What's your experience with stability? When is enough, enough?

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Lyzak
Posts: 81
Joined: Thu May 18, 2017 5:01 pm

What's your experience with stability? When is enough, enough?

Post by Lyzak »

First off, I want to preface this thread: this is perhaps somewhat of a rant, but I only do so in the interest of sparking a conversation. I'm not here to call names or shittalk Pavonis or Firaxis, and I hope no one takes this as an opportunity to do so themselves.

Having said that... :?

I don't think anyone would be surprised by someone saying that XCOM 2 is not the most... stable experience. Despite getting fantastic reviews and obtaining something of a cult following, XCOM has always been riddled with strange behavioral bugs (LoS, AI, nontransparent and sometimes bullshitty-seeming RNG if you will) and, particularly in XCOM 2, performance bugs. Sometimes it's very hard to push through problem after problem and continue to have fun; you can hear Youtubers lament this with relative consistency. Xavier (xwynns) often interjects brief - but passionate - rants into his episodes along these lines, and has even said a couple times that these performance and behavior bugs sometimes make him just not want to play.

That's about how I feel right now. Don't get me wrong: I love XCOM 2, and I especially love this iteration of the Long War. The original Long War struck me as very... intimidating, and much more geared towards players that just wanted a brutally harder game. Long War 2, while definitely still a much harder experience, seemed to me much more accessible.

But the game has many shortcomings and it's just so very hard sometimes to push through them and have fun. Some days you sit down to play and all you want to do is enjoy a game, but bug after bug after bug pops up and you spend more time agonizing over the game not behaving. Certainly, XCOM 2 has never performed well on my machine; despite being a fairly robust computer (and meeting Firaxis' "recommended" specs, not even just their "minimums"), I've had to slog through awful performance even on absolute bare minimum graphics settings. Add on top of that bugs like random crashes on large maps in the middle of missions, soldiers randomly not keeping their customizations despite hitting "save" like fifty times, strange LoS convolutions (which are honestly the least of my problems sometimes), Fog of War not behaving, audio artifacting/cutting out/peaking painfully... and of course, most recently, discovering that my strategic decision to rush Psi Operatives was basically for naught, because of the current Psi Operative bugs in 1.3 and 1.4. It's really a lot to swallow and still say "Yeah, I'm still having fun."

So...

What are other peoples' experiences with this? What's the deal-breaker for you? Or if you don't have one, what's your frame of mind to help let yourself continue to enjoy the game even when you run into problems? As someone who's enthusiastic about games, studies (studied) them and makes them, I feel like user experience in games is a kind of untapped problem, and having these kinds of dialogues about how "the fun factor" is touched by things as technical as gameplay programming and codebase stability, is fairly important.
Steve-O
Posts: 124
Joined: Fri Feb 24, 2017 8:00 pm

Re: What's your experience with stability? When is enough, enough?

Post by Steve-O »

Lyzak wrote:What are other peoples' experiences with this? What's the deal-breaker for you? Or if you don't have one, what's your frame of mind to help let yourself continue to enjoy the game even when you run into problems?
My response to these questions varies for official game devs (like Firaxis) versus mod devs (like Pavonis, for LW2.)

For official game devs, I'm willing to overlook some minor graphical bugs or performance issues (as long as they aren't crippling.) I don't require 60 FPS at all times. However, if there are major and obvious bugs, I tend to walk away from that game. If performance is stuttering on the lowest settings, I'm out. In the case of officially published content, it basically needs to be fun without me trying to make excuses for it.

XCOM is a bit of an exception to this. I just love the core game play so much that I'm willing to put up with some bugs I'd normally never forgive. I literally played XCOM 2012 for over a year non-stop (Dec 2014 - Dec 2015), just starting a new campaign each time I finished the old one. And THEN I discovered LW1. My purchase of XCOM2 was delayed for over a year because I was still playing LW1.

For mod devs, I'm more forgiving. Usually modders are more active and responsive to fixing issues in their mods, so if a mod is breaking the game, I either turn it off or go play some other game for a while, then check back in with that mod in a month or two to see how it's going. (This is what I've been doing with XCOM2/LW2 while I wait for things to stabilize.) I still love the game and I look forward to the day that LW2 is as solid as LW1 was (which was pretty solid IMHO - XCOM had some core issues, but the mod didn't exacerbate them.) Until then, if the bugs get too frustrating, I'll just walk away and play something else in my library while I wait for the next patch.
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