For the most part, fixing bugs is all well and good. Who likes’em? Bunch of ugly buggy annoying things. Just limiting us and getting in our way, right?
But what about those bugs we’ve all grown fond of (because they worked to our advantage)? Our old friends the exploits? Like being able to keep terror sites alive as long as they’re targeted? And not paying bills for crew in transfer? And the apparently infinite alien contaiment? And being able to overflow storage capacity with recoveries? And more stuff like that? I bet you’re not so keen about seeing them get fixed.
So what do you think? Should all bad and good things be fixed for the sake of fairness? Or will you miss those handy little exploits?
Kill all bugs and exploits. Game should work as authors wanted to, not how they programmed it 😉
I totally agree with michal – we need no exploits.
I disagree. Everyone should be able to play a game the way he (or she) wants. So personally I would suggest making the bugfix configurable, a simple .ini file would be enough. Activate the bugfix per default, but give the possibility to players to deactivate it, thus making the exploit working again. Just my 2 cents.
its actually good to fix those bugs. It’ll make the gameplay a bit different. I’ll miss the overflow storage capacity with recoveries:)
I’d say either do as Flo says, configurable bugs(!) or get rid of them altogether.
Correcting some bugs might bring involve extra work though, such as choosing which aliens to store in the alien containment or which weapons to rescue after a mission (either that, or let some automatic algorithm to determine this, based on player necessity for a certain item/alien)
Obviously fix all bugs and make cheats instead
I agree to kill all bugs and exploits unless these changes will make the game very difficult .
The game environment will be more realistic and should be fair to both player and computer.
Adrix89 has an interesting point. An exploit is, at the end of the day, just another way of cheating. Why not explicitly call it that and make it available to the player as an option, as Flo says.
It’s a bit of extra coding, sure. But probably not much more than it’ll take to implement the feature in the first place, exploitable or not.
I too think that all bugs should be fixed, but by “being able to overflow storage capacity with recoveries?”, do you then refer to the fact that after a mission you could store more than you had storage space for with the recovered artifacts?
Because in that case I think it was a deign decision rather than a bug, because:
1. I think it is very hard not to experience this “bug”, so I would guess some beta testing would have easily revealed it.
2. It actually makes good sense to have it like that. Not from a physical point of view, but from a game designer point of view, a) you do not want to upset the player by discarding the items he recovered b) it is not really an “exploitable” “bug” – you can not build new stuff while your storage is overflown, so really it is just a way of letting the player decide what to keep and what to sell.
Wow this question sparked a lot of interest. Can’t be surprised, overall everyone wants a bug-free game but some people feel pretty fond of some of them. 🙂 And in the end, who can say what was and wasn’t intended by the developers?
I’ll have to take special care fixing all of this up, hopefully by the end it won’t turn into OptionsXcom. 😛
From my previous experience with rewriting ultima7&8’s engines, no matter what you do people will complain. 🙂
If the bugs are in the datafiles, they’re easy enough to leave “as is” or fix on load. However if the bugs are a result of implementation limitations (sizeof(char) wraparound and so on), or that you’re implementing algorithms differently to the same effect (and the bug is merely a side effect of the original algorithm), it’s easier just to “fix” the bug then to go to all the effort to implement it. Then suggest to people who complain that their favorite bug isn’t there that the project is open source, and if they feel like they absolutely must have the original bug, they are perfectly free to code it themselves. 🙂