this just in: actually spending money on QA allows you to put out a higher quality product
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It's truly amazing what can happen when they don't cut quite so many corners and release the minimal viable product.
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.
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.
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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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.
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.
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.
You gotta do, what you gotta do.
Anyone else seen the fallout 76 song it just works by the Chalkeaters?