I am noticing a new trend in games and I really don’t like it. What I am talking about is publishers rushing developers to finish their product, and then releasing an un-finished or buggy game. The most obvious example is Tribes: Vengeance, but just about every game that has been released recently has been buggy. Take F.E.A.R. for example. From what I am hearing the game is extremely buggy, and a patch came out 1 day after release. Granted that isn’t as bad as Tribes: Vengeance. Entire features were left out of and were intended to be patched in later. There are actually buttons in the game that don’t work, because the patch that was supposed to enable them never came out.
Now I am not against patches, I am all for fixing the games. What I want is the games to spend more time in development and QA. Tons of people never patch their games. Either because they don’t know how, or they don’t have a fast internet connection to download the patches. Developers need to make sure the product they ship is playable and as bug free as possible out of the box.