It's an interesting topic but it probably belongs in the Off-Topic forum as it involves other games than HoI. (I'm not mod of this forum and can't move it there alas.)
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From what I remember from the games I played very early, they seemed quite less buggy on release (e.g. Caesar 2).
I'm guessing that might be because:
1. There was no way to distribute patches in those days. Games had to be released finished since there was no way to fix them after release.
2. Today's PC systems and programming requirements are much more diverse and complex. It might've been easier to develop and test a DOS game (though on the other hand, DOS had less hardware abstraction).
3. Then there's of course the plain old "it was better in my time" bias.
Your theory may be partially true; I never read any forums where other people would mention discovered bugs. Bugs would be limited what I could find.
Regardless, HoI3 would've come off as a buggy game to me, even under those communication conditions, since I can only play it a few minutes before it crashes. But for the reasons I mentioned above, we might be comparing apples and oranges here.
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From what I remember from the games I played very early, they seemed quite less buggy on release (e.g. Caesar 2).
I'm guessing that might be because:
1. There was no way to distribute patches in those days. Games had to be released finished since there was no way to fix them after release.
2. Today's PC systems and programming requirements are much more diverse and complex. It might've been easier to develop and test a DOS game (though on the other hand, DOS had less hardware abstraction).
3. Then there's of course the plain old "it was better in my time" bias.
Your theory may be partially true; I never read any forums where other people would mention discovered bugs. Bugs would be limited what I could find.
Regardless, HoI3 would've come off as a buggy game to me, even under those communication conditions, since I can only play it a few minutes before it crashes. But for the reasons I mentioned above, we might be comparing apples and oranges here.