Read on Twitter
"Why didn't they just FIX all the BUGS???" - a thread:
Making a game is hard. The bigger the game is, and the more moving parts it has - and the really big games have a LOT of moving parts - the harder it is to make the game. Complexity means more potential faults. >>
Making a game is hard. The bigger the game is, and the more moving parts it has - and the really big games have a LOT of moving parts - the harder it is to make the game. Complexity means more potential faults. >>
Any AAA game studio has a QA department. This department consists of severely underpaid and severely overworked people, who constantly attempt to break the game apart. They will try any dumb thing ever to attempt to expose faults in the game. >>
When these overworked and underpaid people find a problem, they report it. The way this is done differs a bit from studio to studio and depends on the tools used, but basically, each bug gets a classification, a severity rating, a brief description, and how to reproduce it. >>
Things that get filed under the equivalent of "extremely goddamn severe" are bugs that completely crash the game, wipe save files or - heaven forfend - brick the console/PC. >>
Those bugs have to get fixed. They are severe. However, slightly less severe are things like "this questline is broken", "this NPC falls through the ground", and "this mission critical item doesn't always spawn". These things USUALLY get fixed quickly. >>
Even less severe things are stuff like "this line of dialogue has no audio attached to it", "this texture doesn't load in properly", "this car produces the wrong engine noise"; and so on. These things have the lowest priority and are dealt with on on a "if we have time" basis. >>
HOWEVER - and this is very, very important for folx who don't work within game dev - the QA people (who, again, are overworked and underpaid) *do not fix the bugs*. Their job is to report and classify bugs, and these reports are then given to the relevant people. >>
Sometimes (honestly most of the time) a bug doesn't get fixed because someone higher up in the pecking order deemed it not important enough to fix. That, on its own, isn't necessarily the worst thing - but games are awful, enormous chimaeras of code that barely hold together. >>
That weird texture-popping-in bug? It might actually be related to the console brick bug somehow. Remember Alien: Colonial Marines? The Alien AI was broken because of a *spelling error*. And someone who only looks at texture issues isn't gonna catch this. >>
My point here is: If a game is broken when it launches, yes, that is bad. Especially if it renders the game unplayable. You *should* request refunds if you can't get it to run. BUT - don't send goddamn death threats to the developers. >>
Odds are, most of them are completely aware of the issue, and it was likely reported - and then ignored by management - multiple times. You can't know where in the food chain things went wrong, but you can be 99% sure it wasn't the QA staff that missed it. >>
Just... you know. Game dev is hard. And the bigger the game is, the harder it is to keep the entire monstrosity together in an even barely functioning state. Just keep that in mind. >>
"Just fix that bug, how hard could it be???" comes from a place of "this particular thing is important to me, and it's so obvious I can't believe they didn't fix it immediately" - while the game, a few months ago, wouldn't start without a ritual sacrifice.
That's all.
That's all.
