this just in: actually spending money on QA allows you to put out a higher quality product
It’s truly amazing what can happen when they don’t cut quite so many corners and release the minimal viable product.
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.
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.
This engine is a house of cards that is decades past collapsing.
It really depends on if that dev studio conglomerate collectively cut costs on QA and by how much
If Agile consultant could read they’d be very upset
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?
Also helps to come out with a game so popular you can bank on it for the next decade
Sounds impressive until you learn there’s like 5 qa employees.
Spoiler: It’s still really buggy.
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.
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.
You know you suck as a studio if your players settle for “It only crashed oncej”
You are missing the very important “so far”
because it has crashed on me many times since that post.
So you mean they actually QA’d the game.
I’ve watched multiple reviews though that have said some variation of “yup, it’s a Bethesda game, bugs and all”
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.
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.
As an old fart that started playing TES on DOS I have to disagree.
That I can believe. I’m too young for that. Didn’t get to play until Morrowind.
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.
And they’ll still find a way to release it undercooked
“it just works”
Game is great. You people just want to bitch.
Oh boy, I’m sure an account with a username like yours is definitely here to make good faith arguments and have productive discussions.
Yeah because it’s incredibly hard to have the data amirite?
https://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/starfield
They just want to bitch, and you just want to make a pointless comment because my username isn’t W H O L E S O M E enough for you.
You realize that’s from people who get free copies right? Let’s wait to see how the average worker feels about shelling out 70~100 for it
If you don’t mind the puppet faces, the Bethesda jank and playing from loading screen to loading screen, the game is great. I wouldn’t even pirate that crap.
I just imagine your life is like a 2am infomercial. Open a can and all of a sudden you’ve fallen and broken your arms 🤣.
Can’t reply to the points, just tips the table over
This guy is a terrible person. Safe behind a computer acting like a big man. In real life its just a sad dickhead
I don’t doubt a Bethesda game is great. I just doubt the launch will go smoothly
And yet, you have minor bugs and mostly positive experiences.
In all other Bethesda games I only have minor bugs because of mods to fix a majority of them. I’m not buying star field for another 2 months at least because I’ve played previous Bethesda games and I rather buy it once it works
Yeah! Fuck all the evidence showing this is the one Bethesda game we wouldn’t have to wait for mods to make it enjoyable. I only like learning from my own experience, can’t trust anyone.
Apparently with all that QA they still missed massive picture quality problems
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 ✌️
As someone who works in software dev, QA is a godsend to developers. Thank you for your sacrifice lol
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.
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.
It’s blatantly obvious and makes the game look like shit. This should not a low-prio bug, this should be a showstopper.
If you’ve got 8 minutes to spare, this video explains why it’s not that easy: Why Do We Ship Buggy Games? - A Look Behind the Scenes - Extra Credits
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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cool bot.
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.
tl;dw
HDR is brokenSDR is broken as well.
You gotta do, what you gotta do.
Shocking. These days, normally, GA is QA.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
I live under a rock. How does this game compare to NMS?
It’s not an exploration game really at all. Think RPG with space theme.
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
Apples to oranges i hear
Consider it as fallout 4 in space and you’re more than halfway there.
I thought that “The Outer Worlds”?
Outer worlds is closer to “fallout in space” than starfield is.
Starfield is fallout without the fun stuff, which is dissapointing tbh.
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.
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.
“fallout without the wacky/fun stuff” in space.
Its fallout 4 in space. It doesnt compare to NMS. Or Elite, or Star Citizen.
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.
Ayo what’s starfield and why is it suddenly everywhere?
Most recent RPG game from Bethesda. This studio got very famous for their Elder Scrolls and Fallout games, hence the widespread hype.
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
I’d say Bethesda got famous for building games around a shit ton of bugs.
Welcome to earf
Big corporate’s latest data miner/spyware diguised as a game.
Source: trust me bro
While I wouldn’t put it past Microsoft: do you have proof of this?
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
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.
Anyone else seen the fallout 76 song it just works by the Chalkeaters?
And it’s exclusive to Xbox so ps4/5 is screwed.
deleted by creator
Downvote for litchally.
