For many, 2014 was not a great year for gaming. Yes, the current generation of consoles started coming into their own, and more high-quality games saw release than the previous year - and yet, despite all that, 2014 will likely be remembered as the Year of Technical Difficulties.
Making a game is no easy feat: there are so many different things that can go wrong with a game's launch, it's almost impossible to be prepared for every possible issue. Glitches happen, it's a part of gaming - but several triple-A titles released in 2014 were basically unplayable on launch day. It took 343 Industries nearly six months to get The Master Chief Collection in working order, and Ubisoft took several weeks (and massive patches) to ensure that Assassin's Creed Unity could actually run on next-gen consoles. These are studios with hundreds of designers and millions of dollars in funding - the broken games simply shouldn't have happened.
It was unlike anything gamers had ever encountered before...and they were furious.
2015 is looking to be one of the biggest years for gaming in recent memory. The sheer number of high-profile releases is staggering, but the technical difficulties that dominated 2014 are still fresh in many a gamer's mind - thankfully, it looks like developers have taken notice, and they're making sure that the same mistakes don't ruin 2015 as well.
The idea of a Halo game without multiplayer just doesn't make sense, but that's exactly what happened when The Master Chief Collection launched late last year. While the single-player portion of the game worked just fine, players hoping to hop online were met with a plethora of different bugs. 343 Industries tried its hardest to quickly solve the issues...but it didn't. In fact, some players are still reporting issues today, more than six months after the game launched.
For the first time ever, an upcoming Halo game isn't the source of universal hype: Halo 5: Guardians is launching this October, and yet, fans are definitely worried. After all, who's to say that the same thing couldn't happen again?
If 343 Industries' Bonnie Ross has anything to do with it, The Master Chief Collection's troubles are a thing of the past - and they'll stay that way. In order to ensure that future Halo games work out of the box, Ross confirmed (via GameInformer) that every single Halo title from here on out will receive a public beta test.
"Going forward, you will never see a Halo game coming out without a beta. It was obviously painful for our fans and for us. But it won't happen again. There are things we put in place to make sure that we know everything, how it stands up outside and in the wild."
The Master Chief Collection's issues may have been mostly limited to multiplayer, but Assassin's Creed Unity launched with a myriad of issues across the entire game. Glitches were everywhere: Arno would get stuck on debris, fall through the floor, lose his face, watch other people lose their faces, crash randomly, fail to run at a decent framerate...and that was just the single player. Multiplayer didn't fare much better, with frequent disconnects and game-ruining glitches - admittedly, Ubisoft did remedy many of these issues, but not before the game's reputation was permanently damaged.
With Assassin's Creed Syndicate aiming to be one of Ubisoft's biggest games at E3 2015, the developer is clearly focused on squashing any of Unity's lingering issues. Instead of simply showing off the game and letting select members of the press get their hands on it, Ubisoft is holding a public playtest for fans in Los Angeles next week. It's something that's never really happened before, and Ubisoft is promising that the feedback they receive will directly influence Assassin's Creed Syndicate's development. With any luck, it'll result in a better game - Ubisoft needs Syndicate's launch to go smoothly, or its biggest franchise could be irreparably damaged.
The problems surrouding gaming in 2014 never should have happened. Whether it was a case of developers trying to do too much all at once, or a team thinking that a game can ride on name recognition alone, it doesn't matter - gamers got burned pretty badly last year. Thankfully, it looks like the games that had some of the biggest issues last year are learning from their mistakes - let's just hope the rest of the industry follows suit.
Expect to see more of both Halo 5: Guardians and Assassin's Creed Syndicate at E3 2015.
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