KOTOR 2 Released On Nintendo Switch In A State That Makes It Un-Finishable
from the neverending-story dept
Video games have always had bugs at the time of their release, though there has been a trend coinciding with the uptick in digital game sales in which games seem to be published in broken states far too often and are then “fixed” with a day-one patch or something of the like. Some of these bugs are on the more minor side, while some involve game releases that were very clearly pushed for way too early.
And then there is the Nintendo Switch port of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 2, which came out a few weeks back and, well…
Er, whoops. Aspyr, the developer/porter behind the recent release of Knights Of The Old Republic II on Nintendo Switch, has tweeted that it’s aware the game is currently impossible to finish. After some pressing from a customer, the studio acknowledged it’s aware the game is presently bugged such that it cannot be completed on Nintendo’s handheld.
Aspyr’s Twitter account replied with a, “Yup, we know, we’ll get you a patch, thanks for all your patience.” Now, a couple of things on this. First, releasing a game that simply can’t be finished on a platform probably deserves a stronger mea culpa than Aspyr offered up. Buying a game and being unable to complete it is probably worse than paying money for no product at all. The point of video games, in large part, is to play and complete them. Imagine a release of Mike Tyson’s Punchout that just shut down every time you managed to get to the fight against Mike Tyson. That’s a bit like lying on the couch while someone sits at a piano and plays every single note on a major scale except the last one. It would absolutely drive you insane.
And I’ll admit to being a bit surprised that this would happen on a Nintendo console. Nintendo isn’t the developer here. It isn’t the one that worked on the game. Still, I have long criticized Nintendo’s practice of absurdly strict control over its consoles, IP, and platforms. One of the common responses to that criticism is that such strict control gives Nintendo the ability to do great quality control on anything that touches its systems. Whatever the process was for QC testing in this case, it appears to have completely failed.
It raises some rather significant questions about the QA on the game, that it could be certified and released in a form impossible to finish. There’s also the question of for how long Aspyr has been aware its product has a game-breaking bug that affects all players, but haven’t communicated this to potential and current customers. We’ve contacted Aspyr to ask these questions.
You have to think the refund requests are arriving in droves at the moment. And this is one of things that you probably can only do once, at most. Imagine Aspyr or Nintendo announcing that the bug has been patched and then asking the public to buy the game once more.
Filed Under: bugs, knights of the old republic, ports, star wars, video games
Companies: aspyr, nintendo
Comments on “KOTOR 2 Released On Nintendo Switch In A State That Makes It Un-Finishable”
You have to admit that 17 years of releasing the same game in an unfinished state is pretty impressive.
Re: 16gb
What’s more astonishing, is they took a game that came on a couple of cd roms and somehow made both this, and kotor1 into 16gb games. Like, how? Genuinely asking. The textures don’t look any different?
Bad coding – so not surprised the game is broken
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“Introducing a brand new port of the classic Space Invaders, designed to run on today’s machines.
Requirements;
3Ghz i7 CPU
16GB RAM
Windows 11
DirectX 12
Pixel shaders 4.0
10GB hard drive space
Steam account”
Re: Re: Textures
Are you comparing the two games side by side, or are you comparing what you’re seeing to your memory of the original from 18 years ago? Because if the latter, it could be a great deal more detailed and you wouldn’t notice, because your standards at the time were very different.
The same thing happened to the Switch port of Makai Kingdom last month. What happened to user acceptance testing?!?
Re: Thanks, Dave!
Simply put, we had to finish the game by Thursday evening for the Friday Morning release date.
To be honest, it was all Dave’s fault. We’ve been playing the game as a relay to finish the end content. But Dave insisted on trying out all the skins and playing with Easter eggs instead of moving the character to the end-game like the rest of us.
So, enjoy the Fuchsia light-sabre and the surfer-dude jedi, courtesy of Dave while waiting for the studio to fix the end game.
It's not just Aspyr
Regarding *The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim*:
It raises some rather significant questions about the QA on the game, that it could be certified and released in a form impossible to finish. There’s also the question of for how long Bethesda Softworks has been aware its product has a game-breaking bug that affects all players, but haven’t communicated this to potential and current customers.
Six years after release, *Skyrim* remains so badly broken it can’t be played, and the company’s been at it for over 30 years.
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….can you elaborate on this? I’m like 2/3 through Skyrim on switch and have several friends who have completed it, I haven’t heard of a game breaking Skyrim bug.
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If you’ve never seen dragon after dragon rising into the sky so you can’t get their souls to spend at word walls, then you’ve never played post-patch Skyrim and you’re not playing it on Switch.
Re: Default State
That’s just Bethesda’s default state.
Morrowind? Experienced game breaking bug on the XBox One port, never finished it.
Fallout 3? Experienced game breaking bug on PC, never finished it.
Fallout 4? Experienced game breaking bug on XBox One, never finished it.
Skyrim? Experienced game breaking bug on Switch port, had a recent enough save to restart from and finished it.
At this point if it’s published by Bethesda, by default I don’t trust it. Their QA sucks and their post-release support is even worse.
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Wow, let me know what platform you’re getting Starfield on, so I know which one to avoid. 😛
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BethSoft’s bugs are platform neutral, unfortunately, so in order to avoid the bugs, you have to not play the games. I recommend playing Bioshock and Bioshock 2 instead.
What do you mean it's only allowed when it's in your favor?
Just imagine the screaming if the roles were reversed…
Game company: So, bit of a problem here, it looks like after you downloaded our game your purchase bounced and the money failed to go through.
Customer: Thanks for the head’s up. I’ll look into that and work towards fixing that so the money will be able to be transferred. No idea as to the timeline but I pinky-promise I’ll get right on that.
Game company: And in the meanwhile you’ll return/uninstall our game, right?
Customer: Oh absolutely not, I’m going to keep playing it since the transaction took place and it’s not like it’s that big of a deal that you didn’t get your money right away. Don’t worry though, you’ll get it eventually and until then you’ll just have to be patient.
The OG version was bugged too
TBF, the original version had a pretty game-breaking bug at the end too. Not to mention it was unfinished too.
I actually never finished it because of that particular bug.
Clearly the developers porting this have no knowledge of the actual history of the games they’re porting.
Does Tim know about the original’s sordid history?
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Aspyr’s ported a hell of a lot of games over the years, including porting this one to Mac in 2012 and Linux in 2015. It kinda sounds like you’re the one who has no knowledge of the actual history of the subject you’re talking about.
This is a pretty big fuckup, don’t get me wrong, but at this point it’s also an outlier; Aspyr has a pretty positive reputation overall and isn’t known for making these kinds of huge mistakes. However, it was acquired by Embracer Group (THQ Nordic) last year, and I hope this is just an outlier and not a sign of things to come.
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That just confirms my point.
You’d think they’d be extra careful, given the game was already broken.
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My only experience with Aspyr so far has been the cross-platform releases of Civilization 6, which were bugged as hell, and now KOTOR 2, which apparently skipped User Acceptance Testing entirely.
Apparently they’re also the ones doing the KOTOR remake I believe? I’m not enthusiastic
Nintendo seems to have followed Steam and the PlayStation store’s lead and given up on quality control in their digital store.
https://hackernoon.com/shovelware-and-asset-flipping-what-happened-to-quality-control-at-nintendo
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One of the common responses to that criticism is that such strict control gives Nintendo the ability to do great quality control on anything that touches its systems.
Here’s what such responders don’t get about Nintendo’s store: quality control is just the excuse, total control is the actual reason.
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And QC is for first- and second-party games.
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You’ve… never been to the Nintendo eShop, have you?
Honestly! Did Nintendo learn nothing from the Spider-man games? “With great power comes great responsibility.”
To be fair, this is not a new phenomenon...
I remember the pre-internet days when this happened with many titles that shipped impossible to complete, because instead of overworked, underpaid QA departments, QA consisted of one of the developers using the level select code to confirm each one loaded and calling it a day. As a consequence, missing issues like jumps over bottomless pits which are several pixels wider than the maximum jump distance attainable, key items with coordinates that positioned them behind scenery due to a dodgy PAL-NTSC port, or just straight up crashes during transitions between levels.
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Weird, I thought the Internet predated games consoles by a few years. Let me check my history. searches online Okay, I was wrong. The Internet dates back to 1974, but the first home games console was released in 1972. So you were right. 🙂
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😂
A proactive approach from the developer could make a world of difference. My husband has been acting like our 4 year old when her Fire tablet acts up. I’ve got 2 people yelling, throwing devices, stomping around all pissed off. Because I’ve been busy with household chores and fixing a broken toilet flange, I haven’t had a chance to look over the Switch, or look for discussion online, my husband went to GameStop and some repair place where he erased his save points, then factory reset and of course sold him a new memory card while disparaging the one I’m pretty sure was highly recommended and rated. I don’t know how much he paid for the new one but I’m sure it was way too much. He said he looked online for solutions or complaints from others, but he is impatient and I know he didn’t look very hard before ‘taking action’. Low and behold I stumble across this story after he opened the new SD card, downloaded all his games again and spent a few hours out trying to get it fixed when I could have used his help (Fathers day was his to spend as he chose, he wanted his game to work so that’s what he did). I hadn’t even begun to look into what was wrong with the game, so I don’t know how it came up in my news feed other than Google listening lol! But it would have saved us some money and time if the developer reached out to say ‘hey, we know there’s fatal flaw and we are working on it’ back when they started getting complaints. Now I’m not sure he should wait on a patch, especially if his refund window is closing and the patch might not ever arrive.
I was a tester for Microsoft back in the XBox 360 era, and this would have been literally impossible back then. If the testers could not finish the game, it would not receive approval, period. Probably the most memorable instance of this was when we sent Call of Duty: Modern Warfare back to Activision because no one on the whole team was able to beat the Ferris Wheel scene on any difficulty level above the easiest one.
That was how the industry was not particularly long ago. What in the world has happened to it since then that a mess like this can be released?
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They found out that it was easier to just release broken games and rip people off than to make sure that their games actually worked.
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Easier and cheaper. After all, they’re saving money with no games testers to pay and it reduces the perceived risk of pre-release copies being out in the wild.
Not quite the same thing, but a decade ago, they released the Commodore 64 version of Last Ninja 3 for the Virtual Console. Users quickly discovered that the game was bugged and would freeze after the first level. Rather than fix it, they eventually pulled the game from the VC and issued refunds.
so very much spam…