I'm growing tired of Switch ports releasing with obvious, glaring bugs alongside garbage performance

[SparkleMotion]

Looks fine on a 4K TV to me.

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It might look fine to you and not fine to others.

 

[mhayes86]

The worst one I've experienced so far is Pillars of Eternity. I am so disappointed that I can't even play the game because of its issues.

Dark Souls and Bloodstained had some issues, but didn't stop me from playing through them and enjoying them.

 

[ScOULaris]

Sure thing.

1. Most indies (myself included) barely know what they're doing so it's easy to make stupid mistakes.

2. Most game developers develop and test on good PCs. If you don't test your game early on in development on your weakest target hardware, you can discover late in development that your game just won't work there, requiring lots of heavy reworking. At this point, many developers don't have the money to do the time-consuming work and just do the bare minimum to get the thing to run. Personally, I ran into this problem with Cosmic Star Heroine - when I first tried to run it on our Vita devkit, the game almost immediately crashed. It took me months to get it working on the devkit and months after that to get it working on actual Vita hardware (the devkit is beefed up compared to actual consume hardware). As a nice side effect, since I managed to get it to run okay on the Vita, performance is excellent on the much more powerful Switch.

3. Games are frequently worked on until the last minute. A last-minute fix for one problem often causes problems elsewhere that aren't realized until someone spots them.

4. There's a lot of bureacracy involved in getting a patch approved on consoles so even if you have a fix, it could take days or even weeks before you can actually give it to players.

5. Your average indie dev teams' playtesting/debugging resources are themselves. Like with our last game (a 10-16 hour JRPG), I think only one of my friends / fellow devs actually played through the whole thing before launch. Most of them played a couple hours and then told me they'd rather wait for the finished version. Nobody was playing the game multiple times on different versions. Basically, Bill and I had to play the game over and over. As only two people, we were going to miss stuff. And at some point, you're so sick of playing the game that you just want to ship the thing.

6. Games are far bigger and more complex under the hood now than they were in days long past. Because of this, debugging is much more difficult and there's only so much that more time and money can do.

7. In the end, the number of people playing a released game is generally going to be exponentially bigger than the number of people who worked on it or tested it. A million people playing a game are going to find bugs that dozens of playtesters missed.

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Thanks for sharing your perspective as a developer.

I do understand how an indie dev simply doesn't have the bandwidth to do serious playtesting most of the time, and maybe it feels like a more prolific issue now than ever because many of us end up playing more indies than big AAA releases throughout the year. In the pre-patch days of console gaming we were mostly playing thoroughly playtested games developed/published by studios who not only could afford to do so but also pretty much had to because there was no going back and fixing things post-release.

 

[Sieglinde]

The graphics in Fire Emblem are not completely fine. The textures look like complete shit. There are pre-rendered backgrounds in a ton of cutscenes that look like they came straight out of a PS1 game, complete with low resolution and the seams not even lining up

Seems like you got it backwards where the majority of people like the art style and character design but everything else in the game looks terrible.

And yes Yoshi ran at 60fps, at the cost of tanking the resolution below 720p in docked mode. That is a joke for a game releasing in 2019

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I didn't get it backwards, look through any discussion in the pre release and release of the game and almost everyone complains about the art style and character desings, the fandom practically had a meltdown when Lorenz was revealed, the graphics aren't great but comparing them to the ports this thread is referring to is ridiculous, also lol at "straight out of a PS1" guess you never actually played one, anyway i never said they were perfect but my point is Nintendo first party games, are much much better than the broken ass ports the Switch often gets.

And to the that point FE isn't even developed by Nintendo anyway it was made by Koei Tecmo, mostly, which is why it's subpar compared to other first party Switch games (but still not a broken mess like the ports we're talking about).

 

[atomsk eater]

Grandia HD collection is my only experience with this. Still enjoying replaying the first game, but every audio and graphical glitch pulls me out of it.

 

[FantaSoda]

The worst one I've experienced so far is Pillars of Eternity. I am so disappointed that I can't even play the game because of its issues.

Dark Souls and Bloodstained had some issues, but didn't stop me from playing through them and enjoying them.

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Pillars is such a bummer because none of the pre-release reviews mentioned how absolutely broken that game was. The game literally cannot be beaten and these "publications" gave it a positive review (with one outlet giving it a perfect 100% score):

1. Daily Star
2. Nintendo Life
3. FNintendo
4. Multiplayer.it
5. Video Chums
6. Metro GameCentral

The game sits at an 83 on Metacritic and is only that low because NintendoWorldReport actually gave it a middling score (and is the only review to mention the bugs)

 

[kikuchiyo]

(which they know exist before release. They always know these bugs exist, don't kid yourselves)

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This is really, egregiously incorrect.

 

[MaverickHunterAsh]

My main issue is that it's becoming increasingly common for obvious, glaring bugs make it into the release. Stuff that is just inexcusable and simply couldn't have been missed by the developers. My implication is that games are being released knowingly in these buggy states, and then the developers act like, "Oh, thanks for reporting these bugs! We'll hopefully have a patch out in a few weeks to address them!"

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That's a fair point of frustration, for sure. I would just try to remember that in many (I would posit most) cases, games releasing in such a state isn't the fault of the developers but rather the publisher or, if they're one and the same, top company brass who are forcing such games to release before they're ready in order to hit established release dates. In a perfect world this would never happen and games would be held back until they're totally ready for primetime, but money talks and the priority is usually making as much of it as possible before cleaning up any messes later on (hopefully).

The OP briefly mentioned day one patches but it seems obvious they're talking about games that remain buggy or perform poorly even after a day one patch.

They mentioned Skullgirls and Hat in Time as the reasons they made the thread, I don't know what the deal is with Skullgirls but Hat in Time is a mess on Switch. It's definitely the worst performing game I can recall playing in years, and not at all something I would consider common across all platforms.

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Yeah, solid point. Some examples are egregiously worse than others, for sure; I haven't played A Hat in Time on Switch (or at all) but I too have heard it's a real mess, and Bloodstained was so bad that I went out of my way to trade my Switch backer copy for a PS4 retail copy. There are levels of acceptability here, for sure.

 

[ConradCervantes]

Now I see why the devs for A Hat in Time were so petulant initially about developing a Switch port, they didn't have what it takes to put out an adequate release.

They can take their clapping emojis and shove them up their asses.

 

[giallo]

This is why the Switch is, and will probably always be, my Nintendo first party and indie system. Games that are designed specifically for the Switch can look and play great (Astral Chain is a technical marvel given the Switch specs), but the system is DOA for AAA eighth gen ports. I mean, yeah, you can do it, but the concessions are way too much.

All I know is the Switch gave me Cuphead, and for that, I'm thankful.

 

[Velezcora]

Now I see why the devs for A Hat in Time were so petulant initially about developing a Switch port, they didn't have what it takes to put out an adequate release.

They can take their clapping emojis and shove them up their asses.

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I'm playing A Hat in Time on Switch and it runs more than adequately for me in TV mode, handheld mode leaves something to be desired but its certainly serviceable.

 

[Inuhanyou]

welcome to 2006 OP you must be new here?

 

[ScOULaris]

welcome to 2006 OP you must be new here?

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Not new. I've just hit my breaking point recently.