Last weekend, during the Steam sale, I got two very different games from two very different studios, but what they had in common was that they were broken and I got refunds. If it weren't for Steam's refund policy, I would have been burned. Products that plain don't work are being sold on that marketplace.
Assassin's Creed: Unity is a major entry in Ubisoft's flagship series, made by a huge number of people. It had an infamously buggy launch, but that was almost three years ago. I figured it would be patched by now — who'd have bought Syndicate if they hadn't? By delaying my purchase of Arkham Knight, I was able to play it on PC just fine, and I expected the same here.
It wasn't to be. Less than two hours in, I'd seen two crashes to desktop and one glitchy cutscene where an important character disappeared. (And no, I don't think it was intentional "the Animus" bullshit.) The last straw was when I ran into an apparent showstopper in a mandatory quest. A character I was supposed to follow wound up in an unreachable position. I don't have any QA background, but it looked like his "stop and wait for player proximity" node didn't have the correct height coordinate. I retried the mission and it happened again, exactly the same way.
Ubisoft's a big company, with a lot of money and a lot of resources, but maybe leviathans move slowly and overlook many details. I still had a weekend to spend with a new game, so I got Democracy 3: Africa instead. Democracy 3 is the main game, and it has several DLCs, but Africa is a standalone product, and I was interested in how the game was reimagined for present-day African governments.
The Democracy games are made by Positech, which I think is just Cliff Harris (@cliffski) and some occasional subcontracting for assets. He's said negative things about Gamergate, but lately I've been thinking about the potential of an Operation Rainfall for antis, letting them know that we like their games and we're not what they've been told we are. I figured Africa would be a good test case: I'd play it, form an opinion, and write him an open letter.
I suspected the principal issues I'd have would be around the game's assumptions. I played Democracy 2 (long enough ago that I bought it directly, not on Steam) and noticed that, for example, it assumed legalizing drugs would increase crime, which I don't think has always been the case in the real world. However, coming to grips with the game, I discovered that it had a more major problem.
I picked Nigeria to start with. I know just a little about its politics, and it seems like it would have an interesting mix of problems. Sure enough, the game presents the player with a lot of crises in Nigeria, particularly poverty, disease, religious tensions, and violence. In my first attempt, I saw violence as the foremost problem and made ending it my priority. I didn't think the economy could recover without more stability. Result: in a two-party election, I got 0% of the vote after my first term.
I tried again. This time I overhauled the economy, throwing out unpopular taxes. It seemed to me like it was going reasonably well, but my support was almost pinned at 0%, briefly fluttering to numbers less than 2%. I was assassinated before the election.
I tried a third time, pandering to the religious with a program of school prayer and theocracy. Once again, 0% popularity, assassinated.
This made no sense. The game's elections are two-party, and in a two-party election in general I wouldn't expect to see 0% except in the case of obvious sham elections. Moreover, I didn't think someone whose government improved the economy, reduced crime, and ended the AIDS epidemic would have no supporters at all. And I certainly doubted that a theocrat could hit zero support in Nigeria. They've got megachurches!
Turns out there's a long-standing bug that breaks electoral support, introduced in the Electioneering expansion for the main game, baked into the Africa standalone. As I understand it, all voters get classified into the opposition party and become much, much harder to persuade than they should be. The threads where I learned about this were six months old.
There are many games in which "the elections are broken" is only a footnote. A game about electoral democracy is not one of them. I was dismayed to be reminded that small devs can sell games just as broken as big ones. It was time for another refund.
My weekend was not lost — I picked up Stardew Valley and Subnautica and I've been enjoying those. I think I'll also hang onto Ark, although I am a little concerned to hear that its default balance favors multi. But my experience so far this sale has been hit or miss, and it's because there are games for sale that simply do not work. Is there no pressure to fix them or take them down?
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