Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Good Grief!

So the second Madden patch, which was "in development", "nearing submission", "submitted", "in the approval process", and twenty other descriptive phrases, at least, is now in "final approval".

The game came out over three months ago. Detailed information about this patch was posted a month ago.

Here's the problem--well, here's one of many problems with this. As soon as the patch is (allegedly) submitted to Microsoft, everyone on the development team completely washes their hands of any responsibility. "Well, you know how Microsoft (Sony) is," they'll say.

No, I don't. Not really.

I do know that they're making Microsoft sound like their Mommy. "I want to, but Mommy won't let me," they say. "You'll have to ask Mommy," they say.

Patches aren't important to Mommy.

In essence, they try to transfer responsibility to Microsoft/Sony, when they're the ones who shipped a game that needed three more months of work.

Madden's excellent this year. With the exception of the two-minute offense when the CPU is ahead, it's very close to fantastic, and even with that limitation, I think it's the best football game I've ever played (with the right slider settings, which took several tons of "user sweat" to develop). That second patch, though, based on the list I've seen, cleans up some nagging and annoying issues. So everyone is sitting around, three months after the game shipped, still waiting to begin their franchises.

It's not just Madden, obviously, because almost every annual sports franchise does this now, which is completely ridiculous. They using the patch process as a crutch, then blaming Microsoft/Sony.

There has to be a more stand-up way of doing things than this.

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