Old Man Yells at Clouds - A Return to the SNES Quality of Releases.
When I say 'Quality' I'm not necessarily talking about how fun or original game is, but with how functional the game is. I am going to highlight this by, oddly enough, ripping into one of my favorite games not only from the SNES, but of all time, Final Fantasy VI.
Regardless of your thoughts on the game (Specifically the original US release) Final Fantasy VI was, from a technical standpoint, a complete mess of a release for its time. The sheer volume of ways you could crash this game was staggering.
Using Sketch on an invisible enemy.
Using Sketch on Gau when he shows up in the Veldt.
Using Sketch on a specific enemy at the entrance to Narshe in World of Ruin
Using Sketch on a Tyrannosaurs while equipped with the Rainbow Brush.
Your evade stat has no effect.
Magic evade is actually used in place of normal evade.
The list goes on, but specifically in regards to 1-4 (And many others not listed) there are potential effects that may occur. You could wipe your save from the Cartridge, add an otherwise permanently dead NPC to your party, have a character have 0HP permanently, not be dead, and is un-killable now, gain 255 of a variety of items (99 is the normal max), and other such things.
No question this game was a complete mess of a release, but what if, I ask you, this game was released in such a state today? Or more specifically, what if a game with just as many bugs was released today, with the same frequency? To be honest, many of these bugs you may never encounter (especially the oddly specific ones like the Tyrannosaurs and specific weapon equipped), and the others don't actually show up consistently, and rarely cause any lasting effects to your save, usually you have to repeat them if you want to get one of those strange game states.
I put it to you that not only would this, a game that was this much of a mess during its launch during the Snes, wouldn't even cause people to bat an eye if it were released today. You do have extreme cases such as the sheer insanity that was Assassin's Creed Unity that got rightfully lambasted, but what of Bethesda and their games? Many of their releases have been rather objectively worse than Final Fantasy VI in terms of bugginess, and people just kind of accept this.
Even Citizens of Earth, a smaller title that I quite like, was plagued with bugs at its launch. The game randomly freezing, potentially getting stuck in any mobile object and being unable to move, was frustrating. Things like this, back in the day, would have been unacceptable for a release. Yes, the game can ease the pain of this due to regular autosaves, but if you were to compare it to any number of the RPG's that were out at the time you could simply wave off the game to go play one without the continued frustration.
I know picking on an indie studio is a bit of a dick move, but it's an industry-wide problem. We as gamers have just kind of come to accept glitches and bugs in a way we never did before, and I'm not exactly sure why we let it get to this point.
Perhaps it's the promise of patches to fix bugs, but honestly, I wish companies would just start releasing fully functioning products. I miss being able to just pick up a game knowing that, more likely then not, it was going to function as intended. I would be digging my game and suddenly get pulled out because of some stupid bug crashing the system, or some freakishly bizarre Ragdoll physics kicking in and destroying the atmosphere the game was going for. Now, to get the experience as intended, I have to sit back and wait for a freakin' patch. I don't want to wait, I want to play a game that works when I pay for it.
I wonder if perhaps the focus is just no longer where it needs to be. Games back then were more focused on making sure things work, making sure everything came across as intended, but now it seems more like they just want to get the products out since they can just fix it all later. I see this in other regards of games as well (An article for another time) but there are a lot of things about the old school mentality of games I think is missing these days, and not for the better.
I don't mean to say that games these days are inherently inferior, I love a lot of things that come out. Even this year I played a lot of fantastic titles, all I'm saying is that with all the innovations of the modern era, maybe it's not a bad idea to look into the past and see what it was that made things work so well, and learn from it. I hope for a day we look at a game as bugged as the original FF VI is released, it'll be given its proper backlash and not be looked at as just par for the course.