[teen]

The first example is because the game had a patch, I'm pretty sure that you can skip that on Switch, but even if you can't, games that couldn't be patched were objectively worse than ones that can.

The second example is social media and has been discussed to death. No arguments there.

The third example, Tesla's UI, could be said to be worse than manual buttons, but the technology in a Tesla is not objectively worse overall than old cars. Electric cars are amazing tech.

[quanticle]

No, I think that games that couldn't be patched were, at the very least, just as good and very likely a lot better than modern games. At the very least, the fact that the game couldn't be patched meant that companies invested in QA and testing. In those days, "going gold" or shipping the master ROM was a big deal, and so companies went out of their way to ensure that their product didn't have any huge showstopper bugs prior to launch.

In theory, modern games, with patching could be even better. They could be just as well tested as older games, but also ship patches to fix the things that do slip through testing. But in practice nobody does that. Instead, game developers just compress the schedule, knowing full well that they can now ship games with totally breaking bugs that get addressed with multi-gigabyte "day one" patches.

[shadowgovt]

Survivorship bias. Games that couldn't be patched were better if they worked on your architecture. Otherwise you were just left out in the cold or you bought an entirely new PC to play them.

Consoles were better because (after the Crash) the vendors guarded them jealously and put the developers through an absolute hell of quality control to confirm they shipped a working product on the cartridge. Of course, the consequence is that they had massive editorial power over the games that existed in their ecosystem.

[quanticle]

You're proving my point. You're saying that the quality controls imposed upon developers by the console manufacturers resulted in fewer, but higher quality games.

I'm saying that's a good thing.

[cfeduke]

Though games that couldn't be patched weren't as complex but still at least as fun or more fun than today's games. Obviously my opinion. The article is getting at that you cannot just pop in a cart and play a game - there's ceremony with today's games. And for what? It's not a better experience. Unless that's all one knows. Then maybe it's... just an experience, I guess.

the rigamarole I had to go through so my son and I could play a Double Dragon title as a 2P simultaneous experience on my X-Box is the stuff of maximum frustration. Like, exhausting. I pine for the days of hitting the "select" button to choose "2 Player" in NES Contra's main menu and off we go, playing two player. Today, such a feat is amazing technology.

[goosedragons]

Its not a Switch in the article. There's also this bad trend where publishers literally leave pieces of the game off the disc/cartridge and force you to download the rest. Not a patch, the actual game.

[adrr]

Is it worse than the time when games came on multiple disks or cds and you had to switch during the game? How many cds did myst come on? Prior cds was floppies which you couldn't even install it on a HD because the floppies had copy protection on.

[goosedragons]

Yes it is worse. You have the entire game with a multi-disc game. Switching takes like 2 minutes max and can be done offline.

[brigade]

That "trend" isn't shipping incomplete builds, but rather that the engineering work to minimize delta update sizes simply isn't a priority for games with infrequent patches, and YouTubers can't tell the difference.

[goosedragons]

Uh no. I'm not talking about updates. I'm talking about the game medium literally not containing the entire game because the publisher is too fucking cheap to spring for extra discs or a bigger cart. Some examples include L.A Noire, Spyro Trilogy, GTA trilogy, Tony Hawk 1+2 on Switch, PC games like Doom 2016 or MGSV or CoD:MW II on Series X.

[brigade]

LA Noire is an excellent example of my point - people just assumed the disc didn't have the game because the day-one patch was 3/4 of the installed size, but no, the delta update from the GM version on disc was just that bad.

[goosedragons]

I'm talking L.A Noire ON SWITCH. Even the box tells you it needs an extra download to be usable.

https://www.gamerevolution.com/news/354397-la-noire-switch-d...