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Comment by bobthepanda | Hacker News Reader

These examples all seem rose-colored.

* games: there were definitely buggy games being released in the past, the major difference is now they can be fixed. But you have fan made patches for things like SimCity 4 and Skyrim. Heck Nintendo made its whole business off of shipping higher quality software than its buggy competitors in the 80s.

* bank software. Consumer facing bank software was worse in the past, I don’t think this is a great example of a category getting worse.

* security was also worse back in the day, objectively.

If anything we experience more problems because we now expose a greater surface area of our lives to technology

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> Consumer facing bank software was worse in the past

The user experience of an ATM has certainly declined over the decades. Monochrome screens with 2 columns of buttons were the pinnacle. But the uselessness of today's ATMs doesn't fall on the software developers, except indirectly. It isn't their fault that the product people wanted it to be the way it is now. If good software engineers refuse to implement bad ideas, the thinkers of the bad idea will simply reach deeper into the barrel to find someone desperate enough to do the job, and the result will be commensurate with this process.

That said I generally agree with your point. The lazy article fails to establish the premise.

But how else are you going to be tempted by their excellent mortgage rates?

Undoubtedly this is what the product manager was thinking.

The funny thing is we now have an extremely excellent way to dispense money. It should be possible for me to unlock my phone, enter the amount of cash I want, be directed to the nearest ATM, and just tap that phone on the ATM when I get there and the money comes flying out instantly. We now have technology way beyond what anyone could have imagined in the 1960s, but we aren't exploiting it. The closest we've got is using a mobile phone as a tap card on an ATM, then you continue with the ATM's terrible UI, which is like using 1% of the abilities of the platform.

I don't think I ever saw a monochrome ATM that could deposit checks. Letting me choose what denominations I want also seems to be a more recent development. IMO the ATMs now are better than 10 or especially 20 years ago in those ways.

Games-wise, KOTOR2 has to be one of the leading contenders for bad release quality - 20 years old.

We had ATMs that could take deposits in the 1970s, and machines that accepted checks without deposit slips appeared in the mid-1980s. The only thing we gained in ATM technology in the last 30 years is laggy touchscreens and waiting forever for the transaction to finish.

This one near me prompts (1 of 4 before the transaction) if I want the balance printed on the receipt. I select No. Balance is printed on receipt.

At least KOTOR2 was salvaged with the TSLRCM mod, one of the best stories for a video game ever, and certainly the best story to come out of the entire Star Wars franchise...

There is one big improvement - now ATMs force you to remove your card before they dispense cash. The problem of people forgetting cards in ATMs was completely eliminated due to improved UX design.

I'm not sure how it was before 10 years ago, but in the past ~5 years my banking app has become far worse and less secure objectively. Specifically, since they moved from a hardware auth token to a digital token on a mobile app. Consumers lost Millions of dollars past year alone. The situation was so bad that this year govt passed a new law holding banks partially responsible for such scams. The attackers succeeded in emptying entire bank accounts despite multi-factor authentication (all of which depended on the mobile phone), transfer limits, etc,. "Technologists", of course, blamed the consumers for downloading untrusted apps. They also went as far as to say that Android is less secure than iOS because it's open source.

I don't know how many different ways you have tried to communicate with your bank, but in my personal experience a bank will transfer money any way you want if you send your request by fax. The fact that one platform has 2FA doesn't seems to solve a real systematic problem. And of course there's the whole ACH system on which the level of authentication is "none".

AAA Games are being shipped with massive even gamebreaking bugs, that’s relatively new. I’ve completely given up on playing games on day 1.

Compare Cyberpunk 2077 on day 1 with 10 year older games like GTA 5, The last of US etc and it’s amazing how terrible Cyberpunk was when it shipped.

Or look within series, Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League (2024) vs Batman: Arkham Origin (2013) and if you’re just look at day 1 there’s no contest. Worse Suicide Squad got worse after a patch. https://gamerant.com/suicide-squad-game-update-incursion-mis...

I disagree on the banking software side of things. One of the ATM’s near me takes 10-15 seconds between every single screen and it asks several extra questions like if you want to blank the screen. It might look better from a feature checklist standpoint, but it’s faster to use the bank teller when getting cash.

Ignoring the fact that shipping broken games is a business decision, not a technical one, what is the point of cherry picking examples? Why not consider ET for the SNES or plenty of other broken games from the past?

Besides the amount of software in a modern game vs something from the 80s is so insane that often something like an 80s arcade game is an easter egg.

Or ET for the Atari!

it had one awkward mechanic in its control scheme. It took all of 5 minutes to learn to cope with it. And it was not a bug. People just didn't read the manuals back then either. It was actually a decent game (i still have an original cartridge)

> shipping broken games is a business decision

Obviously, but just as obviously buying games on day 1 is a frustrating waste of time. We’ve reached a point where it’s just not worth the hassle.

I’m not cherry picking just looking at categories. ET wasn’t even close to a AAA game, but look at the top 10 games from each year (total sales or preorders) and you’ll see a significant increase in day 1 bugs. Start looking at AA games and some of those never get the patches they need to be playable.

People may have complained about the balance etc of each game, but Diablo III didn’t have anything like the massive number of bugs Diablo IV dropped with.

Hmm what bugs? D4 had a pretty smooth launch, didn't it?

But also > We’ve reached a point where it’s just not worth the hassle.

YOU have reach that point. As many do. And that's fine. Clearly there's still plenty of people who would rather play a somewhat buggy game sooner than wait. Why do we need to get on a high horse about it?

Funny enough this thread about how well D4 is made just happened to be on reddit.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Diablo/comments/1byutzf/diablo_4s_e...

There's so little actual data in this thread its really hard to make any conclusions.

That’s 8 months after release, when it launched people were complaining about everything from floating monsters, broken quests, and a slew of crashes and about 12 different bugs preventing them from starting the game and connecting to servers.

Personally my favorite was this one: I came across a post mentioning the possibility of transferring items between the standard server and the seasonal server. At first, I thought it was a joke, but the method was very detailed, and eventually, a few users who followed the method actually succeeded in transferring their items, standard to seasonal and vice-versa.

What's even worse, one of the players successfully uses this bug, allowing a seasonal character and a standard character to group together. https://www.reddit.com/r/diablo4/comments/15h2dlf/serious_bu...

That’s the kind of bug where you wonder what architecture even enables it to happen. But apparently a similar thing occurred in D2 LoD.

OP in not cherry picking, practically all AAA games are a pile of garbage on the day of release. You'd have to cherry pick the ones actually in a relatively fine state on launch day. Yes, it's a business decision but fuelled by a few factors that did not exist 2 decades ago:

1) Pre-orders

2) Massive marketing machinery employed to boost game's popularity

3) Shareholder value; the game studios of today are part of large media/entertainment conglomerates

4) Younger generations' "flexibility" for low-quality products. They tend to settle on mediocre quality more easily which is not helped by today's narrative that every form of critique is "toxic" or "hateful".

5) Online nature of the product allowing for fixes at a later date

Pre orders existed, I think you are more referring to Early Access which has basically become paid open beta

Outpost was so broken on ship its legendary. The 80s games were so broken they literally killed the industry for years.

The 80’s had issues with shovelware not major releases. Pool of Radiance is from 1988 and was effectively a AAA game of the time.

People complain about ET, but Mario Brothers dropped in 1983. There’s plenty of beloved games from that era.

That's just not true. The gaming industry has been booming for the past 30 years.

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