Launch Now, Finish Later

The game dev philosophy everybody hates (and why it’s great)

Jared Johnson
Aug 29, 2017 · 5 min read

There are few annoyances in gaming more groan-inducing than firing up a brand-new game and getting slapped with a massive day-one patch. It’s so commonplace that we’ve all come to expect it, but knowing it’s coming doesn’t seem to make the sting any less unpleasant. It’s not just the day-one patches, though — games now receive updates and bug fixes on the regular well after their initial launch, and a lot of gamers perceive them as proof that games aren’t as polished as they used to be. Developers, they argue, are releasing unfinished games, and they want to see an end to that. Some have gone as far as creating a Change.org petition to see an end to the practice.

Of course, that will never happen. Things will never go back to the way they were. And why should they? It’s better this way, and it’s been better this way since the beginning. The finished game is dead, and gaming is going to be better for it.

Last week, Overwatch game director Jeff Kaplan published a video update for changes coming to the game. You can watch the update in its entirety here:

In the update, Kaplan identifies a number of behaviors that have grown around some of the game’s mechanics which have undermined their intended purpose and made the experience less fun for everybody, and how they aim to correct that. One of the many changes coming to the game is a complete overhaul of the hero Mercy’s skillset. They’ll be converting her area-of-effect resurrection Ultimate ability to an individual resurrect Alternate ability, while crafting for her an entirely new Ultimate in the process. The intent of this is to discourage Mercy players from hiding when their Ultimate is charging, and to remove the infuriating Team Wipe CTRL+Z from the board, while providing the character with a new range of applications in team strategies. In other words, Competitive Overwatch teams won’t have to spend so much energy looking for Mercy mains that won’t try to be a hero (what are they trying to do, anyway — have fun?!).

If you don’t play Overwatch, that might sound like Moon Man gibberish. It’s not important that you know what this means. What is important is that you understand that the Overwatch team was able to identify undesirable behaviors in their game, stemming from design choices with unforeseen repercussions, and make drastic changes to address them. While this is one of the more extreme examples of fundamental gameplay adjustments in Overwatch, it’s not the first time they’ve done something like it since launch. Other heroes like Reaper, D.Va, and Ana have all undergone big changes since their debut, and the game is substantially better for it.

Fifteen years ago, changes like the ones the team at Blizzard has been rolling out for Overwatch over the past year would be jotted down in notebooks and circled on white boards for things to consider in the sequel. When Halo: Combat Evolved came out in 2001, it didn’t take players long to realize how cartoonishly overpowered the pistol was. Naturally, Bungie took note of their mistake and addressed the issue … three years later, when Halo 2 hit. They didn’t have the luxury of refining their game once it was out and in their players’ hands. Whatever they printed on the disc was “finished” because there was no going back. That wasn’t confidence or fortitude — that was a limitation.

Until now, I’ve only mentioned multiplayer shooters, but the forever unfinished game philosophy can apply to anything. Final Fantasy XV, a single-player Japanese role-playing game, featured a chapter to its campaign so loudly harrumphed by players that the team went back and made an alternative chapter. They’ve added a lot more, too, and will soon give the game online multiplayer. FFXV came out nearly a year ago, and it’s a better game now than it was then. A year from now, it will be better still, as will Overwatch, and many others.

Of course this has been and will continue to be abused, but even disingenuous experiments like No Man’s Sky, or dumpster fires like Mass Effect: Andromeda can improve beyond their initial, troubled launch. NMS spent the year following its release attempting to deliver on the promises it didn’t keep at launch, and Andromeda (while still an old bread heel of a videogame) was able to spare future players the horrors of its infamous launch muppets. A good game can get better, and a bad game can suck less.

It’s too late for me, but it’s not too late for you…

The reality is that a finished game has never shipped. Somebody probably said something like that once, and it’s true. They just run out of time and put out what they have — or they spend a decade chasing perfection until a money-man puts it into somebody else’s hands. We can pretend that hasn’t always been the case, but who are we kidding? In a world of day-one patches, fixes, and updates, months and years down the road, we have an opportunity to see games we love get refined, adapt to the player experience, and evolve. They’re going to be better and better than they were before, and that much closer to something they could never really be: finished.

Media credits: Blizzard Entertainment, except for the ugly Turian — that’s mine.

This article was written by Super Jump contributor, Jared Johnson. Please check out his work and follow him on Medium.

© Copyright 2017 Super Jump. Made with love.
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Jared Johnson

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I like doodling and talking about games and stuff.

Super Jump Magazine

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