An Unfinished Product at a Finished Price

As time passes technology will keep on growing and getting better. With the addition of new powerful consoles this year, graphics, such as ray tracing, add more and more growth to the realism of video games. This pushes gaming studios to keep up with the newer criteria of how games should look and feel. Although this seems great for gamers there is a bigger problem at stake. 

Last year one of the most hyped open world video games of the year was released to a boat load of problems. “Cyberpunk 2077” was supposed to be the most detailed open world game ever created and had many itching to get a copy. The game’s release date was held back a couple months from Sept. 17 to Dec. 10. As Polish game developer CD Projekt had a long publishing process due to interferences with Polish digital law and not being on schedule with the finalization.

Senior Kenny Sanchez has an avid love for video games and was very disappointed with the final Cyberpunk product, he found it underwhelming and in his own words, “A hunk of garbage.”

“The issue with most of these games is that the studios tend to overhype their product and when the game comes out it doesn’t meet the expectations that were put on it or the final product doesn’t look how people would expect it to,”  Sanchez said.

Upon the release of the game it was panned for having multiple problems from the start. Bugs and glitches plagued the game from the start as CD Projekt had finialized an unfinished product, due to backlash for an extended release time. Almost all platforms were plagued with these bugs but almost all console versions suffered from awful performance and graphical issues.

Now more than ever gaming studios are turning out unfinished products to the public. Another example of this is “Battlefield 2042,” the newest addition in Electronic Arts’s Battlefield series. The game released early access and had the exact same problems as CyberPunk did back when it was released. 

Senior Dawid Trojanowski is a fan of the Battlefield series and shared his opinion on the current status of the game and what he is expecting to see fixed once the full game is out on shelves.

“Eventually when the game came out it disappointed me that it wasn’t even finished, there were too many problems like poor optimizing, really bad lag, lack of servers, etc.” Trojanowski said.

Trojanowski added to his frustration about Battlefields developer Dice.

“Dice knew that they needed more time than expected to completely finish the game and give 2042 a better reputation, I’m just hoping for the best and expecting nothing wrong with the finished game once it comes out,” Trojanowski said.

Studios are rushing to get video games out as new standards for games are wanting to be met by the public and due to covid the process of getting these games out with that level has been challenging with what has been shown. 

Sanchez believes that the main point with the issue of unfinished games being released is that studios are releasing these games to keep public interest high with the studio instead of making a new crisps gaming experience.

“The issue with video games now is that they are making them just to make them,” Sanchez said. “There are studios that do put time and effort into their games but they are overshadowed by bigger studios that are putting out the games to just get the same product out.” 

The public is still unsure if this trend will continue for future games and if it will now be the norm or expectation when waiting for a new game to release. But it is a concern for some gamers to see that as a possibility.

“It’s a little scary to slowly see the trend of unfinished games being released, because it affects the gaming community the most out of everyone,” Trojanowski said.

If this issue that is plaguing the gaming community continues to grow it will only affect the ones that are most vulnerable to this issue that would be gamers themselves which will affect everyone else.