So, taking all of that into account, what can a company do to assure quality in their games?
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I hate to break it to you but developers already do all this.
Once again using Bethesda as a sample, SO much got scaled back and cut out of Oblivion because it was too difficult to get it to perform without problems. Anyone remember how much they touted the fact that their game was using Havok but then it came out and literally nothing in the game took any useful advantage of it? How about Radiant AI? That had to be toned WAY down because NPCs were killing eachother over shovels.
Good development practices only get you so far and a lot of times simply not far enough, bugs cannot be easily controlled or planned around and often times they're difficult to locate so it's hard to even know what TO cut. And what if you have to cut more than you want? If I have to choose between a game with the scope of pokemon that runs solid as a rock, versus one with the scope of skyrim that crashes occasionally, I'll choose the latter every time.
The whole process of making a game is an ongoing cost benefit analysis: You find a crash bug at the end of development, it's hard to replicate and you can't figure out what's causing it or how to fix it. But it only affects 10% of the players or people with a specific video card. The game is still playable but it crashes occasionally. Do you delay the game and hope you can figure out what it is and fix it? How much time do you allot to trying to figure it out? When that time runs out what do you do? Or do you launch the game so that 90% of the people can play it fine and fix it later? What happens when you fix it and find another problematic bug? At a certain point the benefits of waiting stop outweighing the costs.
Your ideas about how a game gets made seems to operate under the assumption that game developers are incompetent and can't make intelligent choices.
Your ideas about how a game gets made seems to operate under the assumption that game developers are incompetent and can't make intelligent choices.
A well written response and a point of view I could definitely start to see until you made that comment. How you have come to that conclusion is beyond me. It seems you missed an entire paragraph of what I wrote.
Sorry for the slight thread res, but I found this end-of-post jab to be completely off base and it does not reflect my opinion of game developers, thus poly counters, in any way. This is not a label I would like to stick in this community. I feel that game developers are the creme dela creme in many ways, and it is my desire to one day call myself one.
Overlooking that, I can see how development is a living, ongoing cost/benefit analysis. Pushing the boundaries of games doesn't come without it's growing pains, and you're right, I'd rather have Skyrim than another Pokemon game.
PS3 players are reportedly having absurd performance hits once they reach a certain number of saved games.
This was the final straw that clicked my gears. Funny enough I was in the shower this morning thinking about writing up a rant about games today. Well, more directed towards PS3 games.
So far my experience with PS3 games has been poor. The main culprit? Framerates! Yay. I'd sacrafice visuals anyday for a nice stable framerate but nope.avi, companies keep pushing it and denying me my peaceful playthrough.
It's so sad that when I played Zelda: Skyward Sword with no problems and a nice framerate I actually shed a tear. I can't make this shit up.
This was the final straw that clicked my gears. Funny enough I was in the shower this morning thinking about writing up a rant about games today. Well, more directed towards PS3 games.
This is not supposed to happen though, but again, unforeseen consequences with the game that as far as I know has been fixed with the recent patch.
Saves in skyrim actually records every small change to the game, every altered thing in the game, moved item, killed enemy, moved corpses, visited places etc. gets saved in the savefile, so it will get larger and larger the more things you do and the longer you play.
If you want to compare apples and oranges (zelda and skyrim) then you'll see to how something like skyward sword handles saving the game, it will save progress, items, and specific things you've done, not actually the whole world, not every brush you've cut down, not every tiny relation to every character, since there are none.
It's a far more predictable system and easily testable game.
So far my experience with PS3 games has been poor. The main culprit? Framerates! Yay. I'd sacrafice visuals anyday for a nice stable framerate but nope.avi, companies keep pushing it and denying me my peaceful playthrough.
It's so sad that when I played Zelda: Skyward Sword with no problems and a nice framerate I actually shed a tear. I can't make this shit up.
It's a bit of a generalization though, every company does it different, the ps3 has as much to do with it as wii and 360 does, id choose to have rage run at 60fps, and the god of war series having had a pretty fluid framerate at 30-60 fps.
Zelda does keep a stable framerate, but it caps at 30, even nintendo chooses visuals before framerate.
Even nintendo can't escape bugs, only different is that they don't have the architecture in place to send out fixes.
Guys... we`re all artists here... so start acting like it!
.....
games have lower quality and way more bugs because programmers are getting worse. its ALWAYS the programmers fault, but they`ll deny it till the end! hehe j/k you guys work your butts off.
Ok, in all seriousness though. As long as the game doesnt crash, and as long as i can complete quests, i dont care. if i hand something in, and it doesnt complete the quest and therefore stops me from finishing the game, those bugs i haaate. I dont mind graphical errors, or duping objects or anything like that. I just dont dupe if its possible. Yes, bugs are annoying, but seeing the scope of the games, and knowing not every company has a shit ton of money to throw at it to fix all bugs before release, im completely fine with having constant updates that fix stuff as they go. if they dont fix game breaking bugs, i get pissed and stop playing. I see alot of the time, companies dont prioritize bugs properly.
There are still requirements now as there was then, and they are insanely high, if a game crashes a single time on the consoles during its testing runs its a no go.
for everything non show stopping QA can be a joke. Sometimes you hear "don't worry, we did this'n'that and it still passed our own QA". (coming from our clients - we're an outsourcer)
Morale? It doesn't have to be RIGHT, it just needs to pass QA....somehow
When Quality gets reduced to "it just has to work somehow", is it still "quality"?
Saying that Blizzard and Nintendo doesn't put out non-buggy games is just wrong. Yep, World of Warcraft was 100% from the get start. ^^
Well, I think peoples standards are too high. I'm still remembering corrupt saves games on my NES for Zelda II : Adventures of Link that made me cry. Yeah a game has some small bugs, if you really really hate it, just wait a month or two before buying it and then you'll have a patched version of the game. No biggie.
Saying that Blizzard and Nintendo doesn't put out non-buggy games is just wrong. Yep, World of Warcraft was 100% from the get start. ^^
Well, I think peoples standards are too high. I'm still remembering corrupt saves games on my NES for Zelda II : Adventures of Link that made me cry. Yeah a game has some small bugs, if you really really hate it, just wait a month or two before buying it and then you'll have a patched version of the game. No biggie.
What about the risks in new bugs being created after others have been fixed? I hear the dragons are flying backwards in Skyrim after the latest patch. Maybe I should wait a bit longer before buying it. Or shouldn't I?
What about the risks in new bugs being created after others have been fixed? I hear the dragons are flying backwards in Skyrim after the latest patch. Maybe I should wait a bit longer before buying it. Or shouldn't I?
Well give it a few days then the next big patch will come I haven't met any backwards flying dragons though, heard about them but maybe games just like me
What about the risks in new bugs being created after others have been fixed? I hear the dragons are flying backwards in Skyrim after the latest patch. Maybe I should wait a bit longer before buying it. Or shouldn't I?
Hard to say, I have a feeling some bugs (such as not being able to complete the theif questline) won't be solved. There are some things you can fix too, if you get it for pc. If you're waiting for it and kinda want to play it now, then get it. If not then I don't think it'll be completely ironed out until there's a goty edition, that's just my feelings anyway, plus there'd be some extra content for you.
Replies
Once again using Bethesda as a sample, SO much got scaled back and cut out of Oblivion because it was too difficult to get it to perform without problems. Anyone remember how much they touted the fact that their game was using Havok but then it came out and literally nothing in the game took any useful advantage of it? How about Radiant AI? That had to be toned WAY down because NPCs were killing eachother over shovels.
Good development practices only get you so far and a lot of times simply not far enough, bugs cannot be easily controlled or planned around and often times they're difficult to locate so it's hard to even know what TO cut. And what if you have to cut more than you want? If I have to choose between a game with the scope of pokemon that runs solid as a rock, versus one with the scope of skyrim that crashes occasionally, I'll choose the latter every time.
The whole process of making a game is an ongoing cost benefit analysis: You find a crash bug at the end of development, it's hard to replicate and you can't figure out what's causing it or how to fix it. But it only affects 10% of the players or people with a specific video card. The game is still playable but it crashes occasionally. Do you delay the game and hope you can figure out what it is and fix it? How much time do you allot to trying to figure it out? When that time runs out what do you do? Or do you launch the game so that 90% of the people can play it fine and fix it later? What happens when you fix it and find another problematic bug? At a certain point the benefits of waiting stop outweighing the costs.
Your ideas about how a game gets made seems to operate under the assumption that game developers are incompetent and can't make intelligent choices.
A well written response and a point of view I could definitely start to see until you made that comment. How you have come to that conclusion is beyond me. It seems you missed an entire paragraph of what I wrote.
Sorry for the slight thread res, but I found this end-of-post jab to be completely off base and it does not reflect my opinion of game developers, thus poly counters, in any way. This is not a label I would like to stick in this community. I feel that game developers are the creme dela creme in many ways, and it is my desire to one day call myself one.
Overlooking that, I can see how development is a living, ongoing cost/benefit analysis. Pushing the boundaries of games doesn't come without it's growing pains, and you're right, I'd rather have Skyrim than another Pokemon game.
So far my experience with PS3 games has been poor. The main culprit? Framerates! Yay. I'd sacrafice visuals anyday for a nice stable framerate but nope.avi, companies keep pushing it and denying me my peaceful playthrough.
It's so sad that when I played Zelda: Skyward Sword with no problems and a nice framerate I actually shed a tear. I can't make this shit up.
This is not supposed to happen though, but again, unforeseen consequences with the game that as far as I know has been fixed with the recent patch.
Saves in skyrim actually records every small change to the game, every altered thing in the game, moved item, killed enemy, moved corpses, visited places etc. gets saved in the savefile, so it will get larger and larger the more things you do and the longer you play.
If you want to compare apples and oranges (zelda and skyrim) then you'll see to how something like skyward sword handles saving the game, it will save progress, items, and specific things you've done, not actually the whole world, not every brush you've cut down, not every tiny relation to every character, since there are none.
It's a far more predictable system and easily testable game.
It's a bit of a generalization though, every company does it different, the ps3 has as much to do with it as wii and 360 does, id choose to have rage run at 60fps, and the god of war series having had a pretty fluid framerate at 30-60 fps.
Zelda does keep a stable framerate, but it caps at 30, even nintendo chooses visuals before framerate.
Even nintendo can't escape bugs, only different is that they don't have the architecture in place to send out fixes.
[ame="
Hush boy! Everyone knows them Nintendoes games don't have glitches!
.....
games have lower quality and way more bugs because programmers are getting worse. its ALWAYS the programmers fault, but they`ll deny it till the end!
Ok, in all seriousness though. As long as the game doesnt crash, and as long as i can complete quests, i dont care. if i hand something in, and it doesnt complete the quest and therefore stops me from finishing the game, those bugs i haaate. I dont mind graphical errors, or duping objects or anything like that. I just dont dupe if its possible. Yes, bugs are annoying, but seeing the scope of the games, and knowing not every company has a shit ton of money to throw at it to fix all bugs before release, im completely fine with having constant updates that fix stuff as they go. if they dont fix game breaking bugs, i get pissed and stop playing. I see alot of the time, companies dont prioritize bugs properly.
http://kotaku.com/5865426/game+breaking-skyward-sword-bug-confirmed-heres-how-to-avoid-it
for everything non show stopping QA can be a joke. Sometimes you hear "don't worry, we did this'n'that and it still passed our own QA". (coming from our clients - we're an outsourcer)
Morale? It doesn't have to be RIGHT, it just needs to pass QA....somehow
When Quality gets reduced to "it just has to work somehow", is it still "quality"?
Well, I think peoples standards are too high. I'm still remembering corrupt saves games on my NES for Zelda II : Adventures of Link that made me cry. Yeah a game has some small bugs, if you really really hate it, just wait a month or two before buying it and then you'll have a patched version of the game. No biggie.
What about the risks in new bugs being created after others have been fixed? I hear the dragons are flying backwards in Skyrim after the latest patch. Maybe I should wait a bit longer before buying it. Or shouldn't I?
Well give it a few days then the next big patch will come
Hard to say, I have a feeling some bugs (such as not being able to complete the theif questline) won't be solved. There are some things you can fix too, if you get it for pc. If you're waiting for it and kinda want to play it now, then get it. If not then I don't think it'll be completely ironed out until there's a goty edition, that's just my feelings anyway, plus there'd be some extra content for you.