Why Did The Devs Do This (locked: awful thread with question answered definitively in the first post)

[Zulk RS]

 

14 minutes ago, Noomerdoomer said:

First of all to all those thsybsay back then people didn't care based much about getting 100% completion in a game where wrong I had in friend from high school in the 90s who would not move on from a game until he got everything there was to get in the game. So if he ever got into doom this would have made him insane.

 

Yes it was a lot harder to get get patches and updates to people in the 90s but that was good thing because it made developers really make sure their game store ready before they released. Because you basically had one shot to impress the consumer market with product because if games came out as broken as some of the games are now they would have been written off as junk and no would have really bothered with them. Also because of this you could go to the store and buy your game with confidence knowing you getting the game the developers want you to play.

I cannot recall at all during the nes and snes era of gaming of hearing about patches needed. In this way the ease to get fixes out to costumers now have made game devs a lot more lazy and not put in the work they did back in the day and push out games that made not be as ready for ready for the market because they can just push a patch out week later to fix it. 

 

 

Anyway, OP, hope you got your answer as to why the secrets in Doom are the way they are.

 

1. Devs are human and they make mistakes. Some secrets are super hard to get because they weren't supposed to be but the Devs didn't realize that the secret was like that. Id wasn't a big company at the time and it's easy to miss stuff like this, especially when you have more primitive mapping tools that you're working with.

 

2. They didn't patch it out later because they probably didn't realize the secrets were like that still.

 

3. Even if they did know that the secrets were broken, sending out a patch just wasn't worth it/ wasn't practical.

[Major Arlene]

23 minutes ago, Noomerdoomer said:

First of all to all those thsybsay back then people didn't care based much about getting 100% completion in a game where wrong I had in friend from high school in the 90s who would not move on from a game until he got everything there was to get in the game. So if he ever got into doom this would have made him insane.

Anecdotes =/= what "everyone" would have cared about at the time or even now. I certainly don't give a damn about 100%-ing games, I'm pretty sure I've never done so in my life. So what now?

23 minutes ago, Noomerdoomer said:

Yes it was a lot harder to get get patches and updates to people in the 90s but that was good thing because it made developers really make sure their game store ready before they released. Because you basically had one shot to impress the consumer market with product because if games came out as broken as some of the games are now they would have been written off as junk and no would have really bothered with them. Also because of this you could go to the store and buy your game with confidence knowing you getting the game the developers want you to play.

first, Doom had SEVERAL patches. https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Game_patch

and somehow, people still really liked it? wow, what a concept, sometimes people can look beyond bugs and enjoy a game! and one secret being bugged, which is how this conversation started, by the way, does not make a completely broken game. most normal people would have shrugged it off and still been satisfied with their time playing the game.

23 minutes ago, Noomerdoomer said:

In this way the ease to get fixes out to costumers now have made game devs a lot more lazy and not put in the work they did back in the day and push out games that made not be as ready for ready for the market because they can just push a patch out week later to fix it.

I take it you've never developed a game before so this is the reason why you're able to spit out this nonsense with such ease. Lazy has nothing to do with it. If they were lazy they wouldn't bother fixing the bugs. In fact I'd wager it makes devs work harder because the way that Steam and other forums will absolutely glom onto devs in this EXACT manner until they fix something is now wide-spread to every dev who puts a game out.

 Sometimes people just miss shit. we're human. we make flawed work. that can be for any reason. shoot, I found a subtitle typo in Cyberpunk 2077 but it doesn't make the game literally unplayable. I'll just bring it to the devs, and then they can fix it. It's that easy now. It may not have been so easy to fix a misspelled subtitle back in the 90's.

Maybe work on giving people a little bit of grace when they fuck up. I can guarantee when or if you make a game it won't be perfect either.

Edited October 23, 2023 by Major Arlene
did a typo (to prove my point lmao)

[Gez]

20 minutes ago, Noomerdoomer said:

First of all to all those thsybsay back then people didn't care based much about getting 100% completion in a game where wrong I had in friend from high school in the 90s who would not move on from a game until he got everything there was to get in the game.

Some people cared, of course. But none of them worked at id Software. If there were any obsessive completionist working at id at the time, they'd have fixed the non-maxable levels themselves before release, and the simple fact that these levels were not fixed shows that there were no such people at id back then.

 

20 minutes ago, Noomerdoomer said:

Yes it was a lot harder to get get patches and updates to people in the 90s but that was good thing because it made developers really make sure their game store ready before they released.

No, there were plenty of games released with a ton of bugs back then. Frontier: First Encounters was released in 1995 and it had so many issues that it eventually led to GameTek's bankruptcy.

 

22 minutes ago, Noomerdoomer said:

Also because of this you could go to the store and buy your game with confidence knowing you getting the game the developers want you to play.

Yeah, a couple of times I had to go back to the store and get a refund because a game just refused to run correctly for longer than five minutes.

 

22 minutes ago, Noomerdoomer said:

I cannot recall at all during the nes and snes era of gaming of hearing about patches needed.

Patching console games was a more difficult issue since they didn't have hard drives and cartridges or CDs are read-only. But even then, there were some famous stinkers. Action 52, anyone?

[Lila Feuer]

Art having flaws is what makes it and subsequently us, human.

[Koko Ricky]

@Noomerdoomer, you'll save yourself some grief if you just let this go. id Software, like literally any studio that has ever released anything, created an imperfect product. Having trouble with a secret? YouTube it. Don't worry about the "why" of these things. 

Edited October 23, 2023 by Koko Ricky

[Guff dotD]

2 hours ago, Noomerdoomer said:

I cannot recall at all during the nes and snes era of gaming of hearing about patches needed.

 

Super Mario Allstars + Super Mario World.

[GarrettChan]

I'm pretty sure they expected that 30 y/o later, people will ask about why some secrets are untaggable so they leave them as it is. All in all, it's a social experiment, and they really want to know after how many years, people will finally stop being upset about untaggable secrets.

[Finnisher]

9 hours ago, Gez said:

Frontier: First Encounters was released in 1995 and it had so many issues that it eventually led to GameTek's bankruptcy.

 

Yep and a concrete example of an actual full physical re-release.

 

The first was so buggy it was pulled from sale and the fixed version then released later.

I still remember the ad for it too "we squashed the bugs" lols