The Cutthroats Conspiracy

It was in the spring of '99 when I first heard that Hothouse Creations, the designers behind the highly original though slightly flawed Gangsters: Organized Crime, were finishing up with their latest title Cutthroats: Terror on the High Seas.  At last, I thought, someone is updating Sid Meier's classic Pirates! PC game.  Starfleet Command was the first game I have bought this year (the one before that was Baldur's Gate, an uninspiring CRPG).  Cutthroats looked to be the second.  Why am I telling you this?  Because it's to point out that there are very few A-class games that hit the market as of late and I have no time to waste on anything sub par.  A lot of good games do come down the pipeline, but rarely does anything work correctly right out of the box.  And usually by the time the patch comes along that fixes the game, the box is located in the bargain bin at a fraction of the price.  Hence, I don't buy many games.  

Cutthroats came out on a Friday.  I just 'happened' to be in the mall Saturday visiting my wife at work.  No really.  There is nothing nicer than to surprise her with a visit while you've got the baby boy in tow.  You're not buying it, are you?  Okay, so I knew the game was there.  But I wasn't ready to buy.  Why not?  Because the game had only been out a day and, no fool am I, Usenet had not commented on it yet.  But it was right there on the shelf.  So close.  A rebate available on EB's web site.  A free year subscription to Computer Games Magazine.  Hmmm, pretty tempting.  Damn!  Why can't there be some sort of local computer that I could plug into and check out Usenet.  Than a plan formed in my mind.  I could buy it now and just not open it.  If I leave the game sealed I could keep it and the receipt in the bag and have zero trouble returning it. Okay, great!  You know what happened when I got home, right?

Wrong.  I never opened it.  I did what I set out to do.  I put it in the bag with the receipt and hit Usenet.  There were a whole two posts about the game, with both reviewers being split.  One had an all-nighter and was addicted, the other thought it was crap.  I thought it was curious that the traffic concerning the game was low.  So I clicked my way on over to Eidos' web site (the publisher's).  Sure enough there was a link to the Cutthroats page, from where I could access the Cutthroats forum.

Mayhem.

Apparently the game, with better execution than Gangsters, was flawed with bugs.  A lot of them.  Little black one's, big green scaly one's, some crawled, some flew, and the nastiest one of all just crashed you to the desktop after playing for two hours.  People quickly formed the habit of saving in multiple slots for it would seem the save game files were open to the corruption.  Yikes, I thought.  Now understand that many of them (those posting in the forum) were highly irritated.  It appeared that what did work correctly and, save any crashes, people were having a blast with it.  They loved the game and what it was trying to do but were angry that it couldn't perform correctly.  A Hothouse rep (I'll leave his name out of this), quickly dropped by the forum to calm everyone down and let them know that a patch was coming.  And it did.  A week and a half later.  Eh?  And how come the UK version was less problematic?  We were told that was due to it shipping later so there was more time to fix the bugs.  I say again, eh?  The common thread in the forum was that the bugs were not little one's burrowed deep within the code but large pus like and pimply.  In other words, the game shipped with the knowledge that it was buggy.  Someone mentioned about quarter profits and profit quarters, blah, blah.  But Hothouse showed us they do support their product.  They gave much effort to fully right Gangsters as best they could.  And as it was, with the new patch, Cutthroats was finally playable.  The big ol' nasty bugs were squashed though a few little one's still remain (Hothouse is expected to squash these the second time around).  

But a funny thing happened in that week and a half between the game's release and the patch.  Everyone was venting on any little thing they could (again, they weren't pissed at wasting their money, they were pissed because they could see the great potential Cutthroats has).  For example, one player couldn't understand why the Spanish fleets constantly attacked him.  He reported that he had done absolutely nothing to them, yet they would blow him out of the water on first sight.  This bug was replicated over and over and over.  How could such a glaring bug get through?  Other's were reporting the same problem.  The Hothouse rep followed up with a simple query, what flag was he flying at the time?  Eh?  Turns out that the game allows the player to have different flags run up the mast in order to trick the enemy.  If the player constantly wandered into Spanish waters while flying the English flag at a period in the game where Spain and England were at war, guess what?  You'll be blown to bits on first sight by the Spanish fleet.  Doh!  Everyone seemed to get really quiet about this time.  It soon became apparent that many of the so-called bugs weren't bugs at all, they were part of the gameplay.  A follow up post pondered how many bugs would be cleared up if people just took the time to read the 100+ page manual.  What, me read?  I play computer games, why do I have to read!

How many of us actually read the manual before we play a game.  Not many I suspect.  We actually use it as a reference source, if used at all.  And it's funny how we'll bitch if the manual isn't huge.  Funny indeed.  Except to the game programmers, who work to make a realistic game, only to get bashed for certain gameplay designs that people just don't understand, even though it's in black and white.  Its not you say?  Well did you click yes in the installation screen when it asked if you would like to view the read me file that contains manual errata and last minute changes?  No?  In the gamers defense, Cutthroats was released in an unstable and buggy state.  It was so bad that people were having trouble figuring out what was a bug and what wasn't.  Kinda like when it's a little dark in the living room and you just squashed a bug you've never seen before.  That's when little shadows move out of the corner of your eye and you whip around yelling "Bug! Bug! Bug!" only to find out it was your shadow. 

Now of course their is no excuse to essentially pay a company $40-$50 to become a beta tester, which is what anyone currently playing Cutthroats is doing.  But on the other hand, they are so desperate for a game of this scope that they continue to do so.  Every game needs a patch to fix this or that nowadays.  And patches come out quicker and complete when the designers are looking into real bugs, not imagined ones.  So of you want to be the first on the block when that game comes out, go right ahead.  But since you paid the money, when you report a bug, make sure it's a real bug.  We all want to get the patch out sooner rather than later.

The game is still sealed in the bag.  Let's see if patch number two fixes everything.  And next time you play a game be careful.  That might not be a bug in a pocket…

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Authored by A. Sage