ANOTHER UPDATE: My game won’t work!

ANOTHER UPDATE:  After several weeks of no further response from Codemasters, and no patch to fix the issue, I’ve traded Grid 2.  I’ve found from the trade in price that plenty of others have done the same, 0nly 3 months old and it’s not worth anything.  The level of day one patches for games is not reducing (both Saints Row IV and Splinter Cell: Blacklist have had them on their release), and there are still problems occurring in AAA games (we’ve been playing co-op on Blacklist here at Codec Moments and there are multiple minor issues that don’t spoil the game but shouldn’t be there).  My Codemasters boycott stands, despite them about to release what looks like their most interesting Formula 1 game to date, but I have lost faith in them as a developer and company.

The next gen comes in 2 months and game prices are going to go up by around £10.  Why should we be paying more for incomplete or non-functioning games?  The only option we have to improve this situation is to stop buying from the ones that seem to not care and put the money behind the ones that actually release a product that works out of the box, or admit a mistake and fix it quickly.

 

UPDATE:  I’ve had a further response from Codemasters on the Grid 2 issues.  The sage-like advice I got was to restart the game on a different profile on my PS3 and see if I get the same issue.  Genius!  Aside from having to go through 8 hours of gameplay to get there, I just didn’t think it would actually correct the problem.  What the request from the customer service team did prompt was for me to try the game on another machine completely.  I logged into my old 80 gb “fat”, updated the firmware because it’s only been used as a blu-ray player for the last 2 years, downloaded my cloud save and installed the game.  Starting it up I was thinking that I could get past the race, transfer my save back to the main machine and actually finish the World Series Racing season.  And would you believe it, I got exactly the same issue, freezing on the loading screen!

At least I’ve learned the problem is repeatable across different hardware models and I’ve been back in touch with Codemasters but they’ve been strangely silent for the last couple of days.  If there are any further updates I’ll put them on here, and if anyone else has the same problem let us know in the comments below.

Codemasters Boycott

ORIGINAL:  Sunday mornings are the best time of the week for gaming aren’t they?  Usually nothing happening that you have to get ready for, you’ve (hopefully) caught up on some sleep, maybe a little bit hungover and don’t feel like doing anything strenuous.  Perfect time to boot up your gaming device of choice and immerse yourself for a couple of hours.

I was thinking along those lines this morning, got up, made some coffee and toast, was about to go gaming when I saw an email from Codemasters.  I’ve been having issues with Grid 2, the game permanently freezes on loading a specific event, and it’s been well reported on the Codemasters forums.  I’ve been waiting for a patch but when I received a marketing email on Friday from them asking me to spend money on DLC I lost my patience and got in touch.  They’ve come back advising I uninstall and perform two of the safe mode functions (file restore and database rebuild), both of which I’ve done already but went ahead again to make sure.  During this 2 hour waste of my Sunday morning gaming I got thinking about why I was doing this and why we let games companies get away with this all the time.

At the same time as I got Grid 2 I picked up The Last of Us and Remember Me.  All 3 are high quality games from good studios, but each had some form of game breaking bug.  Grid 2 I’ve mentioned, The Last of Us had the auto-save failing for some users, and Remember Me  had one of the boss fights glitch so that despite taking down all their health it wouldn’t trigger the next sequence needed to complete it.  In the space of a couple of weeks I’d seen more problems with new games than I had since the Skyrim and Silent Hill HD debacles.  Yet we, as gamers, allow this to continue.  There are a vocal minority who raise these issues with the developers to find solutions, but they get lost in the wider ignorant screaming from some of the gaming community that make all of us who enjoy this hobby look stupid.  Have you seen the response and death threats to the Treyarch team because they slowed the reload of a weapon in Black Ops 2 by 0.1 seconds?  These types of stories get the most mainstream media attention which means that more serious problems that affect core and casual gamers don’t get a look in, and issues like broken games don’t get communicated to people who will buy the products but don’t read specialist blogs and websites.

If you take the fundamental problem with these games (they are not fit for purpose) and apply it to almost any other high-street available non-electronic product, there would likely be a full recall from the shelves with the manufacturer liable for all costs.  Our changing technology means that electronic products no longer have to go through this process because they can be fixed remotely, but what is this doing to our consumer rights?  When you buy a product you want to have full use of it from the day you take it home (and I’m not talking about the jailbreaking/hacking/rooting side of things), not to pay for it, get it home, then wait for the person who makes it to finish it off and send you bits at a time.  We wouldn’t accept this with anything else.

So what can we do about it?  We could start boycotting the worst offending developers and publishers.  Easy for those who have knowledge of where the issues are, more difficult to communicate to the casual market.  I know from my experiences recently that I won’t trust a Codemasters game for some time, and I say that having been a customer since the days of Dizzy on the Sinclair Spectrum.  If we stopped buying the games with these issues then publishers would have to take note as well, and this should feed through to giving the development teams more time to finish the game fully.  This isn’t impossible, most of us had consoles from the last generation and I don’t remember ever having a game that I couldn’t finish because of a bug.  Why can’t all studios take inspiration from Valve, it’ll be ready when it’s ready.  That’s why we end up with timeless masterpieces like the Orange Box, though we also have to put up with the will they/won’t they speculation on Half Life 3.

I think what gets me most though is that because of these problems we’re all losing gaming time and experiences.  I’ve spent this morning trying to sort out a problem that shouldn’t be there (and that the suggestions didn’t fix), and whilst it might be something you’d expect on occasion with PC gaming you shouldn’t have it at all on consoles.  My Sunday morning gaming opportunity has gone, that time doesn’t come back, and the worst thought is I’ve actually paid money for this to happen and I can’t get that back either.

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Matt

Co-founder & Editor at Codec Moments

Gamer, F1 fanatic, one half of the Muddyfunkrs DJ duo (find us over on Hive Radio UK), MGS obsessed, tech geek.


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