| Hi everyone, it's Jason Schreier. Today's video games are prettier and more complicated than ever before, so it's understandable that there would be some glitches. But two of the fall's hottest titles are really testing gamers' patience. Assassin's Creed Valhalla, from French publisher Ubisoft Entertainment SA, and Cyberpunk 2077 from Polish studio CD Projekt SA were both huge sellers. Valhalla became the biggest Assassin's Creed launch ever while Cyberpunk garnered eight million preorders. And both are riddled with bugs. Both games feature massive open worlds and high-end graphics, which leads to more glitches as code grows more elaborate. Plus, development for both games concluded during the pandemic, with most of the staff working from home. No doubt that made it harder to catch and fix flaws. Many of these bugs are minor, like characters briefly disappearing or enemies freezing during combat, but both games are also full of major issues. In Assassin's Creed, a glitch blocked my progression and prevented me from completing one of the game's main story quests. And Cyberpunk has myriad technical problems, as fans and critics have pointed out. One report warned readers that the game can trigger epileptic seizures. One particularly hilarious glitch in my game packed the entire city with tiny trees (although it was fixed when I updated my computer's graphics drivers). These bugs are particularly frustrating in games like Assassin's Creed and Cyberpunk because they both offer quests with multiple outcomes based on your decisions. For a game to resonate, you need to believe that an action was the result of what you said, not a glitch in the code. The good news is, thanks to the power of the internet, many of these bugs will be fixed. CD Projekt's last game, The Witcher 3, improved drastically after its release thanks to downloadable patches. The company said it's already working on fixes for Cyberpunk. More development time might have allowed the bugs to be fixed before release rather than afterwards, but that's not always practical. Assassin's Creed was deliberately scheduled to come out alongside Microsoft Corp.'s new Xbox console on Nov. 10, while Cyberpunk had already been delayed three times leading up to its release this week. A company like CD Projekt, which only puts out a major game every few years, might not have been able to afford another year on Cyberpunk, which was first announced in 2012. So here's an alternative proposal: The makers of these big, buggy games should stop pretending that they're finished in the first place. One of the video game industry's most unique recent inventions is a concept called Early Access, in which players can buy into a game during its development and play chunks that aren't quite complete. The recent role-playing game Baldur's Gate 3, for example, entered Early Access in September, and players have been sharing feedback and suggestions with the developers, who will continue to update and patch the game until its official release. What if a game like Cyberpunk followed suit? Maybe you could get a discount for buying in early? Tell players: "Look, we know the game isn't quite bug-free just yet. You can wait a few months for the final product or pay $10 less to buy it right now." It might be embarrassing to admit that your game isn't finished after spending hundreds of millions of dollars and years of development time, but it's even worse to release a game that's pilloried for its bugs. One of the most memorable images for many people of Ubisoft's 2014 game Assassin's Creed Unity, another infamously buggy game, is characters missing faces. If other publishers want to avoid the same fate, they may want to take a new approach. —Jason Schreier | 
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