GTA V delayed ffs.

Brutal. I am really looking forward to it. Guess I will have to play one of the zillion games in my backlog.

The level of internet connectivity has done great things for gaming in general. However, I also think that it's allowed developers a lot of slack in what is an acceptable product to put out. Significant day 1 patches are a really bad look. If the game isn't ready, then it isn't ready. The idea that you can just manufacture the game discs, ship them out with what is essentially a beta version of the game on them, and then have the players download a gig or two worth of patch data on launch day seems lazy. If the game isn't ready, then it isn't ready.

Any game is going to have some bugs, and if you continue to do internal testing after your manufacturing section is done and have a lot of squashes, then it is a wonderful thing that you have this ability to patch them in. But when this turns from a luxury in to part of the roll-out plan I think the developers are really doing a disservice to both the players who become beta-testers instead of consumers, and themselves because it highlights that the game isn't complete.

To me, the Halo collection was an example of a game being released when it wasn't ready. Part of me wants to give them the benefit of the doubt and say that they probably had play-tested with their matchmaking system and everything was fine until some unknown thing (to the players) went wrong and all of a sudden they have a broken game on their hands. That would seem like a more reasonable explanation than the development team just going ahead and making a broken game available for purchase. Unfortunately, the prevailing attitude seems to lean toward not having faith in development teams, and that rigid schedule setting is probably as much to blame as them being DDoS'ed by a ton of people that want to play the game.

Let's see it as a good sign, I'm also eager for it and maybe will buy it full price.

They can delay GTA V as long as they want as long as they put out a good port and not the piece of **** that GTA4 was.

Pre-ordering in 2014 doesn't make a lot of sense to me; we have such instant access to any game that I don't understand why you wouldn't wait until release to at least get some impressions of the game, unless you are trying to get some preorder exclusives. Also, I can't think of any developers other than maybe Nintendo who I trust enough to plop down full price for a game shot unseen with full confidence that I will be delivered a quality product.

That said, pre-ordering has played an important role in video game history, and there was actual value to knowing your copy would be available and in the store on launch day. While it's suboptimal, there's at least a precedent to pre-ordering, and we hardly change fast enough to throw aside these kinds of conventions. Kickstarter was the next step in "selling hype" but at least if the concept didn't get funded you got your money back. Something about selling games in a broken alpha stage on the promise of improving it based on consumer feedback just seems particularly nefarious to me. Like, you can at least remove obvious game-breaking bugs, that is something you owe the consumer in any situation. Guess I don't see the positives of "early access" when you can buy enough great, complete games without any micro transactions to last you the rest of your life.

Love Aceuim's post on the matter. My understand with Halo was that much of the difficulty came from getting games from multiple platforms working on the same engine and the company's desire to release before the holidays.

Yes. Rockstar's track record for porting GTA games to the PC is awful. Even the GTA 3 port was trash back in the day (I still played it obviously because the game was so fun). Hopefully they are taking this one seriously.

is GTA IV fixed now on PC? I don't think I ever played it, last thing I played was GTA 3 and Vice City? (?)

Preordering still seems to make sense for Nintendo games, but this is steam thread, so yeah.

Not sure if it was patched or if it is just that modern hardware can brute force past the terrible optimization.

I installed it maybe a year ago and it seemed fine, however the driving with m+kb was terrible so I uninstalled after 30 mins.

What I "preordered" (well, bought CD Key before release date) in 2014:

Civ: Beyond Earth - FAIL, game sucked (won't preoder Firaxis games again, got hyped)

Dragon Age: Inquisition - Got good reviews, Origin is more stingy with sales and got it at fair price (32€) - SUCCESS, game was very enjoyable and spent 70-80 hours on it

Witcher 3 - I loved Witcher 2, CD Project have so far made all DLC and Expansions free and just overall seems like nice guys. - ???, game got pushed back 6 months to finish it, so I guess this should be a FAIL.

Basically the reason I preorder is to lock in decent price for a game I think I would get anyways, none of the games had any relevant bonus stuff.

You won't pre-order the next xcom sequel?

Xcom was kinda good kinda bad, the fact that all monster spawns were based on map movement triggers rather than having independent movement from the get go, really made it kinda suck. If they fix that I'm down probably.

Probably not. The game was quite fun and I did play it through once before EW and once after, but I don't think it was a masterpiece. It did get repetitive quite fast. I would certainly like to see a review before buying.

I actually forgot to mention the main reason why I won't pre-order from firaxis again. They have their games on sales right after release. For example BE was -40% already in winter sale although it was released 23rd of October. I greatly prefer Paradox/EU/CK policy of not discounting stuff for 3 months after release (I mean it would obv be better for me if the stuff was discounted earlier, but discounting products too early is huge FU to your most loyal fans). Same thing happened with Brave New World, it was -25% like a week after its release.

I pre ordered GTAV for PS3 in 2014 and don't regret it

I GOT A ****ING BLIMP AS PRE ORDER BONUS!!!!!!!

If you enjoyed xcom and want it to be less repetitive check out the long war mod. It's brilliant

I bought GTA IV for $4 during the autumn sale. I uninstalled it after playing for 45 minutes. It doesn't run terribly, but it feels floaty and not quite right to me.

Did you mod it at all?

I tried it unmodded and then with the icehancer graphics mod. Icehancer seemed to murder my frame rate. I had been playing a lot of Mafia II and Dirt 3 when I tried GTA IV, and whereas those games felt smooth and responsive, GTA felt floaty and unresponsive. Also the gun play sucks. The game feels like a crappy 6 year old console port. I deleted the game after my first play session, then decided to give it another chance a week later, then immediately deleted it again.

FWIW I have an R9 290 with 4GB of video ram, an i2500k sandy bridge, and 16 GB of system memory.

I got suckered into pre ordering the bureau thinking it was the next xcom sequel, not doing that again.

Finished Alan wake and enjoyed it, should i bother playing american nightmare? It seems from reviews that it's a lot worse.

Kind of an interesting comment given the discussion. Witcher 3 is probably one of the few games I think is worth pre-ordering for all the points you made, especially if you can get it 15-20% off under the assumption it will launch at full price. Delaying the game to work out bugs and make sure a complete product is released is like the exact opposite of Early Access, yet you consider it a "fail." (I'm guessing because it's annoying to have money tied up in something for 6+ months before you get to use it).

In any case, I don't think ALL pre-ordering/crowd-funding/early access is evil, just that it's an easy way to manipulate customers with hype and give developers a pretty big pass. Also, the process of repeatedly crowd-sourcing funding even when your past project is successful, like what Harebrained is doing with Shadowrun, seems pretty shady, yet who can blame them when people keep ponying up the funds?

I'm all for making the best game possible, but when I preordered I expected the game in about 5 months. Because of the delay I could have had preordered today for the same price while having the money available to me until now. I am, of course, still excited about the game

I'd also say that Witcher 3 is one of very few examples where preordering is fine because the developer doesn't exploit it. They're Polish after all.

there are a few games I'd consider pre ordering, especially if I thought they needed the cash flow.