I used to rag on the whole "patches on release day" thing, but you have to compare that to the idea that getting a "final" build through 1st parties like Microsoft and Sony is a long process that can go for weeks (or much longer, if you're actually doing a physical disc). If you wait until you have an actually final gold master version of the game, you then have developers working on "Day 1 DLC" (which gets quite a lot of flak as it is), or sitting on their hands. So what you actually do is ship your version 0.98 with the bugs that you expect to be able to fix within your window, start both the process for submitting the game and the process for submitting a patch, and hope that you allocated your development time properly.
Needless to say, this comes back and bites a lot of people in the ass, but for a lot of small game studios a 2-6 week delay in a game ship can be the difference between solvency and firing everyone in the office.
*Needless to say, this is probably a completely inappropriate workflow for someone like EA/Maxis, who probably had some suits that said said "well, other people do it, so we should do it too".
It makes perfect sense for there to be a patch on release day. There is a non-trivial amount of time between the completion of a game and when the discs are pressed, packaged and shipped to retailers in preparation for a release. There are bound to be both discoveries and opportunities to fix them during that period.
That said, it's absolutely absurd to ship a game with universal bugs affecting core mechanics.
I don't really see a problem with releasing patches on release day. If you need some lead time to get all your DVDs pressed and manuals printed and whatever, why not take advantage of that time to also polish the game in parallel?
However, going any further is just not right. If the game is hopelessly buggy after release and needs to be patched later just to make it playable, well, what are people paying for?
Probably because most people playing a beta just see it as an opportunity to play the game before it's released. Most people don't understand that they should be _testing_ the game. That's the whole point of a beta test right?
I was in the beta - from the get-go it was clear that EA was interested in using the beta to test their backend, not the game itself. There was no built-in mechanism for feedback or suggestions.
It was a server-stress-test beta (heh, fat good it did), not a gameplay beta.
Also, the beta is time-limited to one hour of play, and almost all buildings were locked out. There was not enough time for anyone to play enough to actually expose these problems (that come about only after your city has grown to some size).
I was in the SimCity Beta1 and tested it thoroughly in the very limited time that was given. It was very hard to test different concepts and parts of the game - none the less, a lot of bugs and a lot of serious issues were found.
I reported 10 separate issues with detailed specifications of my hardware and software setup - with detailed observed behaviour and actions that I could remember were related to the issues.
There was an forum for the SimCity Beta1. There was plenty of individually reported issues discussed and tested by different persons, and there was good creative discussions going on as well.
The forum had the functionality where you could click "I've had this too!" to a main post in the Bugs/Issues sub-forum.
Then again, it was pretty obvious that we weren't supposed to test the game all that thoroughly - because of the limited game time and very restricted game play in general.
It was basically a quick demo play. And that in itself is alright I guess.
EA is large and has a lot of QA/Testers - not sure about the Maxis sub-division though.
Well there seems to be several things in this article: the pathfinding issue seems quite glaring, but maybe it only occurs in certain corner cases. Working around pathfinding issues is also a classic in videogame history :).
The first point (each sim not actually having its own "life") seems harder to catch, however in my opinion that is the main issue here.
They can (and probably will) fix or at least improve pathfinding in following patches. However having the glassbox engine simulating individual "sims" instead of using heuristics and statistics to create traffic jams and the like was something that was advertised early on. It was also one of the major improvements over simcity 4 (which also had pathfinding issues by the way).
I believe it was also the reason why they only allowed smaller cities that what was possible in simcity 4, simulating a huge number of citizen was supposedly too demanding. But if they don't do it properly in the end, what's the point anyway? Might as well go back to what 2003's simcity was doing.
Typically the press is given a pre-release build so that they have a couple of weeks to play it before release and before the magazine hits the stand. They understand that getting early copies entails some work left to be done.
