I remember things like… Different ammo types in Fallout not actually working correctly. Armor Piercing rounds actually do less damage because the calculation is fucked up in the code. Or the biggest fuck up: The slides playing incorrectly if you manage to solve the Gecko/Vault City issue flawlessly. It still plays the ending cards as if you sided with Vault City, instead of getting them to work together peacefully by replacing the president of VC.
Many infinity engine RPGs have game breaking scripting bugs that needed patching or still haven’t been fixed even through user mods.
Anarchy Online straight up couldn’t be installed because the physical media was screwed up. Bought it day 1; didn’t play it until a full year after release when they finally put a fixed installer up for download.
World of Warcraft: Burning Crusade had an issue much like AO’s, with physical media being printed incorrectly and not working.
Just go and find playthroughs of some of these old classics. They just work around the issues. That’s what you had to do. In some cases, like soloing BG1 and 2, these issues were the only reason challenges were possible. lol
Aah, I must have been to young to spot those then lol. All I could remember off the top of my head is driver issues (specially audio, ugh) and reinstalling Windows because install corrupted the system and such.
Lol, some games were certainly buggy, but most games I played as a kid on my NES, SNES, Sega Genesis, N64, and Xbox worked pretty well. I remember by siblings being games testers as high school and college students, but that seems to no longer be a thing.
These days, only indie games seem to work okay day 1, and that’s not even a guarantee. Ever since WiFi became standard on consoles, it seems developers ship games way too early since they know they can patch it later.
Ah yeah, I guess that is true. I think Nintendo really clamped down on quality assurance due to the fact they rose up from the ashes of the Atari era and the global video game crash of the 80’s, that was directly attributed to a lack of quality assurance in the industry.
PC games, though… Oh boy. They were doing way more cool stuff, taking the tech to its limit, but they also tended to be smaller teams from garage companies, so had less resources for QA. Though it still was pretty rare to get a brand new game that straight up didn’t work. I think the only time that had ever happened to me was with Anarchy Online. I bought it retail the day of launch; that shit didn’t even install correctly. I couldn’t play it for a whole year, at which point they patched it and also put up a digital download cuz the physical media was botched.
Yeah, PC games were more rough, but they also often had a mechanism for updates. Sometimes it was a physical expansion pack (I think Warcraft 2 and StarCraft expansions were distributed that way, I forget though), and some had an online updater (I had dialup for most of my childhood so I am very aware of how much that sucked).
However, since I mostly played larger titles, I didn’t have to deal with that. Some games I loved as a kid:
Dark Forces
Lords of the Realm 2
Command and Conquer - most titles
Warcraft - 1&2
Age of Empires
Rainbow Six: Rogue Spear
I don’t remember any kind of patching needed for those games, and these were all mid to late 90s games, and I also played a lot of older floppy games, like ZZT and Scorched Earth, though the latter saw plenty of updates (I think my brother downloaded them at school or something).
Sometime after 2000 or so games started relying on downloading updates on PC, and with the PS3 and Xbox 360, that moved to consoles as well.
You clearly weren’t actually around back then lol
Sure but the glitches of old are more like Missingno in Pokemon, no? As opposed to the “oops, this questline doesn’t trigger, hotfix incoming” kind.
Not for PC games.
I remember things like… Different ammo types in Fallout not actually working correctly. Armor Piercing rounds actually do less damage because the calculation is fucked up in the code. Or the biggest fuck up: The slides playing incorrectly if you manage to solve the Gecko/Vault City issue flawlessly. It still plays the ending cards as if you sided with Vault City, instead of getting them to work together peacefully by replacing the president of VC.
Many infinity engine RPGs have game breaking scripting bugs that needed patching or still haven’t been fixed even through user mods.
Anarchy Online straight up couldn’t be installed because the physical media was screwed up. Bought it day 1; didn’t play it until a full year after release when they finally put a fixed installer up for download.
World of Warcraft: Burning Crusade had an issue much like AO’s, with physical media being printed incorrectly and not working.
Just go and find playthroughs of some of these old classics. They just work around the issues. That’s what you had to do. In some cases, like soloing BG1 and 2, these issues were the only reason challenges were possible. lol
Aah, I must have been to young to spot those then lol. All I could remember off the top of my head is driver issues (specially audio, ugh) and reinstalling Windows because install corrupted the system and such.
Lol, some games were certainly buggy, but most games I played as a kid on my NES, SNES, Sega Genesis, N64, and Xbox worked pretty well. I remember by siblings being games testers as high school and college students, but that seems to no longer be a thing.
These days, only indie games seem to work okay day 1, and that’s not even a guarantee. Ever since WiFi became standard on consoles, it seems developers ship games way too early since they know they can patch it later.
Ah yeah, I guess that is true. I think Nintendo really clamped down on quality assurance due to the fact they rose up from the ashes of the Atari era and the global video game crash of the 80’s, that was directly attributed to a lack of quality assurance in the industry.
PC games, though… Oh boy. They were doing way more cool stuff, taking the tech to its limit, but they also tended to be smaller teams from garage companies, so had less resources for QA. Though it still was pretty rare to get a brand new game that straight up didn’t work. I think the only time that had ever happened to me was with Anarchy Online. I bought it retail the day of launch; that shit didn’t even install correctly. I couldn’t play it for a whole year, at which point they patched it and also put up a digital download cuz the physical media was botched.
Yeah, PC games were more rough, but they also often had a mechanism for updates. Sometimes it was a physical expansion pack (I think Warcraft 2 and StarCraft expansions were distributed that way, I forget though), and some had an online updater (I had dialup for most of my childhood so I am very aware of how much that sucked).
However, since I mostly played larger titles, I didn’t have to deal with that. Some games I loved as a kid:
I don’t remember any kind of patching needed for those games, and these were all mid to late 90s games, and I also played a lot of older floppy games, like ZZT and Scorched Earth, though the latter saw plenty of updates (I think my brother downloaded them at school or something).
Sometime after 2000 or so games started relying on downloading updates on PC, and with the PS3 and Xbox 360, that moved to consoles as well.