Why must games crash?
It has been a long time since the days of Windows 98. While the famous “Blue Screen of Death” was a common occurrence for users of that operating system, most of our readers have probably only seen a handful of full-blown computer crashes in say, the past year.
Unfortunately, while Microsoft operating system stability has improved by leaps and bounds since the 90’s, the same can not really be said for the games that run on Microsoft operating systems. At least these days when a game crashes, you generally only need to restart the game, not the whole computer. But many PC games, even the very high profile big budget titles, still crash with distressing regularity.
For a recent example, look at Fallout 3, a game that has sold a lot of copies and received a huge amount of press. The latest patch supposedly fixed several crashes related to alt-tabbing behavior and updating the game. I did not experience these crashes. I have however had a steam specific problem: unless I disable the steam “in-game” client, Fallout 3 crashes immediately at startup, every time. This is obviously not an issue that affects every player, or it would have been fixed by now. Still, it is an issue that affects me, and it is quite annoying - when I play TF2, I really want to have the Steam in game options, so I have to enable / disable this feature every time I want to switch between games.
Even more annoying is the fact that the game also crashes randomly during actual play, often right after an autosave. While I have put an inordinate number of hours into Fallout 3, I have definitely seen somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 to 20 of these crashes.
Of course, not every crash is avoidable. Computer configurations vary tremendously, and it is impossible to predict in advance all the problems that may arise. Also, many systems using higher end processors and graphics cards can suffer from overheating, which tends to lead to system instability. (I assure you, however, that overheating is not occurring in my case.)
Nonetheless, the vast majority of crashes are preventable. It is entirely possible to release a game on the PC platform and have it play crash free for 99.9% of your audience. How can any developer with limited resources accomplish this Herculean feat, you might ask? The answer lies in public or large scale private betas. In a large beta kinds, thousands of players playtest a title for a few months prior to its release. Besides allowing developers to find and resolve any crash issues, betas are also great for fixing game balance issues.
Large scale public betas are currently in use as a matter of course by none other than Stardock (you merely need to pre-order the game to participate), and they are an excellent quality assurance tool. When done correctly, a good beta can vastly improve the play experience when a game finally does hit store shelves.
So why aren’t more companies doing public betas? Perhaps it is the additional time (several months) of development that a good beta takes. Many companies (and especially publishers) would rather just get the game out immediately, to try and maximize sales. This is faulty logic in a lot of cases, however, as good word of mouth generated by a beta and final product polish can surely generate enough additional sales to justify a measly couple of months of additional development time.
The other primary reason must be related to piracy. It would be a challenge to prevent a pre-release beta version of a game from leaking. This is another area where game developers should follow Stardock’s lead. Their development model and lack of DRM has enabled them to make a tidy profit, even though all their games are inevitably leaked and pirated.
I look forward to a future where buying a finished, retail version of a game implies a crash free, reliable gaming experience. If major game studios start adopting large scale betas with high frequency, that future could be here very soon.
November 10th, 2008 at 10:26 pm
This is yet another nail in the coffin of PC gaming’s eventual death.
Why go through all the trouble worrying about different hardware setups and beta testing for months when your game will sell better by an order of magnitude on the consoles? Developers know exactly what they’re getting into with the consoles; the games are better, more plentiful, easier to produce, and far less buggy.
It’s a bad business decision to make PC games anymore. Hence, they’re all bad or at least worse than their console counterparts.
That said, Oblivion’s engine is obviously not that good. Even in vanilla form Oblivion was notorious for crashing at the worst of times without any sort of error message or warning. Add in a mod or ten to fix some stupid gameplay issue and making any decent progress without a crash was always a crapshoot.
Also, I’ve seen only a “handful of full-blown computer crashes” since 2001.
November 11th, 2008 at 9:38 am
Not all games will sell better on consoles. The standard example of this is MMORPGs, but this also applies to RTSs and turn based strategy games. Also, shooters are almost inevitably better on PCs because of the superiority of the mouse + keyboard setup.
I think there will always be a market for these sorts of games. The market may end up being smaller than the console market, but it is not going to disappear. Note that it is not clearly smaller than the console market currently, if only because of World of Warcraft.
Also, I would argue that PC versions of games are more often than not better than the console versions. Fallout 3 is one example. While the occasional crashes are annoying, they are a minor factor compared to the much better control scheme on the PC.
As far as how many crashes you have seen, I guess I probably just work on a lot more PCs than most people.
November 11th, 2008 at 7:23 pm
What seems to be missing here is the fact that consoles crash too, and it can be far more difficult to recover (since generally the only people that can service a console are the console manufacturerers). I’m not just speaking of the notorious Xbox red ring of death. I’ve had Halo 3 on the X360 freeze up, controllers mysteriously stop working while playing EDF, and those are just the ones from the 360 that I can remember (seeing as I don’t own a 360 and these are just from when I was playing with friend’s machines this isn’t exactly a stellar record).
November 11th, 2008 at 9:40 pm
I wouldn’t even pinpoint PC games as the target of criticism. I’ve used non-game software that was far buggier than even the worst game software. The best examples I can think of are when a formerly lean software package gets utterly bloated. I’m thinking of Adobe Acrobat, WinAmp, etc. The first bloated versions were incredibly buggy, as so much new functionality was added without being properly tested. The more recent versions are somewhat better; they are still, unfortunately, just as bloated.
I think it has more to do with the availability of patches for PC games. A bad bug in a console game (until very recently with the deployment of networked services, anyway) was never going to get fixed, and it would forever mar and tarnish the record of the game. A bad bug in a PC game can simply be patched at some point after release. So the disincentives to release with bugs are different by at least an order of magnitude between the two.
November 13th, 2008 at 12:16 am
Not anymore. The bug/patch point is almost completely irrelevant now. And I only say almost because some people might not have access to The Internets, but you could say the same thing for PCs — just look at how many people complained about Steam/HL2 when they first came out.
With access to The Internets (that is cheaper and possibly free), the only thing consoles are lacking is keyboard/mouse support, which they may already have. Cost, game availability/quality, comfort, the important social factor of having drunken people sitting next to you to punch, etc. are all going for the consoles. PCs have what now? Configurabilty? Hmm. Apparently that’s not a word. Still, if it actually mattered at all console games might not outsell PC games 20:1.
MMOs and RTS games do have their place on PCs, but shooters I’m not so sure anymore. If you’re talking about games like Quake or UT, then, yes, those belong on PCs. However, those games are dead; no one plays them anymore and no one makes them anymore. CoD4 and the like, which are the types of shooters people play now, don’t suffer on consoles because they aren’t so much about aim as they are location and prediction.
The issue is quite literally that it’s impossible to actually aim a random spray of bullets. All you need to do is point the thing in the proper direction and hold the trigger while trying to rein in the recoil bounce. This works equally well with both control systems.
November 13th, 2008 at 9:39 am
I think the point about consoles lacking keyboard / mouse support is an important one. In fact, I don’t think consoles (as we know them) will ever have widespread keyboard mouse support. The reason is that consoles are made to play on a couch around a TV, while PC games are made to play sitting at a chair in front of a desk. This is really the key difference between the 2 platforms at this point. As long as there are games that you are better off playing while sitting at a desk, there will be a market for PC or PC-like games. Whether a console might come along to fill this niche is pretty much irrelevant, as the games will still be PC style games.
Also, I disagree strongly that no one plays (or wants to play) games where it is actually possible to aim your weapons in a reasonable manner.