To be fair, it took several hours for the issue to be noticed (
I think the news originated on GAF). Even Digital Foundry missed it despite extensive testing at framerates above 30fps. If the game appeared to be running normally at higher framerates from the off, then it's understandable that nobody thought to check something like the amount of damage received.
Well, but the fact is devs know the game very well, since they developed it. They should notice if you receive double the usual damage istantly when testing the game, people who never played Vanquish can totally miss the issue, players who played Vanquish can notice it if their memories is good enough/they can do a quick comparison with the console version, but I think devs should really notice the bug no matter what.
Anyway I finished Cradle. The game was on my wishlist from release, and I was able to play it thanks to Yakkue and Ningen.
Sadly, the game itself is very disappointed.
First, it's not open-world: there are TWO buildings, and I mean TWO buildings in the while "open-world", and in the world itself you don't need to do nothing except to solve two (TWO) dumb puzzles. The world is totally empty, there are really no activities to do or whatever.
Anyway the game is a point and click game, divided in two sections: one in which you need to gather items and assemble them (I refuse to call those puzzles since there's nothing to figure out honestly, if not for the very first puzzle which had a receipt you simply need to follow but you can screw up when adding salt), the other when you do cube minigames, a VERY bad minigame in which you need to throw 30 cubes into a vortex. You need to repeat it 4 times along the game...to get items needed to proceed.
The game is very short, around 4 hours, the interaction is limited (again, TWO npcs in the entire game) and you can't really explore or whatever because there's nothing to see, even the game just ends without a proper climax or explanation. The "plot" is interesting, but I wouldn't even call it a plot, just an amount of informations and concepts with a "past" to discover, but you won't really solve the whole thing (spoiler? Not really, some things remain unsolved).
It feels like a concept, a beta of a game, the sad thing is the product is not even early access, but it's finished, caput, done.
You can't even save your game, the game autosaves when you clear a chapter, but if you drop an item needed to proceed and you can't find it in the overworld, you'll be forced to reload that chapter starting from the beginning.
A missed opportunity, I don't know what happened, maybe devs run out of money, maybe the scope was too big and they couldn't reach it, but the game as is now is not a good purchase, in my opinion.
The aesthetics are fascinating, the final theme occuring during the end credits is very good, but if devs won't do a "director's cut" with a better inventory, the option to save when you want but more important bring new contents to a game sadly empty, Cradle will remain what it is now, a nice-looking experiment but nothing else.
The real question is how you'd be under the assumption that literally no testing occurred before releasing it.
I assume nothing, I'm just saying a bug like that should be noticed by devs. I can expect common beta-testers to not notice it, since maybe they never played the game and you can thing "wow, this game is very hard", but devs should check it. But the bug will be fixed at least, this is not From with DS2.