🚀 go-pugleaf

On Sat, 8 Oct 2016 09:06:34 +0200, Werner Punz <we...@gmx.at> wrote:

>Am 07.10.16 um 02:59 schrieb Rin Stowleigh:
>>
>> Well the bad news is that this means I am no longer eager for the
>> release of Mafia 3:
>>
>> http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/10/mafia-3-pc-port-capped-at-30fps-at-release/
>>
>> ... but the good news is it means more time I'll be available to play
>> Battlefield One!
>>
>> I'll check back around on this game later to see if they patch it so
>> that the frame rate doesn't suck hairy balls.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>As I said "no reviews until release" is always a bad sign. In Mafia IIIs 
>case it is quality problems.
>Btw. the 30fps cap will be patched out the next few days, but the game 
>has a lot of other problems on the PC side as well.
>I would wait a few months or for the Goatse (GOTY) edition.

My first reaction when I read the news you posted about that was that
I would just wait until after release and see what the Steam reviews
and Metacritic user scores looked like before buying.  

But then I saw the 30fps cap thing and I just said no fucking way I'm
buying this in it's current state.  

Whenever the user scores on Metacritic start coming in averaging 3 or
so out of 10, it largely foretells that games future chances of
pulling itself out of suck.  Games can improve but when the scores are
that bad, in all but rare cases it is an indication of something
fundamentally wrong with the game that is not going to be easy to fix
in a simple patch.

I saw that they are claiming the frame rates will be opened up by this
weekend, but it just doesn't make sense.  If they were only days away
from fixing such a game-breaking issue, one that would just go away
with a single patch release, why would they have not done whatever it
takes to make sure their game was not reviewed without that patch?  

Either releasing a poorly tested patch that fixes the frame-rate issue
but might have other bugs, or delaying the games release by one more
week would have been viable last minute defensive strategies.  

But the fact they just released the game, knowing reviews would be
impacted and sales subsequently (and probably irrepairably) affected,
shows exactly what you've said -- the frame rate isn't the only
problem.  

It's like they just decided the worst of the problems are probably
unfixable, they are never going to get good reviews, so they might as
well minimize their losses and not undergo the expenditure of changing
the release date.

>I just wonder why the game studios always try to go for a 30fps cap, no 
>matter what, it is not like there hasn´t been a shitstorm over this many 
>times already. I guess marketing people will never learn that a "unified 
>experience" (aka a shitty 30fps experience because of the xbone) over 
>all platforms is not wanted.

Marketing douches have fucked up more than one game to be sure.  I
just wonder if that is the only issue here.  

Marketing isn't responsible for optimizing the engine.  One
possibility I thought about is that it's just got "ARMA disease",
where the engine creators (pointing at Bohemia Interactive here) just
don't have the skill and a good enough grasp of multi-threading and
paralellism to make a performant engine.  If that's the case the game
won't be fixable.