It could be worse...

It seems epidemic that companies are releasing their games without fully testing them lately. Arguably the biggest game release this year, Sims 2 also came out buggy. Now, to be fair, on initial play, Sims 2 wasn't really all that buggy. It is obvious that the AI was somewhat tested. It's after a decent length of playing that some MAJOR bugs come to the surface. My Sims 2 game currently is unplayable because of a major bug that just about everyone is getting after a certain amount of gameplay.

Anyways, that brings us to what the companies are doing about it. To Frontier's credit, they have been very forthright in getting information about the flaws and informing the public what is going to be in the patch. They also have released a patch, even though their street date is a good month or two after the Sims 2. As for Sims 2, the following link will better describe that situation... link

I'm not sure when I will see a patch for Sims 2 and be able to play the game again. At least I have a slightly less buggy RCT3 to play now. *** Edited 11/4/2004 2:45:28 PM UTC by Jeff***

I never got into the sims, but with problems like that, I'm sure there are alot more unhappy people than with RCT3. What has happened to game development?(TM)

EA is smart to say as little as possible because it doesn't result in all the crying on the Atari forum. Not only that, but Sims2 actually works. I bought it for Stephanie, and she hasn't had any real problems with it. RCT3 had problems within the first 15 minutes of the first scenario.

Agreed with that... my wife got Sims 2 the day it came out and hasn't had any bugs at all, at least none she noticed or cared about.

They're not even in the same league.

A good majority of the people that have had the game for an extended amount of time and have been playing the game heavily have been getting what is called the "jump bug" where sims will literally jump out of any activity that has social interactions. Thusly, they will not eat at the table when others are at the table, they wont talk on the telephone, watch TV with someone, ect... The condition also seems to spread so eventually all of your sims have this problem and the game is unplayable. There are a ton of people with this and EA has done nothing to tell anyone if they are doing anything to fix it. At least Frontier told people they were doing something and put out a fix.

Hmm... I'll have to warn her.

Only problems I ran into with The Sims 2 were performance issues, such as the game would freeze up a bit when too many interactions were happening on the screen at one time. But I contriubted that to a weak graphics card. It has never once crashed. Any bugs I have found are very small and don't annoy me or effect the gameplay in anyway.

RCT3 on the other hand....

I hear what you're saying about games fully testing and what not. But you've got to respect that a patch comes out so quickly, i mean, i've played lots of games that were buggy as hell and no help ever came.