One downside to our world of being able to go back and decide to change a game's nature by patching it, is that sometimes, the decisions made by the Powers that Be, are sometimes changes for the worse.

Subjective the topic is, though one could make declarations of things being objectively worse; if it for example killed a game's playerbase or was actively to the detriment of players.

Minecraft 1.7.3 beta: It's all downhill from here.
So, I wasn't exactly an early buyer of Minecraft. Not turbo early; I think I joined the fray just after 1.3b (Just before they introduced beds, basically.) And Microsoft can pry my Minecraft.net account from my cold dead hands.
Why I feel it got worse: Minecraft for me was about the nomadic wonderment. As changes were made in 1.8b and 1.0 release, it was clear that changes were being made which no longer favoured that play style.

Sure, they've introduced new cave generation, but they've done nothing to actually make it viable to even explore them. Plus diamonds are so rare now that you have to stripmine to have enough to rub together! The landscapes never do their weird things anymore and looking down into a big hole or deep ocean is only neat a few times.

A lot of the additions are just weird cruft and bits that don't connect together to make anything deeper than a surface system. Several of them are active penalties for living nomadically, like Phantoms; creatures which I understand are universally disliked anyway and if they just got removed, I wouldn't miss em'.

The combat system has always been a bit fucky, and the changes they made don't exactly jive with a player like me, whose solution to combat is to not involve themselves in it. Going from basic clickspam to charged attacks, to...I don't even know anymore, get off my lawn. (It doesn't help that ever since Gamepedia was merged with Fandom that all their wikis have gone to pot.)



Starbound: Boy, this sure is a nice beta, it'd be a shame if something were to happen to it!

Ugh. All that good potential lost because TiY was a skinflint mountebank. I shouldn't have to go over the deal, but basically unpaid labour, potentially disputed as "volunteering".

What we knew was that several years ago, two elements of the original Terraria team split off to make their own Terraria with blackjack and hookers. And an infinite procedurally generated universe that'd you'd slowly unlock by literally constructing your own boss battles and using whatever they dropped to help rebuild the capabilities of your ship. The rest, was your story to weave.

Then 1.0 came along and it no longer was your story. No, now you're a cadet in the Protectorate, having to do musclework for the only one who was out of the office when Earth Oh gosh(!) was attacked. And it's already within that short cliffnotes that I have to pause and stare at how stupid the plot is.

In the Alpha & Betas, Humanity had done the understandable thing: Given the ability of FTL, they launched colonies across the galaxy, even establishing penal colonies, military outposts, and more.

In the release version? OOPSIE DOODLES, humanity is now an endangered species relegated to refugee camps!

...The same FTL ships still exist in the release version. But even that egregious plothole aside, there's the larger question of: What do these species even gain from the Protectorate and more importantly...

(Sidenote here: The Florans see the Apex as nothing but lunch. In fact, the Florans are basically a voraphile's dream come true. So what do they gain by being in a loose pastiche of Star Trek's Starfleet? One could claim enlightenment, but it's generally understood that the PC and characters like the PC are...rare, to put it bluntly to the point of YOU becoming the CHOSEN ONE!)

...What even is the protectorate?
According to Starbounder, the game's wiki: ...This tells us bugger all.

And that's sort of the onus of the point here: Everything from the release onward in Starbound is at best, quarter baked. Some of it is still raw. There's no depth. What depth had been there, was removed.

So: That massive set of rants out of the way, can you exemplify games that have gotten worse as that version number incremented? I vaguely understand the front fell off of World of Warcraft at some point, though where and when seems to be a point of contention. Cataclysm? Myst: Book of Pandaria? Enlighten me! And go on! Don't leave out the details!

When cloning was added to Hardwar, I forget which version added it, it completely disrupted the tension the game had.

Explain this. Was it basically that an unlimited lives system was introduced, so it no longer meant "Dead=out of match"?

well in single player it does the following you go to a shop and spend x amount of credits on a cloning device, you install this device in a hanger that you own (you could only do this in hangers you bought and owned) then if you die during the course of the game you would "respawn" at your hanger but not recover your moth (the type of aircraft used on titan)

I never played it MP so I dont know how it worked there or if it even did work, but for me it ruined the tension of completing a run or a mission. its harder to explain with out getting into the nitty gritty of hardwar.
Note that Hardwar plays alot like the old Elite games,

Not so much for the "peaking" but Chuchel v1.0, before the utterly pointless orange-facing.

I think that Early Access release certainly made this problem far more common. While the whole idea is to allow users to play test for the devs and provide cashflow for the development, it results in either the customers pressuring the devs to make changes to the game, or the dev making decisions which upset the customers who already paid for it.

In any case these changes will result in groups of players who enjoyed "the old version" before X part of the game got changed, and despite the final game perhaps being less buggy or full of more content some players always look through those rose-tints and declare "it was way cooler when...".

Since most of the games I finally play have been either at the very end of the development cycle, or are beyond new content and just get bug tweaks, I don't get to witness this personally. An interesting thread, Darvond. I look forward to reading more examples.

I've thankfully switched to this mindset, but I still got burned by a few games on the way.

I just avoid early access to begin with sadly, been burned too many times.

I was hopeful at one point, but then came the eternally indev games...

Sometimes this happens when games get ports and remakes. For example:

Final Fantasy peaked in its PlayStation version. The GBA version added some interesting things, but it also made the game way too easy, to the point where you *have* to run from battles or else you'll end up overleveled and the game will be too easy. (PSX version's easy mode didn't feel like that.) (By contrast, note that the PSX version of Final Fantasy 2 is the worst version I've played (tied with the WSC version I think) because they slowed down spell leveling, and it was already a bit too slow in the original Famicom version.)

Dragon Quest 6 is more balanced in the original SFC version than in in its DS remake, plus they removed monster recruitment in the DS version.

Crystalis's original NES version is better than the GBC version in most respects, especially given that, for whatever reason, the soundtrack was replaced with one not as good. (There is one good thing about the GBC version, and that's that you're no longer required to reach max level to beat the game.)

Final Fantasy 5, if we ignore the pixel remaster (because I haven't read about what changed with that version, though I have read about a few nasty bugs), peaked with its GBA version (though the original is still the one you want if you want to sequence break the third world).

Deus Ex Human Revolution before the "Director's Cut". Not only did the Director's Cut ruin the game's signature look (that would be bad enough, but thankfully the golden filter can be returned relatively easily with a mod), but they forced a lengthy DLC that has nothing to do with the main story at all into the game as an unskippable part of the campaign. It completely ruins the game's momentum, when at the point when things are really coming to a head you are forced to lose all your upgrades and run for hours back and forth around one boring facility, doing shit in no way related to the story you were immersed in. It is truly terrible and does great harm to the storytelling of the original. I have no idea why they did it like that, instead of making it a separate thing like the Jensen's Stories DLCs in Mankind Divided.

- Don't Starve. I adore the game but dislike Hamlet DLC and thought the game "peaked" with Reign of Giants + Shipwrecked. The problem is, for many such games the developer will patch the "base" game anyway (for save game compatibility reasons vs new DLC), adding a load of new bugs to those who don't want the DLC and significantly increasing the size of the game. So I kept the "outdated" offline installers that were the last pre-Hamlet aware ones, and the difference in size is quite noticeable (DS + RoG + SW (22437) = 739MB vs DS + RoG + SW (41435) = 1.8GB + Hamlet (41435) (1.6GB) = 3.4GB total). So even if you don't want, buy or install Hamlet DLC, the newest "base" game still has to bloat itself out 2.4x fold anyway purely for Hamlet compatibility reasons...

- This War of Mine. Similar story, I love the "base" game but wasn't that interested in the fixed stories DLC. Old pre-story version = 1.05GB vs new Final Cut (inc stories) = 2.8GB.

- Titan Quest Anniversary. Same story again. I loved the base game but didn't enjoy Ragnarok / Atlantis much. Old TQ:AE installers = 3.84GB. Newest (51934) = 11.7GB (base) which excludes the 2.2GB Atlantis / 2.4GB Ragnarok / 2.45GB Eternal Embers for a total of 18.7GB. So even if you don't buy the DLC, the "base" TQ:AE game has tripled in size anyway because of it.

This stuff is why I wish GOG would offer the option of downloading older versions of offline installers for those who don't want all (or any) DLC.

Completely agree. Aside from the fact some people liked the "gold filter" look / the absurd jarring DLC placement, the DC version was based on an earlier build that reintroduced the same chronic stutter that a newer build of the original had patched out. Textures were also a downgrade as apparently the Director's Cut was based off a console port:-

Deus Ex HR Original - https://i.imgur.com/0n5LENz.jpg

Deus Ex HR:DC - https://i.imgur.com/d12zFjB.jpg

(Notice the detailed textures & reflections on the two cars, insanely over-saturated bloom on the DC, etc). The game also increased in size for seemingly no reason (8.2GB DXHR (Base) + 1.95GB ML (DLC) = 10.2GB Original vs almost 18GB DXHR:DC with integrated DLC and inferior textures...)

Rust was very polished and optimized before the devs scrapped it and created the game again from scratch in 2014. It's good now, but there was a long time where the amount of bugs and optimization problems in the new builds were just colossal.

That reminds me: Binding of Isaac, which has had so many releases, version revisions, and patches to send a notary mad.

And generally speaking, I think it's held that many of them aren't much of an improvement, introducing things like no longer being able to infinite Jeboram or just Hush who is awful in general.