Lack of proper testing.

If the devs\testers aren't going to bother testing their games properly, and judging by PC gaming history pretty much all testers are either incapable or unable to test EVERYTHING, then beta testing of games should be more open to the public. It's extremly disappointing to have to put up with extremly lame mistakes as noted above.

Considering this has always been the case I wouldn't consider it as the decline of PC gaming but it's definetly one more thing upon many that the end user has to put up with to play PC games.

Maybe because the game comes on six CDs instead of one DVD like all sensible games should do these days and five of those six seem to be all talk and pretty pictures.

The limited edition is on a single DVD. The Aspyr (US) release is on the 6 CDs. I only glanced over that thread and I didn't notice anything about the installers for different versions.

Level of testing heavily depends on the company. Typically, game get more thorough testing than installer. This is largely due to psychological reasons -- there are perceivably fewer ways for installer to fail compared to game. So it needs less testing, right? The next step: testing plan omits marginal cases for installer (low disk space, installing to the root of HD, attempts to install to non-writable media, multi-user installs, etc.) Remember Myth 1.0 recall?
The only good news is that it did not get worse lately. Neither it got any better 🙁

Great Hierophant wrote:

Maybe because the game comes on six CDs instead of one DVD like all sensible games should do these days

Acutally the game is shipped on DVD everywhere - except in the USA. Maybe Aspyr - The US publisher - feared, that not so many US citizens have a DVD drive available or are willing to buy one.

To the discussed topic: This is nothing new, things like these happened all the time. I just installed an old game (Double Switch), where the installer crashed, when the folder "C:\Program Files" doesn't exist - regardless of the fact that the standard program folder is named differently in every language of Windows.

Hey, the original release of Half Life had a serious issue. It was something like if you installed it in a non-default directory and then uninstalled it, it removed the parent directory downwards. They fixed it fairly quickly I seem to recall!

Agreed with Wintermute - these things are nothing new. I'd go as far to say that most software houses do the installs as a last minute exercise when in fact they are piece of source code that require careful planning and testing!