This is what gets me. Modern game development seems to say "eh, a little hitching won't hurt anyone", and then we wind up with games that run like shit. Even on consoles.
It's a complicated problem, which might have been made worse by the fact that games are simply easier to make nowadays than ever before.
If you make it possible for level designers to make six square mile levels, they all make nothing but six square mile levels.
The difference is, sadly, that we don't control the assets at all. :(
Early access game devs pushing unoptimized releases should set up their release system betterer.
Backfilling existing code with ifdefs and dealing with compile breaks and other more weird things can be intimidating, time consuming, with hard to define ROI, so I can empathize if someone doesn't do it.
#ifdef DEBUG
Great game, except it has NES graphics and stutters like hell.
Wasteland 2 on my machine also ran really, really badly, it was unplayable (it was the first time I got pissed for kickstarting something).
Kerbal Space program also has some performance issues, but not bad as the previous two.
Then I go play some graphics heavy game made by some studio that like to make good tech, or play emulated Wii or PS2 games, and there are no issues and games look awesome.
Garbage collection is often a big problem for real-time performance, especially on the old version of Mono that Unity has.
But, even with having a worse experience than a day 1 patch (that being unable to get the day 1 patch because it is 10GB and you only have 5GB for everything for a month), I wouldn't call it the worse thing ever to happen to game development.
It shouldn't really become acceptable to ship an knowingly subpar product with the attitude "we can always issue an update later."
There is an art in exploiting bugs in old games and working to glitch your way to worlds you aren't supposed to enter at that time. The kind of time and effort in finding these is really amazing. Finding and exploiting those bugs is an art form in itself. Take a look at this - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aq6pGJbd6Iw Skip to 12:15 for the real insanity.
Or just like in the PS1 days, game developers still have to make trade-offs to meet dead drop dates set by publishers.
Online enabled patches can allow developers to be a little more cavalier with the quality, as they push to build more features closer to ship date.
That just means that we get to deal with buggy crap while they tell themselves it's OK because they can ship another update.
Sigh.
(It is possible to do 60hz on the N64, but it's really hard)
I also wonder if they are doing the equivalent in modern consoles - pushing the limits with graphics, etc. where you simply can't avoid the hitch.
It would be good to hear someone's perspective on this that works on these types of games.
Chances are they're not doing anywhere near the same thing with modern consoles; maybe in off-the-shelf engine code to get maximum FPS, but the games themselves, not likely. Also because modern video games are millions of lines of code - you don't want to duplicate those tenfold by squeezing every bit of performance out of it. Maybe only in the most frequently accessed codepaths.
PS: Skyrim is an interesting case where there is a player made patch to make city's open world where the original game has a loading screen. http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/8058
The streaming model isn't simple though. You need to decide which assets to load, when, and when to discard them. You also have to consider how your level is designed, i.e. if you've got three tiles, and a player travels from tile a to b, and then b to c. When he moves from b to c, you can remove a from memory, but what if zone b + c is too big to fit, whereas a to b is okay.
A really interesting presentation was given at GDC this year from Insomniac games on streaming http://s3.crashworks.org/gdc15/ElanRuskin_SunsetOverdrive_St...
Also, when you get close there many ways to hide the loading going on so it seems cleaner. Like a player going from planet A to planet B though a more limited space ship. On arrival they see a larger but still limited space port, giving the game time to load the new planet. Or even just boosting the glare when someone steps outside.
However, IMO these things can easily be over done.