. Games Were Actually Released When They Were Finished
Half-Life 2 is one of my favorite games of all time. The gameplay is perfectly balanced, the shooting is fun, the puzzles are stimulating, and you can basically pick your own immersion level as you play through the game. There was a six-year gap between the original Half-Life and the acclaimed sequel, and despite a complicated console port and source code leak during development, Valve worked tirelessly to create a quality product that would be hailed by some as the greatest video game ever made. I didn't mind the wait, and I'm looking forward to the next game in the series. Fast forward to 2012. I'm playing through the verdant world of Skyrim on the Xbox 360. Sure, some NPCs spawn inside rocks and wooly mammoths might inexplicably fly straight up into the air, but I can understand why an established developer would want to release a huge game with a few glitches and fix them later. However, after a certain update through Xbox Live, my game stopped...working. It froze immediately after I booted it up. I spent hours researching fixes and workarounds, but to no avail. All I could to do was wait for the next update to come down the pipes and fix my problem, which it did. After a month. Thanks to the advent of online services, game companies can release a game that is so rife with sequence breaks and exploits that it renders the game borderline unplayable (or in my case, technically unplayable). Would you buy a half-finished, moth-eaten blanket if you were promised a couple patches every once in awhile to make it functional? No. A normal person would want a complete, finished product that serves its pupose with minimal hangups. It was done before PSN and Xbox Live, and it can done again, as long as the company takes the time to craft a quality product.
Eller likes a lot of old video games, and some new video games. Follow him on Twitter (@JordanEller) for updates about articles, but mostly silly jokes.
