• empireOfLove@lemmy.one
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    1 year ago

    this just in: actually spending money on QA allows you to put out a higher quality product

    • KᑌᔕᕼIᗩ@lemmy.mlOP
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      1 year ago

      It’s truly amazing what can happen when they don’t cut quite so many corners and release the minimal viable product.

      • Harrison [He/Him]@ttrpg.network
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        1 year ago

        I’m not sure that using the entire QA staff of the world’s largest agglomeration of Dev studios on a single game only qualifies as “not cutting corners”. That’s surely going above and beyond.

        • Neato@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          If that’s what it takes to ship a game that doesn’t have multitudes of game breaking bugs like they’re known for, perhaps the company has bigger problems. Like still using an engine that is this bad.

          • derpo@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            This engine is a house of cards that is decades past collapsing.

        • Rolder@reddthat.com
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          1 year ago

          It really depends on if that dev studio conglomerate collectively cut costs on QA and by how much

        • Haui@discuss.tchncs.de
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          1 year ago

          I really don’t like the word agile since everyone I ever met who had this in their job title was blowing up steam someones butt. Is that the job description or what is it with these agile types?

    • fidodo@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      Also helps to come out with a game so popular you can bank on it for the next decade

    • synicalx1@sopuli.xyz
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      1 year ago

      I’m only a few hours in, but aside from the usual weird NPC behaviour this engine is known for I haven’t encountered any actual bugs so far.

      • Dubious_Fart@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        yeah, the game stinks of gamebryo, but… I’ve only had one crash so far… Who would have that that all it would take to make a less buggy bethesda game was the entire QA department of one of the biggest companies on the planet.

          • Dubious_Fart@lemmy.ml
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            1 year ago

            You are missing the very important “so far”

            because it has crashed on me many times since that post.

  • iAmTheTot@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    I’ve watched multiple reviews though that have said some variation of “yup, it’s a Bethesda game, bugs and all”

    • ImFresh3x@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      Watched twitch streams out if curiosity. This is a bathesda game in every way. Which is fine, but it feels like we’re being told it’s not. And it is.

    • emptyother@programming.dev
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      1 year ago

      But it IS still the least buggy Bethesda game yet, that I believe. If all people got to complain about is lack of some HDR shit, theres not much to complain about.

      I’ve only found a few bugs so far: One enemy floating in air, and followers who aren’t good at following.

      • Ser Salty@feddit.de
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        1 year ago

        I’ve had some of the usual physics glitching out and exploding stuff all over the place, and one guy phased through a bar counter… other than that, pretty smooth sailing.

    • CreateProblems@corndog.social
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      1 year ago

      Hey, I work in QA (not in the video game field though.) However, I can tell you there is a difference between “QA missed” and “deadlines required prioritizing other fixes.”

      One implies that the employees are bad at their job. Which is almost certainly not the case. I haven’t played Starfield (or even clicked through to your link lol) but presumably this is something blatantly obvious. And I’m sure the QA team was frustrated letting a glaring known issue through.

      QA finds issues but it’s up to development teams to fix them, and strict deadlines will always hamper delivering a flawless product. But deadlines are driven by management and until the industry changes (i.e. don’t preorder games) we’re going to keep seeing these problems.

      But as a QA professional, please don’t blame us ✌️

      • stratoscaster@lemmy.zip
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        1 year ago

        As someone who works in software dev, QA is a godsend to developers. Thank you for your sacrifice lol

      • Alien Nathan Edward@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        This. You don’t know what’s sitting on a jira somewhere with “won’t fix” tagged to it. As an ex-QA who’s now a dev, we want to fix everything and we get told what we will and will not be fixing. When you see bugs in the final product that are relatively easy to reproduce, the story there is almost certainly that we found it and then the money told us not to bother with it because they think you’ll buy the product anyway.

      • MeatsOfRage@lemmy.ca
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        1 year ago

        Hell yea brother. Lazy Dev / Lazy QA talk is shit that’s gotta stop. Dev here. No one likes to ship buggy code, it’s just gonna come back to bite us. Sometimes all you can do is ship good enough code because there are 20 more Jira tickets coming down the pipe.

        The teams behind a single AAA game are often as big or bigger than your average tech startup. It’s competing priorities all the way up and down the ladder and devs and QA often have very little influence over this.

      • BorgDrone@lemmy.one
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        1 year ago

        It’s blatantly obvious and makes the game look like shit. This should not a low-prio bug, this should be a showstopper.

          • BorgDrone@lemmy.one
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            1 year ago

            Yeah I don’t buy it. This is not a new engine they just developed, or some obscure complicated feature. This is one of the core functionalities of the game engine: render the game world onto the screen. And it’s an engine they developed in-house. They have been working on this game for years and years, and all that time no one noticed that output of the rendering engine is incorrect and everything looks washed out?

            In the current state, the game should not have been released at all. If this is something that was fundamentally unfixable they should have pulled the plug and cancelled the game.

            • bleistift2@feddit.de
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              1 year ago

              Is it possible you only watched the first half? From 3:30 onwards the video digs into why it’s hard to push a release date.

              • BorgDrone@lemmy.one
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                1 year ago

                Yes I did. I’m not saying they should have pushed the release date but cancelled the release entirely. As in: never release it and refund everyone who preordered it.

    • DreamButt@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      As a developer who works with great QA people. I can guarantee you that the QA team were not the issue here. Where the developer’s time was prioritized and what fixes where even allowed to be patched would have been a direct result of leadership decisions

      • ipkpjersi@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        Yep. A lot of people don’t realize that games are not bad because of the developers but rather because of leadership. They incorrectly attribute the blame to developers and think developers want to build shitty games or something.

        • InputZero@lemmy.ml
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          1 year ago

          I don’t know why everyone is acting surprised, it’s been this way for a while now. Pre-ordering any game is just paying early so you can be a dev-tester. I can’t think of a major release in video games that hasn’t been a buggy mess on release. I was fool with No Man’s Sky, and I won’t be fooled again. My plan is to just wait a few months until the second patch, same thing I do for all new releases and they’re usually discounted a bit by then too.

    • ShortFuse@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I’ve been in the SpecialK discord all of yesterday messing with stuff and went to bed.

      Now I wake up and find that not only did they (SpecialK devs) fix the 8bit pipeline problem, but it paves the way for real HDR in all Direct3D12 games.

      You have until launch day to return pre-orders and I was considering it, but we might have fixed HDR/black levels now.

    • ZC3rr0r@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      It’s been that way for a while now.

      When online patching became a thing most games studios quickly figured out they could push the game to press in whatever state, then work on fixing the bugs in between code complete and GA, and simply push those fixes as a launch day patch.

      And commercially, it makes sense. The greatest the game is on the shelves, the earlier the investors see ROI. It’s just a shame if this calculated gamble backfires and the degree find way too many bugs to fix in the window between code complete and release. That’s when you get Cyberpunk 2077…

      • Haui@discuss.tchncs.de
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        1 year ago

        To be fair, I haven’t played 2077 on launch day but like 3 months later, on a medium-high gaming laptop. I‘ve had zero crashes, no T-poses and generally nearly no bugs.

        The real problem was them releasing the game on last gen consoles which were (like low tier pcs) unable to handle the game. I would even go as far as to say that they made a game that was only playable on high tier hardware.

        And interestingly enough now 2.5 yrs after release, the game has more bugs for me than it had 3 months in.

        I‘m not a game dev so I can’t say why that is but as a dev I can say that fixing one bug might introduce another which becomes a lot harder to fix.

        • CaptKoala@lemmy.ml
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          1 year ago

          I played at launch, and there were game-breaking issues every 15-30min for me, constant crashes etc. I rage uninstalled for the first time in years, due to a bug in the smasher fight the game would crash in the same spot every time, as such, I couldn’t actually finish the game.

          I revisited it after a broken leg earlier this year and it’s come a long way, but yeah I really wish it had spent far more time in the oven as well as cutting out older hardware. The time they spent trying to get it to run somewhat stable on old hardware could’ve been far better used in QA and bugfixes.

          I’m 7 characters deep, and I’ve stepped back to play other games (BG3 came along at the perfect time) while I wait for the DLC later this month. I foresee another few hundred hours of my life being sacrificed, if only so I can try my luck against maxtac.

          • Haui@discuss.tchncs.de
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            1 year ago

            Sounds like you did have some fun after all. Happy to hear I‘m not the only one. Yes, the launch must have been a catastrophe.

          • daellat@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Cp2077 will be an odd case for me always. It wasn’t literally perfect but I couldn’t complete two gigs and I experienced some graphical glitches and that was it, incredibly lucky somehow… I 100%'d the game pretty much at launch, though I didn’t do all of the possible endings I did do about 3.

      • DreamButt@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        It’s not even really an rpg with how few skills/abilities there were to select from. And how little the environment changes to allow you to solve problems differently

        • 小莱卡@lemmygrad.ml
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          1 year ago

          Outer worlds is closer to “fallout in space” than starfield is.

          Starfield is fallout without the fun stuff, which is dissapointing tbh.

        • EmotionalSupportLancet [undecided]@hexbear.net
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          1 year ago

          Not really? I feel like that was a lot closer to new Vegas. That felt like a continuation of obsidian whereas starfield very much feels like a continuation of the trends between Skyrim and FO4 within bethesdas game design. If that makes sense.

          • MartinXYZ@lemmy.ml
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            1 year ago

            Thank you for elaborating. I honestly didn’t notice the “4” in the first comment and thought it just said “Fallout in space”, so that’s where my comment came from.

    • Ser Salty@feddit.de
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      1 year ago

      The NMS like gameplay is like a tiny part of it. It’s a story heavy RPG first and foremost. Sure, you can do a lot of NMS style stuff, like gathering resources and scanning wildlife on a thousand planets, but that’s really not why you should get the game. You should get it if you want a massive space RPG in the style of Bethesda. And yes, this time Bethesda actually made a proper RPG.

    • undeffeined@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      Most recent RPG game from Bethesda. This studio got very famous for their Elder Scrolls and Fallout games, hence the widespread hype.

      • onichama@feddit.de
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        1 year ago

        Hey that’s the game with all the bugs!

        I wanted to look at Starfield on Bethesda’s website, but the site bugged out loll

      • bleistift2@feddit.de
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        1 year ago

        I’d say Bethesda got famous for building games around a shit ton of bugs.

        • CaptnNMorgan@reddthat.com
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          1 year ago

          Shit, I would like a hint at least! As far as I know this is just random tinfoil hattery. At least the earth LOOKS flat from most angles accessable by humans

        • peveleigh@lemmy.ml
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          1 year ago

          No but I think it’s naive to think otherwise. I’m not saying they’re stealing your banking info but I absolutely believe they’re collecting data on the actions you take ingame.