Not (just) romantic love, but the full spectrum of love – motherly love, fatherly love, love of friends, love of community, love of humanity. Yes, Sailor Moon HAS talking cats, and lesbians (note that their lesbianism is just there, it’s not an ISSUE), and rods, and malls (as malls exist in Japan – they are teenage girls), but that’s not what Sailor Moon is ABOUT. I might not be able to out-talk Mumbles, but I can write like a mofo. Okay, listen – if you’re gonna call me out, I’m gonna bring it. That sort of instant feedback is incredibly useful and makes me actually wonder if there will be a day much bigger games try to make use of that hugely useful resource that is your audience. But there are thousands of people poking this thing which lets them find really odd bugs at a very early stage of development. They released the Hanger module which is basically a show room with some animations and stuff, but even that contained bugs. The only example I know of where a big budget game has had open player testing is the publically funded Star Citizen. I don't actually think a lot of the triple A games could actually survive with long Q&A periods, so instead we arrive at this compromise where the first time buyers are essentially doing the last stretch of Q&A which will then get patched. I'm lead to believe the majority of companies set aside as much time and money as they can into testing, since big bugs can quickly become PR nightmares (*Cough*Diablo launch) but there's only so much you can cover before you need to ship. But before you release you have to factor in all the lower end pc's and work out how to scale your game to work on those, which I believe Shamus himself has illustrated with his Bad Robot posts.īig game companies can't do this of course because their audience would crucify them for releasing something so unpolished. One of the horrible pitfalls for designing pc games is no pc is the same, and usually when you start designing a game you make it on the best PC you can get. Not just because it gets you extra funding but for the sheer amount of testing that your audience can perform for you.
Honestly this is probably something triple A games wish they could do. Regardless of how people feel about paying for an unfinished game, this system/business model is defiantly here to stay since it's been shown more than enough people are happy to put their money into them. On the Q&A of modern games I think one really interesting thing is the early access system on steam, or other such alpha/beta releases that Indies tend to go for.
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