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?
Agile used to refer to a very specific way of developing software, but then it got coopted by the mainstream where companies kept doing shit the same way they always had but calling it “agile”. It’s basically like when early Christianity became the state religion of the Roman Empire.
That’s a pretty cool comparison. Can you elaborate on that a bit? I have no idea what actually happened with christianity in ancient rome.
Yeah, every single workplace I’ve worked at aside from one has been “iterative waterfall” - AKA waterfall with sprints.
Companies shouldn’t be allowed to say they’re “agile”…
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.
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
Do the people who choose the deadlines (especially if they’re the publisher) really have that much influence on the programming and development side of things?
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.I concur with pretty much everything you said, though I will say my FPS has been significantly better than yours. You got an nvidia card? I heard they are bugged with bad performance and waiting for a driver update.
Game, while less critically fucky than previous Betehsda efforts (No doubt thanks to Microsoft dragging Bethesda into QA kicking and screaming), still carry the heavy stink of gamebryo, with classic bugs that have been there for decades… Like items/NPCs falling through floors for no reason.
I dont mind the very plane world map on random gen planets and shit, but how the fuck am i supposed to navigate New Atlantis or Neon on a field of useless floating dots and a collapsing fast travel icon stack?
edit I want to add that the autosaving fucking sucks, too. Especially since i got set back by a significant margin due to the crash i just had.
The issue with Nvidia cards is that Bethesda had an agreement with AMD for the game dev, so NVIDIA DSLL isn’t included. This means NVIDIA cards can’t by default take advantage of their full resolution upscaling ability.
I say “by default” because there’s already mods that replace AMD FSR with NVIDIA DSLL. I installed DSLL 3.5 and have been running it essentially without issues (very rarely the screen goes black for a second or two). Getting smooth frame rates on my 2070 super, 3440x1440, High settings other than resolution scaling (which I set around 58%, essentially DSLL “balanced”).
I cant find where I saw it, but what I saw was not a lack of DSLL, it was like an actual driver bug requiring a driver update to address.
a driver update isnt gonna add DSLL.
I haven’t even run into half of those somehow, always curious how different experiences we can have
Yeah. People have vastly different combinations of hardware and software. Different manufacturers and drivers. So it can be really different.
If they play on pc, I mean.I seem to unknowingly have built myself a real shit-magnet of a computer. Basically no new game has worked well for me since I built that one.
I had like 20 bad bugs per hour with Cyberpunk on release while my buddy had like one mildly annoying per 5h.
Darktide just didn’t work at all. Kept crashing six months after release, then I gave up.
Etc etc…
Same, it’s been exceptionally smooth considering the scale and scope of this game
Sounds impressive until you learn there’s like 5 qa employees.
So you mean they actually QA’d the game.
Yeah the Microsoft QA team is probably the only one that’s ever touched 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.
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”
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
I got a free copy with my GPU. I wouldnt have spent 100 dollars on 5 days early access. thats just stupid as fuck.
I am average worker who preordered it 2-3 days ago for 100€ with intent that if it’s bad that I will be able to refund it.
So far I have like 6 hours put it and except some stuff sometimes clipping through walls or weird movement and 1 crash I didn’t notice anything else broken. There are some game mechanics I am annoyed about and “open-world” performance is bad but it’s not broken game the bitching make it outs to be.
So far I am experiencing the Bethesda RPG™ I though it would be and I am happy. Can’t wait for modders to put more stuff in.
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
Look at his username, Obvious troll is obvious.
This guy is a terrible person. Safe behind a computer acting like a big man. In real life its just a sad dickhead
LMAO, you’re the one just randomly posting on my shit 🤣
Yeah bro, I’m interested in what you got to say. Is this not fun?
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.
“We assembled our best team of Creed Brattons.”
Holy shit is that the job title he held on that show? He was part of Dunder Miflin’s QA?
I thought his job was quabbity issuance?
(it’s been years since I watched the series, please don’t hate me for this) I don’t remember what that means 😅
In one of the scenes he was trying to remember what he does for a living and as he’s trying to remember he says that
Beautiful. It’s very on brand for Creed. Thank you! :)
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.
Our managers did that shit, too, back when I was in the durable medical equipment industry. They said some shit like “QA as an org is dysfunctional, as evidence by all the complaints. We’re gonna streamline the process by eliminating them and having dev teams do their own QA according to this checklist we’ve developed. We think that we can get the same quality for less money and less bureaucratic overhead communicating between the dev teams and the QA team.” They cut about $2 million in annual salary right then and there. A lot of our QA engineers and even a couple of their managers found out about the restructuring at the all-hands where they announced this.
Fast forward a year, they’re getting the shit sued out of them and have to do a multi-billion dollar recall because of…let’s just call it an “emergent use case” among our customers that no one foresaw and therefore no one tested. That emergent use case was sending people to the hospital. I’ll go to my grave confident that someone whose only job was QA would have absolutely been able to catch that.
Their soul would be sent to the crossroads.
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Lol some of their devices absolutely shipped w privesc bugs, including at least one that could be rooted and I know cuz I was on the team that pentested it but I’m not tryna feed Lemmy some shit that a basic security scan could tell y’all. All I’m gonna say is that if it has wifi or Bluetooth throw scans at it.
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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.
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.
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.
tl;dw
HDR is broken (or all colour grading)SDR is broken as well.
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.
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.
Big if true.
And it’s exclusive to Xbox so ps4/5 is screwed.
PC?
Yes PC too but I’m running an Intel NUC with Linux for utility and compact space.
I’m not familiar with NUCs, So I dont know if that affects anything… but I’ve been playing Starfield since it unlocked on Linux, so theres no issue with at least the linux part if that helps you with anything.
That’s good to know. I mentioned the nuc because its not a gaming machine. I am able to play some stuff on it but its not a powerhouse. It is utilitarian for me. Budgets, bills, banking, videos, programming, etc.
I have a Nuc with Linux (Void ) too
Good to know 👍
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
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.
I thought that was “The Outer Worlds”?
Edit: a word.
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.
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.
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.
You gotta do, what you gotta do.
Anyone else seen the fallout 76 song it just works by the Chalkeaters?
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