In this case, the house has a roof and the car has an engine. Maybe the roof has a few holes and the engine needs a tune up. The builders will fix your roof and the dealer will repair the engine for free. That is what the patch is for. It is literally patching holes in the original programming to make the game better or more stable. ...and it is all at no additional cost to you. It isn't like they told you that it sucks you bought a broken product now pay more to fix it. If you don't want to deal with it, then don't waste your money on a brand new game on release date. Wait 6 or 7 months and purchase it. The game functions just fine, it just has some minor inconveniences that need to be worked out.
I've got to take Rommel's position as well...
They most certainly are NOT fixing things for free, they are fixing them for the price you paid for the game already, but not giving you a final product until days/weeks/months after they have already gotten your money...
To use analogies more appropriate to the scenario at hand:
That's like going to the store and buying a pair of shoes, but the shoes are "factory seconds" that never went through any quality control, where parts are put together poorly, stitching is coming apart and the shoes themselves can't be put on and worn as actual shoes... But they make great "modern art" I guess...
Thankfully the shoe maker promises to fix those shoes for you "Soon(TM)", but in the meanwhile you're sauntering around barefoot.
No, promises of a solution tomorrow do not diminish the problems of today... Particularly when that tomorrow is a truly unknown horizon to even the developers...
In this day and age, with how involved and complex games are to make, I do not expect perfection on day one. I have been playing Rome II thus far, and enjoy it quite a bit. However I believe that I have been quite lucky in that regard, particularly given the last few Total War games since Rome: Total War, SEGA has been cranking out shoddy work for sake of timing and financial reports rather than ensuring that the product itself is in a ready enough state to see release...
All the evidence one could ever need is Empire: Total war, that was so broken that SEGA never did fix it, and abandoned it for Napoleon: Total War. It was the community that, to this day, worked on it and got it far enough along to be remotely tolerable. Worse still, Napoleon was hardly more than Empire, with the work of the community flagrantly stolen and plagiarized with a dash of odds-and-ends trimming around the edges.
While Rome II hasn't been that bad for me, for others it has, and that is simply not making a good product.
This isn't a call to not play, boycott, or any other such silliness, it's merely being intellectually honest enough to admit that Rome II is NOT a product ready for public release, it's a grand scale paid beta-test, and SEGA is laughing all the way to the bank and scheduling the cease of support in a few months or so in time for their next planned Total War game, which will also be unfinished...
Whilst nobody's disagreeing with the fact that the game released in a terrible state, this is just overreacting.
Be ****ed off, sure, but all it boils down to is that we get the 'finished' game a month or two later than usual, and considering how Total War games give me hundreds of hours of entertainment for the same price many 5-10 hour games cost, I'd say it's still worth it, regardless of how annoying a buggy release is.
Just chill out a bit, it's not the end of the world.
The more reason for giving us a more worse bugfest laden games... since hey... its still give U lots of years of entertainment still + it will cost U less than $1M + its still got patched every secondly minutely hourly daily weekly monthly yearly to solved that bugfest laden problems & most important... don't worry, they will release it as fast as they could to save production cost & use their gamers as freebie beta tester more & more so the gamers can play it early & earlier so they can enjoy their entertainment earlier... so yeah, prepare to get more worse product
Since its not problem at all to release a games with 101 defects as long as its still have 102 good perks or stuffs to compensate that, including supportive CS with beautiful voices + limited edition version with unique units pack + day one or maybe hour one DLC + the patches size is less than 100Tb & hey, its free & auto update too
No wonder then our gaming world is now becoming full of many bugfest laden games that need more than 3 patches today...
Like how great our today companies like to talk BS about go green yet all they did were just churning so many products every year with short & shorter life phase, just to pollute our earth with many bad things, even recycling proses will still create another pollution & waste energy too
Hey, if people even want to gladly queque for days just to buy newest smartphone, surely people would gladly to wait for days weeks months even years too... to just play a games, especially with GOTY version
[Edited by kaizer88, 9/17/2013 2:25:31 AM]