Forza Drivatar...
 

I mucked about with the Drivatar this evening - and it has some nice features - and some poorly finished half-baked features.

[rant]
All I want to know is why that even though modern game titles have huge budgets, production teams and are supposedly well made - they fuck out in the end and never finish the project on time and simply ship half-baked products?

You can train your drivatar and have him earn mney and try win races for you.

That's a plus...

You can select 5 drivatars and race against a custom grid of cars from your garage...

Thats a plus...

Even though you select cars with custom decals - they do nto show up on cars piloted by Drivatars.

Thats pretty lame... what twit let this pass quality control? I wonder if the mods you make to the car are even applied - the modded cars sure seem dog slow when driven by a drivatar.

You can select your drivatar, and have him run a 6 lap free run "race" on any track and you can observe him drive...

Thats a plus...

But you cannot review of save a replay of the Drivatars free run..

Thats pretty stupid - I would love stab the project manager who passed that with a blunt spoon in teir eye.

Over all a nice feature piss poorly implemented.

After all the time we as consumers waited, and all the millons spennt on these games- I really believe tehy are quite unfinished and immature.

[/rant]

Re: Forza Drivatar...
 

well from what I'm told by my friend whos a programmer for a game developer, its quite often the publisher not the dev team who are fault, as they set unrealistic targets , and push for the game to be ready ASAP so they can get their money out of it ..
so while the dev team might have lots of great feature ideas it often ends up that the publisher force them to be dropped or left partly finished in the name of the $, as the game developement is to a pointa dead end for them, costing money but reaping little reward other than a few fancy features that probably wont make much difference to the final sales figures

This is why I liked what I've been hearing from E3, alot of the developers are admitting that they have done this in the past and that they are NOT aiming for the Launch date of the next-gen consoles but aiming for the Launch Window i.e. within the first 6 months both the Xbox 360 and PS3 head honchos have been saying there won't be a massive amount of games available at launch date only like 4-5 really good games and probably no more than 15 total.

The latest Tomb Raider also turned out shit because of the publisher who forced the product to be sold to have a profit before the end of the year. And so the game was so jammed with bugs, textures overlapped etc.

The irony is that a rushed topic proves to be LESS profitable than a polished one.

But these idiot publishers never learn.

But there was a profit, thats the important thing. Just take a look at EA! :lol:

There was a report somewhere that gaming companies are pushing their software gurus to the limit in order to keep up with heavy competition. Super long work hours, unrealistic deadlines (Sounds like my old job) they're really pushing the physical and mental capacities of these men and women.

EA rushes their Sports games and it shows in the game play. I hope this years games are good, they havent put out a Launch day on them so that could be promising.

i still havent tried it but i will soon