Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/08/13/review-marvel-ultimate-allian.html
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It looks fun. If it was on the PS4 I’d try it with the kiddo.
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Sometimes, I play video games to get out of my head for an hour or two
Have you played No Man’s Sky? it’s a really great game for that 
And the Beyond update is coming out tomorrow.
That level of bugginess is unacceptable for a $60 name brand title. I wouldn’t accept it in an indie game. If you’re seeing this level of blatant graphical errors then their Q&A has also missed a ton of deeper issues in the game.
I would be a little more forgiving if it was F2P or some $5 indie title, but even then this shows a poor level of workmanship. It’s just embarrassing to the developer.
I miss Offworld.
I always say, why pay $60 for a game at launch when a few months later it might actually be finished and at least two-thirds of the price? It’s not like there’s a shortage of other things to play in the meantime.
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I’ve been gaming for a good chunk of my 51 years. There’s a lot of stuff I don’t miss, but I do miss games being done when they shipped.
Yes, it’s nice that games can be fixed later if they need to be. If that were possible back in the day, many games may have been better experiences.
But it seems like it leads to a whole “ship it now, get the money, and fix it later if it’s worth it” attitude that’s annoying.
I’m glad you’re enjoying the game though, and I hope they fix it through updates.
I’m pretty sure Sean said at one point that he ditched the PS4 in favor of the Switch to conserve space.
But that’s an excellent example of a game changing massively after release. I have to give them credit for not just throwing their hands in the air and walking away after such a contentious launch.
Unfortunately, I bought it at launch and put many, many hours into it at that time. So in spite of how much better it has become, it’s difficult to give it another chance. Especially with so many other games fighting for my attention and time.
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This is odd. I haven’t had a single problem with custscene bugs. I wonder if your SD card is just too slow or in the process of death. That looks like the same type of effect when you have too high of a bitrate requirement and the bandwidth can’t keep up.
There are, in fact, costumes to unlock at least there seems to be, in the infinity mode.
Occasional shitty camera angles I will, however, agree with.
There’s also Minecraft, which is on the Switch. For me i’ve preferred playing NMS but both games have similar appeals.
I recently tried giving Minecraft another chance and i got pretty tired of playing it pretty quickly as usual 
there’s just not enough there to hold my interest. Might be more fun as multiplayer, i haven’t done that yet.
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Marvel S.T.R.I.K.E. Force has much better graphics and fantastic animations. Been messing around with that one almost since it debuted.
Edit: Of course, this is for the Switch, and Nintendo’s graphics have never been anything to write home about.
The character customization and power-up choices was at least 60% of the fun of the first two – if that’s gone I probably won’t bother.
“A delayed game is eventually good, a bad game is bad forever.” – Shigeru Miyamoto
Or, things might have been like they are today - rush it out with known issues because you know you can fix it later. Miyamoto’s quote really doesn’t apply any longer. There is usually a point at which players will give up on a game if the issues aren’t fixed, though. However, any game that can be updated on-the-fly, will have some grace period.
The fact you can fix bugs or add features after a release has other implications as well. Maybe QA did find those cutscene issues. Maybe they only showed up in very rare instances, and fixing them was expensive. Instead of spending resources up front, wait and see how many players it actually impacts, and fix it in an update if the number is large enough to justify the cost.
Just to be clear, I’m not justifying or defending such practices. I’m also not running a video game development company, so, I can’t promise I wouldn’t be defending them if that were the case.
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I think it still applies but the edges are blurred. That said there are more instances of a game launch being so catastrophic that there’s just no saving it because no one cares enough to stick around, and if there’s no one playing the game then why sink money into it to make it better?
There are studios that have managed to iterate and make a game successful over time though it seems to me that i see more failures than successes that way. It’s better to delay a game and try to get it as good as it can be, even if you know you’ll end up having to patch things in later you’re still better off having a game that has a bit of soul and fun to it to keep some core players around.
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I agree. Like I said, there is a grace period. How long that period is depends on a bunch of things. Among them are:
- How BAD it actually is and how much work still needs to be done
- How respected are the developers.
- What kind of track record do the developers have with releases in the past.
** Do they usually have very clean releases?
** When they’ve released games with issues in the past, have they cleaned them up quickly? - How big was the demand for the game and how much was it hyped?
I’m sure there are a lot more, but that’s just what I thought of right this moment.
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Mmm. I guess that grace period varies by the customer. Some may have spotty access to the internet, or low data caps (Xfinity reinstated their bandwidth caps again) and may not want to spend the time/bandwidth needed to update the game “x” number of times until it works like it should have out-of-the-box. Or they may just be pissed that the game wasn’t working right on day one and never come back.
I feel like if a company is going to push out what is essentially a beta of a game so they can meet their deadlines and get an influx of cash, with plans of fixing it later provided it sells well enough, then they should make it clear that’s what they are doing. At least Steam “Early Access” games are labeled as such. I’m not aware of anything like that for consoles.
I’m still waiting for Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night to be fixed on the Switch before I buy it. At some point I’ll just get it on the PS4 instead. I’ve heard it works great there.
As for “A delayed game is eventually good…”, Daikatana? Duke Nukem Forever? And countless other games that were delayed and still sucked regardless.
It does indeed. It means they can significantly alter the game you bought if they want to/are pressured to/feel like they need to. Or even make it disappear, if you only had a digital copy. For that I’m thinking of the P.T. demo on the PS4, or numerous games I’ve bought through iOS that have vanished from my purchase history (a whole other problem). I’m looking forward to the day when some developer replaces all of the guns in an FPS with walkie-talkies to appease the pols that want to abolish fake guns and keep the real ones.
You’re right. It’s still very much a give and take situation. There are positives to being able to fix games after launch, but there are some pretty substantial negatives as well; depending on the developer/publisher/customer.
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