Nowadays, the publisher can just urge their devs to release the game as soon as possible, and then release one hundred billion patches, rather than just spitting out a good game right away. That way of doing business is faster and seemingly more profitable.


Now, in the 90's and 00's, you couldn't do that. Many people either didn't have Internet or it was very slow and expensive. The game HAD to come out ready, or else it was doomed to fail.



Today, most games need gigabytes of updates to even work properly.


It's obvious CDPR knew the state Cyberpunk was in but they wanted to cash in on the holiday sales. They figured that even with all the bugs, it was better to release the game right now and capitalise on the hype, rather than delay it yet again and risk people losing interest

So I wasn't the only one who feels the internet has ruined gaming in a lot of aspects?

I take no issue to optional internet connectivity...

... but...

... I do agree that once internet connectivity became ubiquitous...

... the development of good, complete SP experiences and improved AI became casualties.

IMO the push for connectivity is more to mine data than improve gaming. And for me, the more connectivity is pushed, the more I want to disconnect.

Get your head out of the septic, drinking that only makes you fulla crap.

Games weren't superior, there were just less bullhorns, soapboxes, and electron scanning microscopes. Star Wars: Masters of Teräs Käsi was a flaming turd and it came out in 1997. There were entire catalogues that were considered poison at worst to middling at best. High Tech Expressions, LJN, Ocean, countless publishers/developers for the then dying Micros, all of them synonymous with absolute tat.

Paper publications only had so much physical space, web sites were in their infancy and mostly focused on fandom; nobody was about to go out of their way to bother with a mediocre or below average game unless it was a slow season or they wanted something easy to pick at; even then many of the publications had agreements with the publishers or toughly contested contracts. Konami could pick up their ball and leave Gamepro in the dust if they decided to dump on Antarctic Adventure.

So you had to pick your battles.

It's just publishers had to be slightly choosy because you had higher companies breathing down their necks.

The problem is not the internet. The devs are.

If the game is no good to release yet, then do not release.

Agreed. If the developers decide that they'll release an unfinished game and give huge updates to patch it, we can't really blame the internet for it. Sure, it's only because internet is faster and more common but I feel that the game released should be complete. Patches are fine but if developers release a full, playable game with less bugs - then there'll be less patches.

my 2c: if you grew up in the 90s-ish, games in the 90's and 00's were superior because there were fewer of them and if you didn't have much money (especially as a child) you cherished whatever you could get, even games that have aged poorly. And internet access being less ubiquitous allowed games to have more of a "magical" mystical quality to them because info like plots weren't spoiled or spread as easily.

Evidently you were not alive back then.

Questions are now answered!

Disagree there. Devs in those days focused more on the story and gameplay than graphics. We have had marvels like Fallout, Baldur's Gate, and the venerable Planescape: Torment released then. Game development cycles were relatively shorter due to them being more focused and linear. Developers had to work around hardware limitations to fulfill their vision and this led to interesting gameplay mechanics and innovations. You had games that were exceptionally good at story-telling like say Sanitarium, Thief, Metal Gear Solid, Black Dahlia, Silent Hill, Grim Fandango, etc., and others still that were mediocre and forgotten.

Some of these games broke new ground like Redneck Rampage (kidding) and laid the template for modern games today. Today, AAA gaming is very expensive and risky; Which is why, developers are far less willing to take big risks with gameplay elements and mechanics like they did back in the day. You often have iterative and evolutionary advances but it is rare to see a AAA game that is ground-breaking in every possible way.

Some of the best games that I enjoy may not have the best graphics like the original fallout and its immediate sequel; However, their gameplay remains exceptional.

I agree games were less BUGGY because you couldn't just download patches very easily.

However games were often superior because they weren't 90% visual and 9% gameplay and 1% story. Instead the visuals were TERRIBLE, and instead visually was closer to probably 25%, 60% was story and the last 15% was mechanics).

There were probably more good games coming out on consoles than the PC, although there are certainly good ones, it wasn't until Windows 95 and after that you generally had VGA/SVGA and standardized sound cards that gave you decent quality sound output, making for where consoles and computers were probably similarly on par after a certain point.

But there was also a thing called LIMITATIONS!, often limitations caused the original idea to be impossible so they found interesting workarounds that became part of the game and even improved the games to a degree vs having unlimited memory graphical output and space.

Honestly, I prefer to go back to a time even before then, where games were more like 5% graphics (you couldn't do much), 0% story (no plot or an excuse plot), and 95% mechanics and level design.

Or you can go to Famicom/NES era RPGs, where the focus was still more on the gameplay than the story (even if a few like Final Fantasy 2 and SaGa 1 did some interesting story-related things; SaGa 1's plot is still rather unique to this day). Also, back then developers were more willing to experiment with the most fundamental mechanics, so you see games like SaGa 1 and Dungeon Master that take approaches to character growth that you just don't see that much with modern games.

Planescape: Torment would have been an exceptional game in any time period, not really representative for the average games from its decade. But I hear The Witcher 3 was exceptionally good at story-telling as well (haven't played it myself), seems to be quickly forgotten and overhadowed by the Cyberpunk 2077 release ...

Anyway, I believe games like Arcanum or VTM: Masquerade, or the infamous Pool of Radiance: Ruins of Myth Drannor etc. also suffered from bugs at release. The main thing that's different today is probably the magnitude of the teams who work on one game, the complexity of the games (open world without loadscreens etc., although Gothic had that too already), as well as the big money and suits involved. So you have more potential sources for errors while at the same time possibly more pressure from above/third party people not involved in the game's creation process themselves.

Allow me to disagree. The problem are not the devs, the sheep buys anything the marketing tells them to buy, even before launching. Monkey likes shiny and I am as guilty as anyone.

Heck, if a hyped game only sells to youtube "reviewers", it's probably enough copies to make money...

There are much bigger problems than just the internet but I agree with what you're saying. The internet in general has ruined life. Everybody must be tweeting, streaming videos and acting like air heads every minute of their life. Thanks internet and smart phones. Bunch of zombie sheep.

Yes and No.
I would say tendentially yes for the internet subject, games came out in a more stable state, no doubt.

Superior on what respect tho?

Gameplay wise I can agree, the most influential games come right from the 90s but many MOBAs of the time (Quake, Unreal, Quake ]|[, Unreal Tournament) had brutal, unrefined gameplay which modern multiplayer games are leagues ahead of in terms of mechanics.

Graphically those were weird times with pre-rendered/captured assets coming in to replace hand drawn ones: some games looked really weird, in additon realtime 3D graphics were still in its infancy and again many games of the time look weird.

Packaging wise there's no contest here the game's boxes were beautiful as well as the manuals and some of the added paperwork that completed the lore.

Technically hardware was much more expensive compared to today's but conversely motion capture/performance capture (which modern AAA games can't do without apparently) costs literally milllions and millions to make now.

Furthermore back then there weren't as much resources as today for self learning 3D artists/programmers/modders.

So in the end I would say that I mostly agree with the OP's question.