billd91
Not your screen monkey (he/him)
No - what no studio will choose to afford before launch. But then, from too many development managers' points of view, quality cuts into the bottom line.
So Cyberpunk 2077
billd91
Not your screen monkey (he/him)
You sure you're not thinking of AC4: Black Flag? AC3 was the one set in the colonial US.
And AC4 was the one that sold me on AC in the first place. AC3 is, by comparison, not grabbing me at all.
CleverNickName
Limit Break Dancing
I think it's more about how much they feel they can get away with...you know, how many bugs and patches are their fans willing to forgive in exchange for a $60 purchase price and a "before Christmas" release date. Makes me wonder what percentage of a AAA game's budget gets spent on playtesting, and what percentage is spent on marketing.
Some fans are extremely forgiving and others, not so much. And as long as the former are louder than the latter, it probably won't change.
doctorbadwolf
Heretic of The Seventh Circle
That is an incredibly cynical point of view. Far more likely, is it just isn’t feasible to take extra years to test an effectively complete game that you’ve found all the obvious bugs in, especially when a few hundred thousand fans will find the same bugs in hours that would take a small team of play testers months, at least, to find.
It’s likely that the games that launch without any meaningful bugs or issues are simply lucky.
Gradine
The Elephant in the Room (she/her)
Yes, I am thinking of AC3. I heard good things about Black Flag but I never ended picking it back up
Imaculata
Hero
I work in game development, and how it usually works is this:
The producer and game director make sure development remains on schedule, and decide when certain milestones should be reached. Once the game nears completion, a deadline is set, and a certain amount of time is set aside for QA testing and bug fixing. The amount of time set aside for this is mostly a financial decision, because the producer has a release date in mind (such as, before xmas, or before half the team goes on holiday).
During the final phase, game breaking bugs and progression blocking issues are fixed first. It is extremely rare to ship a game without any bugs, but at the bare minimum, the game should not crash, and it should be playable from beginning to end.
It seems to me that CDProject Red understandably wanted to make the xmas deadline, and capitalize on the release of the new generation of consoles. They had already pulled some crunch to finish the game, and now it had to be released, no matter what state the game was in. It is unfortunate that they didn't push the deadline into next year, to fix some of the bugs a lot of players are running into now.
I know what it is like to fix bugs during the final crunch period of game development. Lots of employees pull all-nighters to get it all done, and you know you won't be able to fix everything. I don't presume malice here. As people are tired and stressed out, sometimes someone will submit the wrong build of the game, or accidentally reintroduce a bug that was fixed. Eventually you run out of time to retest everything again. Some bugs may only occur on ps4, ps5 or xbox. Plus every new build has to be submitted to Sony and Microsoft first, who then also have to approve it. It is not a matter of simply pushing out a fix. There are lots of steps in between. Compiling the game in between submissions costs a lot of time, and baking the levels every time someone makes a change costs a ton of time too. Bug fixing is tiresome and time consuming. You can't spend another year on fixing every bug, and you hope to fix most of the worst bugs before release. But as people do crunch, they get tired, and become more prone to making mistakes, which again costs more time. At some point you just have to ship the game, no matter what state it is in.
What they attempted to do here is make a really complex game, and it turned out to be more work than they anticipated. This is not some greedy cash grab. I know some of the people that worked on this personally. This is the final product after months of stress, hard labor and passion. It is a shame that many players are frustrated and won't see it that way. I'm sure the developers are equally disappointed. The last thing they wanted was for players to experience the game like this.
The producer and game director make sure development remains on schedule, and decide when certain milestones should be reached. Once the game nears completion, a deadline is set, and a certain amount of time is set aside for QA testing and bug fixing. The amount of time set aside for this is mostly a financial decision, because the producer has a release date in mind (such as, before xmas, or before half the team goes on holiday).
During the final phase, game breaking bugs and progression blocking issues are fixed first. It is extremely rare to ship a game without any bugs, but at the bare minimum, the game should not crash, and it should be playable from beginning to end.
It seems to me that CDProject Red understandably wanted to make the xmas deadline, and capitalize on the release of the new generation of consoles. They had already pulled some crunch to finish the game, and now it had to be released, no matter what state the game was in. It is unfortunate that they didn't push the deadline into next year, to fix some of the bugs a lot of players are running into now.
I know what it is like to fix bugs during the final crunch period of game development. Lots of employees pull all-nighters to get it all done, and you know you won't be able to fix everything. I don't presume malice here. As people are tired and stressed out, sometimes someone will submit the wrong build of the game, or accidentally reintroduce a bug that was fixed. Eventually you run out of time to retest everything again. Some bugs may only occur on ps4, ps5 or xbox. Plus every new build has to be submitted to Sony and Microsoft first, who then also have to approve it. It is not a matter of simply pushing out a fix. There are lots of steps in between. Compiling the game in between submissions costs a lot of time, and baking the levels every time someone makes a change costs a ton of time too. Bug fixing is tiresome and time consuming. You can't spend another year on fixing every bug, and you hope to fix most of the worst bugs before release. But as people do crunch, they get tired, and become more prone to making mistakes, which again costs more time. At some point you just have to ship the game, no matter what state it is in.
What they attempted to do here is make a really complex game, and it turned out to be more work than they anticipated. This is not some greedy cash grab. I know some of the people that worked on this personally. This is the final product after months of stress, hard labor and passion. It is a shame that many players are frustrated and won't see it that way. I'm sure the developers are equally disappointed. The last thing they wanted was for players to experience the game like this.
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Not in my experience. When software is buggy, the first person to take crap for it is.. the dev manager. If there's a decision to skimp on QA for time/money's sake, that's generally forced on the Dev Manger, not originating from them.
payn
He'll flip ya...Flip ya for real...
Any reasonable person understands that games, particularly complex ones, are going to have launch bugs. Bugs are annoying but if you can get past the irritation you can still see the game for what it its and have a fair perspective on it. That said, CP2077 has more bugs than I have experienced from any launch of a AAA title. I understand the devs worked hard on this, im not giving them any hell over it, but its clear this launch wasnt ready for primetime. A decision I doubt the devs had any control over.
Pretty much. Unless they're blind, everybody on the inside a project can see the bug lists and problems when they run it. They all would like more time to work on it. Up to and including infinite time (you can fix bugs forever, it turns out).
It's the people outside that circle who want to make money, pay the bills who say "No, we need to ship it and make some money." Executive types make that call.
CD Project Red hasn't released anything big since The Witcher 3. Maybe the Gwent game made them some easy coin, but they were probably bleeding cash to make CP. Exactly the kind of pressure to release a game before its really ready.
Sacrosanct
Legend
I don't work in game development, but I do work in software development for a large company (I used to be a tester for years, but my current role is a Product Owner for an Agile scrum team), and my experiences pretty much align with this. We just finished a project on 12/8. Deployment date? 12/10. That's unheard of to be working on code that late into the game. Technically we were past hard code freeze date, but you do what you gotta do for high profile projects.
There is never enough time for testing. Ever. And you will always be scrambling to meet deadlines. High sev show stoppers get the attention, and the rest may go out with the final deployment. I've heard that in the gaming industry, the environment is even worse for testers and devs to get things done, and they are often treated poorly.
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