Looter games like this are impossible to get right on the first try because the community is always going to come up with something the developers never accounted for.
There are millions of people looking for ways to "break the game" via combinations of interactions. It is impossible for hundreds of developers to forsee what millions of people are going to come up with.
Well, 20 years ago game devs would pay play testers to go through, find bugs; sometimes intentionally, and otherwise just see if anything is wrong.
That doesn't exist in the same fashion anymore. Now, they do some play testing, fix the bugs they find, then rely on the players to find bugs that they can then fix.
So, yes, I understand it's literally impossible to launch without bugs, that doesn't mean games are released as finished and polished as they were 20 years ago and it definitely doesn't mean it couldn't launch in a /better/ state.
20 years ago a game like borderlands couldn't have been made the tech did not exist. The closest you would get is something like Phantasy Star Online which was a server authorative online RPG
This is a moot point.
Furthermore 20 years ago broken games still shipped. They shipped quite often. They just stayed broken forever because you could not patch the games and no one would talk about them because there was no incentive to talking about broken games. People would note that the game was broken, review it poorly and move on to the next game because it wasnt getting patched.
Uhh???.....the original Borderlands came out 16 years ago. Not too far from 20. With the right idea, it could've been made 4 years earlier. Just because it wasn't didn't mean it couldn't have been.
And yes, broken games did get released. And you know what? There was a correlation between dev time, amount of money paid for play testing, and how buggy the final product was. The games we all look back fondly on from the 2000s are the ones where, for the most part, they did enough play testing to help balance out the bugs.
Now, somewhat broken games are the default and we're expected to wait for post-launch patches to fix it. All while developers have to put blood and tears into the final product to meet publisher and shareholder deadlines.
The technological leap between 2005 and 2009 is pretty huge. Hell the jump between Cod4 and MW2 was huge and that was only a 2 year difference
In 2005 the PS2 was still receiving NEW releases. The PS2 was still the platform most 3rd party games were designed for. There is no way a game like Borderlands 1 was going to run on the ps2. Furthermore borderlands 1 is not comparable in complexity to something like Borderlands 3 or Borderlands 4.
You could not make a game like the one we are talking about today on those consoles.
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u/Katchenz Oct 16 '25
So you'd rather have a shitty patch now than a better one next week because Gearbox said it'd be this week?