The Broken Games Report: Issue #1

Welcome to the first issue of The Broken Games Report, a recurring look at the games that arrive on store shelves before they arrive in a finished state. The back half of 2014 has been a banner season for exactly that: a run of high-profile, full-price releases that shipped with day-one patches larger than some entire games, and a community left to play tester. Let’s run down the worst offenders.

Halo: The Master Chief Collection. A loving remaster of four Halo campaigns in one box, undone at launch by the one thing it could not afford to break: matchmaking. Players sat through long searches only to be dropped into empty lobbies or mismatched teams, turning the headline multiplayer feature into a waiting room. 343 Industries has acknowledged the problems and promised server-side fixes, which is the modern way of saying the disc you bought is not yet the game you bought.

Assassin’s Creed Unity. The poster child for this whole report. Unity launched with a long list of game-breaking bugs, and Ubisoft has been candid about the scale of it. Their incoming Patch 2 is aimed at the headline failures across all platforms: Arno falling through the ground, the game crashing when joining a co-op session, Arno getting caught inside hay carts, and a delay in reaching the main menu at game start. The PC version of Patch 2 is set to pile on further fixes, including flickering with Nvidia SLI and AMD CrossFire configurations and improved cinematic-mode performance on lower-end hardware.

That is only the patch we can see coming. Ubisoft has also consolidated a broader known-issues list that reads like a postmortem: frame-rate problems, graphical and collision issues, matchmaking and co-op crashes, Helix Credit purchase failures, Uplay service outages, unredeemable Unite rewards, invalid collectible codes, Companion App issues, and Initiates service outages. A subsequent Patch 3 is already being discussed. When a publisher is mapping out a third patch before the first month is over, the product was not ready.

Assassin’s Creed Rogue. Spare a thought for the other Assassin’s Creed that shipped the same month. Rogue was the quieter, last-generation send-off, and it largely avoided Unity’s headlines, which tells you something about how low the bar had sunk: not making the broken-games report is now an achievement.

Sonic Boom. The tie-in to Sega’s new Sonic sub-brand became an instant punchline, speedrun in record time thanks to bugs that let players clip through the world and skip whole sections of the game. When the fastest thing about your Sonic game is the exploit that breaks it, the report writes itself.

Dragon Age: Inquisition. The good-news entry, relatively speaking. Notes from early EA Access play on Xbox One flagged some rough edges: heavy depth-of-field, plenty of clipping, plastic-looking reflections, a moment where dialogue responses could not be selected without first holding the bumper to open the consumables menu, and a horrible frame rate during cut-scenes that otherwise ran fine. Annoyances rather than catastrophes, which in this company counts as a win.

DriveClub. The PlayStation racer that turned its always-online ambitions into an always-offline reality. Server troubles left the social features, the entire point of the “club” in the name, unreliable for weeks, and the promised free PlayStation Plus edition kept slipping as a result.

The thread running through all of it is the same. These are not small studios learning on the job; they are some of the biggest names in the business, shipping to a fixed holiday calendar whether the code is ready or not. Patches will come, and most of these games will eventually be the games they were sold as. The question The Broken Games Report keeps coming back to is simple: why are we paying full price to find out?