The inconvenient truth

While I was busy typing my last post, Hank changed the blog's theme and now the background is some obnoxious shade of green. Have to get it changed before someone sues us for intentionally causing blindness.

Have been playing a lot of games lately. However most of them have been old titles. One game which I would like to talk about is "S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl". It is a post apocalyptic first person shooter with some RPG elements. Sort of a dumbed down, highly unpolished cross between Fallout 3 and Black (PS2 and XBox) with lame ass quests and 9487372 bugs. I've been playing this game for a few hours now, and I haven't been able to clearly understand the plot, which is presented through notes and messages on the protagonist's PDA and of course, in game conversations. Most of the game's dialogue, apart from random comments in russian and some spoken dialogue by the game's few main characters, is presented solely through written text. Though someone like me, who has completed planescape torment several times, can live with it, most new age gamers (including new age RPG gamers) might find this a little annoying. Especially if you take into consideration the length of a few conversations.

There are plenty of gameplay bugs as well, first one being insane difficulty of the first few gun fights. Shooting is hardly any fun. And even the haunting atmosphere created during the night by piercing howls of mutated dogs is marred by recurring audio bugs. Many a time you will find yourself frantically looking for a dog who growled right behind your back, only to spot it some 100 feet away. And by the time you realise this, some bandit might've already punctured your torso.

Don't get me wrong, I am not saying that this is a bad game. Just that it is a highly unpolished game which had the potential to be a 9/10 title. I guess this is where a lot of game developers and publishers go wrong. They kind of get used to the shortcomings in their games during the course of development and either stop noticing it or label them as insignificant. And towards the end of production cycle, it is usually too late to iron all these quirks out. Especially gameplay bugs. Publishers are a bitch when it comes to extending a deadline.

I just hope we can somehow take a more sensible approach by identifying most of these game destroying issues during development time and not have to deal with millions of bugs post testing.