It is not just hardware, but problems in other places as well. For an example, look up "bush hid the facts".

The real solution is to design games with very strict machine Specs and not deviate from those specs. Sure you alienate every P4 and shitty old laptop user, along with every person on a dial up modem connection on the planet (MP) and don't fret, little Billy will be overly verbose and pissed off, on the anonymous Internet Game Forum, that his ancient PC can't run the NEW games but wtf right?

Well, it comes down to sales. If you create an already niche game, then isolate alot of potential clients, laptops, old PC's etc, then your sales base diminishes to a point where production costs cannot be recouped. If one cannot recoup said production costs, then what is the point?

There is none. So game companies are forced to include way to many differing possible hardware setups and the result, especially on any new Engine, is what we see more and more of these days.

I do not condone nor support poor releases but at my age, I have seen the Industry evolve, and evolve it has. Not always in the right direction but it still warms my heart to see some try and be fresh and creative. And when they do so I will send my support their way. Call it what you will, fanboyism, stupidity whatever, but I do not want to see the PC industry die off. So instead of sitting around and bitching, how about stepping up and lending a hand.

Obviously many here have the skills because they know way better than the developers how to run a gaming company, produce Bug free games and have Infinite monetary budgets.

P.S. And don't forget. The modern gamers demands way f'ing more stuff (like everything) be in all the games they buy today than was the case when games came on three 3.5" floppy disks.

Well, I honestly dont know what you guys have been gaming on all these years however PC games have never been bug free on release. It had nothing to do with Windows, they were buggy as hell back in the DOS days... anyone remember Origin and their voodoo memory manager with Ultima VII? Bethesda was one of the worst companies ever; the initial release of Daggerfall should have bankrupt them to be honest. Or how about the old RPG Darklands from MicroProse? Or maybe Twilight 2000? Traveller? Patriot (now that was a winner), Harpoon? The list is pretty well endless.

Come on guys, back then we had to wait forever to get a patch; if you were rich you may have had access to Genie with a 9600 (or 2400) modem and if not you needed to wait till someone loaded it onto you local bbs.

So to say that PC games are buggy today your just looking back with rose colored glasses; if anything, the bugs are far less "game breaking" now than they were "back then".

What exactly is the definition of 'work' in this thread?  Of the 96 games that I own on the PC, I can count, on two fingers, the number of those that outright didn't work out of the box and both of those issues were fixed inside of two weeks.  I suppose, if we count the server issues with WoW, then three fingers would do the trick.

I've never had a game not work, and, I too have a hundred or so PC games.  And I think we can all agree I am an idiot, so if there was some problem, I would not be able to fix it.  I've had games crash fairly often, like this one, I've had them be poorly made, unbalanced, or unfun, but they all played. 

[quote who="Sakhari" reply="33" id="2806833"]
New PC games don't work, they just don't.

9 out of 10 new games don't work at launch.

What exactly is the definition of 'work' in this thread?  Of the 96 games that I own on the PC, I can count, on two

fingers, the number of those that outright didn't work out of the box and both of those issues were fixed inside of

two weeks.  I suppose, if we count the server issues with WoW, then three fingers would do the trick.

 
[/quote]

i can't speak for anyone else but i will throw in my two cents.

i think it would be naive, given the reality, to suggest *working* means having every advertised feature present and fully functional. i don't think i've seen that, ever. something is always broken, or at the very least, some feature dropped or redesigned to be other than what was originally stated.

at the very least, i consider a game *working* when i can play it, begining to end, and do so without having to rely on luck, or some cheat guide walkthrough, to avoid reaching a dead end pitfall.

two worlds is a prime example of this, do quest 'A' while you were in the middle of quest 'B', and either you had to restart, or somhow find a way over the gate, cheat basically, so you could steal that last needed piece for the end game quest. it was a mess.

civ 4, obviously, until a kind gentleman from russia patched it for us poor saps with too little memory to handle the massive leak, as there was no way to achieve any kind of victory before the game konked out prior to this, and boy did the developers take their sweet time.

myth 2 was one that i never got to finish, being that the level to obtain the codex at the library bugged out something fierce, forcing me to restart the game from scratch and hope things magically worked out better the next time. i lost interest in trying yet again.

i won't even touch myth 3. that was rancid

obviously  WoM is a work in progress, but on first purchase i crashed constantly before slowing to such a ridiculous crawl that progression was impossible. so i call that not working.

far cry was purchased solely to play multplayer, but had some serious synchronization problems. after dying dozens of times without scoring a single hit, we discovered the host always appeared a good 2 feet away from where he was actually standing, making him impossible to shoot.

thats just what popped into my head, while i don't play as many as i used to i'm sure i can recall a bunch more if i had to.

but really, thats just the most forgiving and generous definition of *working* i have, i consider a game working when the features of the game consist of more than a token effort and are fun and enjoyable

an example of this is mount and blade(since i don't want to pick on WoM). it had a quest system which consisted of about a dozen quests, they could only be done once every 45 or more days, and some of which eventually became uncompletable. the king would gather his forces and ride off to battle, but then run away if he personally was outnumbered, despite having a combined army ten times stronger than whatever he was facing, or abandoning a siege that was hours away from completing because a caravan passed by that he would gleefully chase across the entire map letting his kingdom go to heck. they had an economy and trade system that unfortunately was practically destined to go bonkers, and a feif system where it was impossible to maintain any level of wealth as the player.

yeah you could play it without crashing to completion, but so much was ihalf assed and tacked on, i can't call it *working*. if all you wanted to do was fight endlessly it was okay, but anything else was prone to dissapointment. using that definition, i can name quite a few more games.

Aha! You fell for my trap!

I will relish this moment..................., the relishing is now completed.

And now for the counter-argument:

The PC is just one big box of trade-offs. When you're building one, the trade-off is money or performance, when you're designing one, it's specialisation or diversity of function, when you're operating one, it's compatibility or particular needs.

Standardising PCs would slow down marketed series improvements. Meaning, like consoles, if you bought a new PC, you could expect it to run everything it's designed to for at least 3 years without needing to upgrade. That would also cool the hellfire that is currently consuming software developers. It would also mean a decrease in R&D costs to hardware competitors, which would improve their bottom line, not to mention manufacturing processes would not have to be modified as frequently.

On top of that, with slower increments, manufacturers could spend more time on hardware and chipset QA, meaning much better system stability.

I do agree with what you've said about out-of-the-box PCs, having sold many of them myself. It is an unfortunate fact, but not a necessary one. Standardisation can be done a LOT better.

So in the end, it comes down to just one trade-off instead of many. That is, the option to mix-and-match from a list with a buttload of options, or a pre-prepared system that just works better (i.e. more reliably) with everything.

You guys are kinda missing the reality. The industry is somewhat standardized, its called everyone is microsofts bit**. yeah new improvements roll out pretty quick, but if they don't work with microsoft & directx, noone will see those improvements, because noone is going to write their own api to utilize them, especially not to take advantage of an improvement of one specific piece of equipment that may or may not be present

Nvidia, ATI, when they come up with some new idea, they are pretty much compelled by circumstance to work with microsoft to get it out there, To standardize it. what they fight for, as far as the software community is concerned, is to get to set the standard. And most of this happens under the hood, its not something you as a game programmer really care about, because it doesn't substantially change what you do to use the card. you still set textures and shader options, and feed vertices through the pipeline to display the pretty triangles on screen. even if you get some new feature, utilizing it is done through directx new function calls and settings which don't affect existing code

and yeah, this graphics card is an nvidia 8200 by "so and so" and this is an 8200 by "whomever" and they run a little differently, but you know what, they both run on the same stock nvidia drivers, they were both built from the schematic handed to them by nvidia, your performance issues, guy one used a cheaper memory resulting in a slower speed of the card, or moved the memory around causing some minute delays in communication, or one of them is actually a cheaper 8200 'crp' model which means they were given the exact same nvidia chip, but its been hardwired to shut off some of the more advanced features, hence a reduced price, and slightly poorer performance.

but you the programmer, don't care. you ask directX, can this handle shader 2.0, can this handle multiple backbuffers, can it handle 80 kagiliion by 80 kagillion resolution, and it in turns asks the card, and it says yes or no. is it an 8200 or an 8200 crp, you don't care, you just wait for the reply that says yes i can do it, or no i can't. you are going to work with directX & windows, so they have to make sure they work with directx & windows,

its called object oriented design. how the card works doesn't matter, only that it exposes a common interface for achieving the desired actions, and that, however it achieves the desired action, it does achieve it. new improvements don't matter, either they happen under the hood, where the programmer doesn't see them, or they have to be specificly invoked, as in who cares if shader 9.0 is out there, shader 2.0 is still 2.0.

seriously, you all speak as if you must sacrifice your first born to the combatibility gods to get a game working, like there is a programmer hunched over in a room writing 8000 special case circumstances to account for all the hardware setups. manufactures strive to be compliant, if they aren't, they fix it with new drivers unless they are some fly by night. and when there is a major incompatability, its usually widely known on the developer networks as well as how to get around it. meaning if every engine doesn't have the same exact problems, you are probably doing something wrong, or atleast not everything you should.
 

Fraid you are WRONG here bud. I started back in the 80's as well and never got a bug ridden unplayable game until Ultima IV in which I merely called the developers/publisher at that time Sierra and they talked me through a boot disk over the phone (it really wasn't even a bug but just a setup routine required to boot up the game on my machine). I played hundreds of games of various types and many of them from SSI and SSG and MICROPROSE and not a one did I have any crashes or lockups or bug ridden crap out of the box they all worked great. The AI's were pretty darn good as well. You want a good fantasy wargame go find an old copy of SSI's "War of the Lance" it will stomp you in the dirt. So yeah the Golden Age was in the 80's when developers put QUALITY into their programming, they were PROUD to produce those great games and you didn't have to jump through hoops to get them to work. I eventually learned to write my own boot disk with 6 different bootup settings for various games. That is NOT A BUG it is just something that was required to get the game to operate. Sadly the GOLDEN AGE is gone forever because of greedy publishers and developers alike. Their philosophy: Put out CRAP OUT OF THE BOX the LEMMINGS will buy it.

Not exactly a fan boy. If Stardock had released Elemental and then moved on to their next project I would be just as mad as possible at them. But they are not doing that, in fact we know that they are hiring people to direct the progress of a game that they already got all of our money for.

That is not business as usual. This is a company run by people and not by policy and it shows.

thanks for all the replies guys! Glad to see that other people out there are as fed up with publishers, EA, the games industry, EA, shoddy products, etc.

And Stardock, you better deliver cause I just tied myself to your bandwagon!

To say all developers care only about money would be incorrect. Just yesterday I check the requiments to work as a programmer at one company (to get a few for what companies want for when I get out of college), and one of the requirements was to be passionate about playing and creating games. Many of the big names may be as you say but it is not universally true.