Saboteur Launch Plagued By Problems With ATI Cards 230
An anonymous reader writes "So far, there are over 35 pages of people posting about why EA released Pandemic Studios' final game, Saboteur, to first the EU on December 4th and then, after knowing full well it did not work properly, to the Americas on December 8th. They have been promising to work on a patch that is apparently now in the QA stage of testing. It is not a small bug; rather, if you have an ATI video card and either Windows 7 or Windows Vista, the majority (90%) of users have the game crash after the title screen. Since the marketshare for ATI is nearly equal to that of Nvidia, and the ATI logo is adorning the front page of the Saboteur website, it seems like quite a large mistake to release the game in its current state."
I bet I know who the "Saboteur" is... (Score:1, Informative)
It's Nvidia!
On a serious note, 29% to 63% market share is not even close to "nearly equal".
http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/
Re:I tested Saboteur (Score:3, Informative)
EA is well known for forcing game developers to release Beta and even Alpha quality software as final.
Another thing EA is well known for is the, after release, quick redirection of resources from bug-fixing/patching to making (paid for) expansions.
I strongly suspect that EA's recent "downsizing" simply exacerbated the negative-effects of their usual pattern of behavior.
As long as people keep buying their games, EA will keep doing the same thing again and again and people will keep getting shafted.
Re:"EA released Pandemic Studios' final game" (Score:4, Informative)
If they ever revive the Pandemic name (why? what notable titles have they made?
Battlezone 2. Though that franchise seems to be long forgotten (which is a pity... it was a very interesting genre).
Re:Saboteur, hey? (Score:5, Informative)
Unfortunately, the games industry is being pushed by customer demand and sabotaged by shrinking budgets from the corporate side.
Definitely no.
I worked for the video game industry, and this has nothing to do with QA or anything...
The period of the year when the games sell well is Christmas.
But selling your game at Christmas means that the game MUST be ready by the end of September.
If you miss September, you can say goodbye to make money with your game (especially if it's crappy).
There is also a small period at the beginning of January: parents gave money to their children, and the children tend to buy games.
In general, the company does not care if the game is ready for launch or not, because it does not want to miss the launch date, so the game is sold in the state it is in September.
Also, the company believes that a patch will be available by December and won't affect most of the customers, since the game is scheduled to be played after the Christmas sales.
Only the early customers will discover the problem.
Note also that when a crappy game is published, the company behind the game does not send the game to the magazines, since it does not want to ruin its Christmas sales.
QA has probably found the problem before September, but the marketing department told that the game must be available whatever the circumstances are.
So, instead of blaming QA or developers, blame the marketing department instead !
Re:This is where consoles win (Score:4, Informative)
There's a lot of games that can't be run on DOSbox...
And there are a lot of games that CAN be run on a modern system. Just for a laugh, I tried one of the oldest games taht I could find in my collection under Windows 7 (beta). It is Microsoft Fury 3 [wikipedia.org], released in 1995 (before the N64). It played perfectly! The game never came with an option to change the resolution of the game, so it looked better when playing it in a window rather than full screen.
I have tried some older ones under DOSBox before, but they were non-action ones so they didn't really stress the system. So at least you have SOME chance that a game that old will play on a new PC system.
Also, it should be pointed out to the GP that you can still play some old SNES and N64 games on the Wii using Virtual Console [wikipedia.org]. But this requires that you buy the games again, which annoys me when I still have the original in my hands. At least there is no hassle having to transfer the games from the old catridges.