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.
Also helps to come out with a game so popular you can bank on it for the next decade
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.
that's just a reality of software development and hard set deadlines.
That's a fine excuse if you're a developer, but not if you're the one who chooses the deadlines
Strange, I'm about 12 hours in and apart from minor glitches like odd character movement every now and then it's been pretty smooth sailing. What are you guys running into?
I walk by a shelf and it randomly explodes from some physics glitch.
Things forever rolling that should not be rolling, like books.
NPCs just keep sprinting into a wall.
NPCs stuck halfway through the floor, both alive and dead.
Enemies teleporting into mountain, and can shoot me from there.
Creatures not attacking when they should.
Ships clipping into stations.
My character stuck in a pose.
Guns floating.
Nothing game breaking though!
Just immersion-breaking.
Im more concerned about other stuff. Performance. Design choices.
I get 37fps in towns with an "UFO rated" computer on userbenchmark.
The menus are horrible.
And what good does the spaceship do? I just fast travel everywhere. I think I've seen the inside of my ship twice i 10hrs.
Story is the most lazily written, generic scifi tropey stuff I've seen.
No maps. No clue where shops are.
The game is marketed as huge and open, but in reality it's all just setpieces with empty planet surfaces. You cannot get into your ship and fly 500m east to your mission marker. If you do that, a new map is loaded and none of your missions are there.
Sounds impressive until you learn there's like 5 qa employees.
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.
And they'll still find a way to release it undercooked
"it just works"
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.
My favorite interaction ever, as a QA:
me: Our integration testing environment is constantly broken due to bad practices among all the teams that share it. They need to be aware of the contract they expose and how they're changing it before they deploy their code to any shared space.
management: Given the recent complaints about the instability of the QA environment, we've decided to shut it down and eliminate all QA positions.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
Apples to oranges i hear
Starfield is Fallout 4 set in space. No man's sky is exploration in space. I prefer the latter.
It doesn't.
Basically the space flight mechanic is somewhere between Mass Effect: Andromeda and CoD: Infinite Warfare.
You use your galaxy map fast travel to go anywhere and can only fly the ship around each small "instance."
Planetary landings are restricted to POI's or you can land on some random spot, but the planets are broken up into chunks so you can only walk around so much before having to go back to your ship for another fast travel moment.
Consider it as fallout 4 in space and you’re more than halfway there.
You gotta do, what you gotta do.
