Scum of the Gaming World competition

Hey there! I was just wondering, do you have any horror stories about crappy customer service for one of your games? If so, then post here. My story concerns a game called Tribes: Vengeance, if anyone has heard of it. It would appear to be the last in the great Tribes game series, and this one got published by those wonderful people, Vivendi Universal. They pushed the developers so hard for it to be out, that it was full of hideous bugs and then they released it at the same time when other real big games were coming out, like Doom3 or Half-life 2 so obviously sales weren't as good as they could have been. Then, the patch for it is delayed over and over again. We keep getting promised a patch until about April 13th, when Vivendi finally pulls the plug on the entire game. It was a case of 'Abandon Ship!! Women, Children and publishers first!!'

Any stories worse than that?

theres always, good ole CA Telling us RTW will be better then the other two and then letting us down with the thing they call "Total war", come on actually try next time.
thanks,
dizzy

Age of Sails II, by Akella (published by Talonsoft.) Really beautiful to look at, and lots of features on the surface. Unfortunately, a lot of the features didn't work, the AI was weak (not as bad as RTW, but bad enough) and the longer campaigns always corrupted. The sailing model was somwhat illogical/gamey...like being able to turn rapidly when the ship should be "in irons."

And then there was the gunnery model...nobody ever figured this one out. It had 4 types of shot, but the only one that worked decently in combat was solid shot. Chain shot did not work well for demasting like it should. Grape wasn't particularly effective at clearing the decks at close range, and double shot was largely useless for shattering the hull at close range as well. What influenced making a hit? We never could tell for sure. Timing pitch and roll, as ship velocity should have influenced it but did not. Range and angle had some impact, although it was so random that many perfect raking shots at close range did next to nothing.

Sailing and gunnery should have been the heart and soul of the game, but neither mattered that much.

Akella tried to patch it 3 or 4 times, but never did fix the problems. I forced the store I bought it from to give me store credit.

Black Cactus and the Warrior Kings duo. Two brilliant games by a new developer, trying to do something new and really dripping with potential. Except they were very buggy. Very buggy. WK1 BC did patch, but the patches (I think it was 2, with one being very minor) only fixed a few of the issues. They kept on promising another patch, and they posted saying what would be in it, discussed it, told people about it, etc, but it never materialised. Then the sequel came out, and it was the same thing all over again but with just 1 patch. No idea what happened to BC; I haven't heard anything about them since 2003.

:waits patiently for survivors of Lords of the Realm 3 and MOO3 to arrive: I never played these two, but I heard plenty about them. That's why I didn't play them

Nice to see i'm not alone. Also, another problem with Vivendi is that they make sending a complaint or suggestion near impossible. Just go to their website, and try contacting them. You'll see what i mean.

2150
a german developer
so annoyed i dont even remember the name of the dev company
(i ceremonially burnt everything that came in the box...and the box too)

not so buggy, but some of the unit scripting did not function as it should
and the AI was extremely predictable,
unit pathing for the AI was hopeless - bottlenecks were so obvious you could simply set an ambush and the AI would walk right into it over and over and over...

all tech support was in german,
when i pointed out i could not understand german and could i please have translation
i got the wonderfull reply "we are sorry you cant speak german - GO AND LEARN IT"


They had a great forum - similar to the org,
lots of categories
LOTS of people on it every day...
and it was truly great for us scripters,
about 40 or 50 people posting new/modded scripts and tid-bits everyday...
so
about SIX MONTHS before the sequel came out they simply SHUT DOWN THE FORUM
when we asked, they said "we want people to focus on the sequel, we will be redesigning and re-opening the forum soon, now go away"
when it finally came back online FOUR MONTHS after they closed it .. well,
there were no sections for 2150 and ANY posts about 2150 were deleted (almost instantly)
in a very short space of time they had no patrons anymore...

i never bought the sequel (and i told them i would not)
and i destroyed my copy of the game (as i told them i would)

B.

Hmph, that does sound bad...

I never played these two, but I heard plenty about them. That's why I didn't play them

Don't mention Lords or the Realm 3. It is probably the single worst game I have ever bought. Don't remember any bugs, and never checked for patches though. But I still won't bring it out.

Originally Posted by Mikeus Caesar

Hey there! I was just wondering, do you have any horror stories about crappy customer service for one of your games? If so, then post here. My story concerns a game called Tribes: Vengeance, if anyone has heard of it. It would appear to be the last in the great Tribes game series, and this one got published by those wonderful people, Vivendi Universal. They pushed the developers so hard for it to be out, that it was full of hideous bugs and then they released it at the same time when other real big games were coming out, like Doom3 or Half-life 2 so obviously sales weren't as good as they could have been. Then, the patch for it is delayed over and over again. We keep getting promised a patch until about April 13th, when Vivendi finally pulls the plug on the entire game. It was a case of 'Abandon Ship!! Women, Children and publishers first!!'

Any stories worse than that?

and i thought Tribes 2 (the second game in the series) was bad. if you ever played it from day 1 you know what i mean. The game felt like it was released in beta state, and when the game crashed your entire pc would crash! 5 patches later the game still didn't feel finished (even after the 5th, 90mb fix!)

Tribes 2 was the sole reason i never got T:V. all trust in the tribes series was lost

Originally Posted by frogbeastegg

MOO3

Damn you frog, I'd just about completely banished this from my memory.

Originally Posted by dessa14

theres always, good ole CA Telling us RTW will be better then the other two and then letting us down with the thing they call "Total war", come on actually try next time.
thanks,
dizzy

Amen... RTW had so much promised and so little delivered...

I hate it when buggy products are released, if you ask a full price I want a solid product. The worst I ever saw was Hidden&Dangerous, which was a crying shame because it was such a good game nonetheless. But things seem to be improving, new games are most of the time pretty polished.

The worst: Eidos.

They released Thief:DS for x-box in europe, while they knew there was a MAJOR bug that resets the difficulty after you save. And they sold it for the full price, bah. These guys deserve to be pirated if you ask me, but I will leave that to the poor people

MTW...

Jedi Generals anyone???

Thankgod RTW got the series back on track.

I'd rather have Jedi Generals that make the game harder, although slightly annoying, than Suicidal Generals that ruin half a game.

On the bad support front, I've generally been quite happy with my games. The worst was probably C&C: Generals, which still didn't work properly after seven patches.

Interstate 82, the sequel to interstate 76.

I liked interstate 82 unfortanately it was at the sitting edge of old technology. Within 6 months of release it would not play on anything new.

Funny I 76 still works with all modern hardware/software.

:waits patiently for survivors of Lords of the Realm 3 and MOO3 to arrive: I never played these two, but I heard plenty about them. That's why I didn't play them

LOL How did you know?

LoRIII:

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrghghgh!!!

I've never been so furious and dissapointed with a game. After almost 20 minutes of loading for the first time (on a computer with twice the recommended specs) the game was pretty average visually and waaay too simplistic at this stage. It was almost like a game for 7 year olds!

And the loading time! The first time I actually waited, I thought "Maybe its adjusting itself to my computers specs or initializing some sort of system check or something".

Ha! Something! When I tried to open it for the second time it took even longer!
I dont know if the game tries to sit in my RAM memory alone or what is going on, but I'm really really REALLY glad I rented it before buying it.

A piece of nonsense in every aspect that deserves to burn in Hell.

Originally Posted by Monk

and i thought Tribes 2 (the second game in the series) was bad. if you ever played it from day 1 you know what i mean. The game felt like it was released in beta state, and when the game crashed your entire pc would crash! 5 patches later the game still didn't feel finished (even after the 5th, 90mb fix!)

Tribes 2 was the sole reason i never got T:V. all trust in the tribes series was lost

Actually, T2 is okay these days. I've been playing since 16th February, 2002, and i've now got all the patches, but i don't really notice any bugs. Except for one of the most famous bugs of all time. Unhandled Exception. Whenever a friend came to my house, we would put bets on how long it would take before there was a UE. Fortunately there isn't as much of that anymore. If you still play it, then come on either Zeewolf Katabatic or =Rebels= Katabatic servers. I'm usually on there between 19:00 - 20:30 english time.

Scum of the Gaming World competition!

And the winner is Masters of Orion; Battle of Antares

SCUM! I like that word. So apt, so very descriptive. Abomination works as well!

The control interface was very poorly designed with constantly having to in and out of screens and menu's that are all over the place. It degenerates into an idiotic clickfest which at least has the redeeming feature of taking your mind off the fact that nothing is happening. I kid you not it was possible to do absolutely nothing but click the turn button and the game ran itself. If you didn't do that you are back to endless screen after screen to get the smallest thing done. The manual was a pathetic joke and half of it was the bizarre storyline interspaced with useless game information. Maybe accountants might find find this game exhilarating? The other fun part was that you could toggle 'player control' and go on about your merry way while the AI would slowly take over the decision making little by little every few turns ("I'm sorry dave I can't let you do that").

The tactical combat part of the game was the most aggravating for me as it was real time simulation without a pause button and very fast. You get to try controlling 5 ships through a clunky interface or leave it up to the AI which was so brain dead that disaster was it's battle plan!

I saw this game months after I paid full price for it, in the bargain bin selling at 4.54$ canadian (3$ american) and it was overpriced!

Originally Posted by LordHugh

On the bad support front, I've generally been quite happy with my games. The worst was probably C&C: Generals, which still didn't work properly after seven patches.

the RTS to come from EA before that -the last one by Westwood Studios before EA murdered that dev entirely - Emperor: Battle for Dune, did not work properly after nine patches

coulda been the best RTS game ever if only it had been fixed, then given proper support.

but since it was forever abandoned whilst still unfinished and extremely buggy, and not even properly compatible with Windows XP even though the game was released in 2001; it is now a long-dead game.

leave it to EA to let what could have been the best game in the world die and turn to dust

Originally Posted by discovery1

Don't mention Lords or the Realm 3. It is probably the single worst game I have ever bought. Don't remember any bugs, and never checked for patches though. But I still won't bring it out.

It wasn't a great game, but I've seen far worse. At least it was cheap. And I don't remember any major bugs. I played it through fully once or twice and haven't looked at it again.

Originally Posted by Efrem

MTW...

Jedi Generals anyone???

Thankgod RTW got the series back on track.

If RTW is back on track, stop the train, because many of us want to disembark and deposit our lunch on the ground. If RTW had Jedi Generals then at least it might have some chance of not suiciding him at the first of every battle... In that regard MTW was superior.

I just rebuilt my system, reinstalled STW/MI and MTW/VI. Played some "quick battles" in MTW...and I actually lost a battle. Imagine that! Haven't gotten around to reinstalling RTW...and I'm in no hurry. Reinstalls are on a merit system with the most interesting first, so it could be awhile.