this just in: actually spending money on QA allows you to put out a higher quality product
this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2023
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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.
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.
It really depends on if that dev studio conglomerate collectively cut costs on QA and by how much
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.
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"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
sometimes there's also the dev team prioritizing some reported things over others, within the same class of bugs, that might not result in a better end user experience (either from lack of foresight, or external pressures from sources like the publisher), but they definitely know most of the complaints before they became complaints after release.
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.
tl;dw
HDR is broken (or all colour grading)
SDR is broken as well.
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.
Big corporate's latest data miner/spyware diguised as a game.
Source: trust me bro
Big if true.
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.
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
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.
You gotta do, what you gotta do.
Anyone else seen the fallout 76 song it just works by the Chalkeaters?
Downvote for litchally.