Chaos Rift Games Chaos Rift Games: Indie Game Development and YouTuber
Recently I published a review on XCOM 2, stating that it’s a must buy. Despite the slew of bugs, possibly the worst condition Firaxis has ever released a game, I still think the game is pretty worth while. This in itself is a horrible indicator on the state of the video game industry. A game, so riddled with bugs can still considered “good” and a “must buy”. Keep Calm, it’ll soon be patched.
10 years ago, I’d have said don’t even bother buying this game, it’s a steaming pile of shit not worth the time. Sadly, times have changed and not for the better. All too often now a company will release an unpolished, unfinished product and either leave it to the modding community, abandon, or work like hell to fix it. I’m confident Firaxis will do the latter and fix the majority of bugs within the month. But this practice is getting worse and it’s not helping the industry. It’s why greats like Chris Roberts and Richard Garriot have left the publishers in the dust to crowd fund their projects and self publish.
Huge bugs in the game are:
- Voice overs just stop, there’s still sound, just no voices. Not game breaking, but I like hearing my troops freak out.
- Performance is all over the place. The game is so poorly optimized it’s not funny. It’s playable, but sketchy at times.
- Strange pauses for no reason. The game has points where camera controls are stolen from you by force, and you have to stare blankly at an objective, POI… for an awkwardly long time.
- Animations sometimes don’t happen. Often I’ll watch a Gatekeeper come in, whirl his arms, then nothing. The game just sort of sits there thinking and you’re watching idle animations, then it updates. suddenly all your crew has taken damage, one guy is dead and reanimated and you’re left wondering what just happened.
- Did I mention weird pauses? Yeah, they’re all over the damn place.
- Text doesn’t update. Sometimes it tells you a squad member just died, sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes you see the damage number, sometimes not.
- Skill messages pop up super late, or early or whenever the hell they feel like it.
- It seems like the more saves you have (you will have many), and further into the game you are the more problems crop up.
- Later in the game, the last few missions, performance just plummets to the Earth below at mach speeds.
I could go on but what’s the point? The bugs are numerous, but the game is “playable” and only crashes to desktop rarely. It’s just screaming out on the horrible state of affairs modern games are in. Even the PC port to Rise of the Tomb raider was also released rife with bugs and wildly out of sync performance issues.
So simply Keep Calm, play XCOM. Or perhaps not play it, not buy it. Let your voice be heard that the industry needs to stop sucking ass and get their shit together, and fast.
