Treyarch Would Love to Ship a Game Without Bugs

Greg Tito

PR for Dungeons & Dragons
Sep 29, 2005
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Treyarch Would Love to Ship a Game Without Bugs



Every game-maker would like its titles to ship bug-free, but Treyarch's community director said that the scale of Call of Duty makes such a feat nigh impossible.

Bugs suck for gamers, but the truth is that there is no way to test every permutation of every situation in a game if you want the title to ship in this decade. Some games are worse than others (I'm looking in your direction [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/editorials/reviews/8229-Review-Fallout-New-Vegas]), but Josh Olin, community manager at Treyarch, said that his company is working to remove as many bugs as possible from the PS3 version of Call of Duty: Black Ops. Treyarch is committed to doing the best it can, but with so many millions of players enjoying Black Ops, it would have been impossible for the QA team to squash every bug before the game launched. Olin is responding to the buggy reputation that Black Ops has on the PC and the PS3 but he's quick to point out that the game had bugs on the Xbox 360 as well.

"The PS3 and the PC issues are not exclusive to the PS3 and PC - the Xbox 360 has had its own fair share of issues. Every platform has issues," Olin said. "It is unfortunate that those [bugs] have to exist at all. In an ideal would we would love to ship a completely bug-proof game.

"I can't think of a single developer in the world, though, that could achieve that," he said.

Bugs are an especially difficult problem given the number of people playing Codblops online. "If you look at the population size of the Call of Duty franchise, just a single hour of gameplay collectively after the game's been out - you add up all the man-hours that all the fans put into it - that's more time than you could put into Quality Assurance in a lifetime.

"The sheer number of people is staggering, and they hit buttons and they hit glitches and walls in such weird, strange ways that we could never predict or think of," he said.

Olin isn't quite sure why gamers say that the PS3 version of Blops is worse than any other format, because he's had more than a few reports that it plays perfectly on that platform. "There's hundreds of thousands - if not millions - of players on the PS3 who have absolutely perfect, pristine experiences," he said. "I talk to them everyday - I see replies to me on Twitter all the time from people going 'I don't know what people are complaining about. The game is perfect for me!' So they do exist. I know that doesn't make the people who are experiencing problems feel any better, but it should put it into perspective."

Olin isn't giving up though, and he said that Treyarch is committed to fixing bugs for every customer. "Even if the bug is only hurting a hundred fans, if we can find the cause we'll patch it," he said.

Bugs and glitches in games are never going to be completely removed - that's like asking for there to be no more snow or for mosquito bites not to itch. With a game like CodBlops, its popularity only increases the chances that something will be discovered by a player that a QA team never could, so you almost have to cut Treyarch some slack. On the other hand, it's great that Olin says he's committed to fixing problems that players are having, but that doesn't make a guy feel better about dropping $60 on a broken game.

Source: Videogamer [http://www.videogamer.com/news/devs_cant_ship_bug-free_games_claims_treyarch.html]


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Dec 14, 2009
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You'd think they would have fixed most of the bugs by now, especially since they've been using the same engine since CoD4.
 

TeeBs

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Oct 9, 2010
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In other news, I would love to work out, but its literally impossible for no reason.
 

gibboss28

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Feb 2, 2008
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...Pretty sure everything he said goes without saying. In fact why did he say this?
 

Danpascooch

Zombie Specialist
Apr 16, 2009
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Welcome to the wonderful world of programming.

No bugs is impossible, it's all about how many you have and how serious they are.

What is with all of these press releases lately? Next it's going to be "Treyarch: It's better to have toilet paper go over rather than go under"
 
Apr 28, 2008
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Bungie managed to release Halo Reach with very, very few bugs.
Been out for quite a few months and hasn't needed a patch yet.

Did I just turn this into a Halo/COD flamewar? Hopefully not.

silverbullet1989 said:
well im sure there's an argument about releasing a beta in there somewhere -_-
Also this.
 

cjackson92

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Mar 6, 2009
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If this is his attitude then why did they blame all of the issues a month ago on the player? Why did they say that they there was nothing wrong on their end and that it was our fault that these issues occurred?

You can try and save face but for a lot of people the damage is done. That being said, I'm certain they won't notice much of a loss of income.
 

Woodsey

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Aug 9, 2009
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Release a beta, become mildly competent with the engine that the game's been running on for the past 4 years.

How's that for a start?
 

Kenjitsuka

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Sep 10, 2009
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"but the truth is that there is no way to test every permutation of every situation in a game if you want the title to ship in this decade."

There is actually very decent automated bug checking software available.
But "Time is money, friend!" an NPC in WoW reminds me often...
Still, I do believe SOME companies work hard on Q&A, whereas others phone it in.
 

AlternatePFG

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Jan 22, 2010
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PC version is still a mess, and there's only been a few patches released for the game. Still can't run well on low settings (Can play BC2 on High with little trouble), still can't change classes/killstreaks.

The PC version is a mess, plain and simple.
 

enzilewulf

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Jun 19, 2009
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Do what Reach did? Release a beta for two weeks and observe, change problems and continuously play through levels and find new mistakes. Sure you can get out of the maps in forge and in campaign but that shits just awesome.
 

DSK-

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May 13, 2010
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Riiiight. Thats why the games of old that were finished "When they were finished" and didn't patches as soon as they were released. At the very least, I didn't have to do so.

I think in this case, that they ported Black Ops over to PC badly. Why do I say this? I have seen a piece of code (This - seta xblive_basictraining_popup "0") in the config_mp.cfg

I don't agree with his words in the slightest. I'd rather wait for a long time and have less bugs (I don't expect everything to be be bug free) but some bugs that are/were in BO were seriously gamebreaking.
 

PlasmaSnake13

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Dec 8, 2010
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Well...DUH.

Sorry. But seriously, who actually thinks that's possible? Especially with such a huge game like Black Ops. Well, the more you know!
 

SovietSecrets

iDrink, iSmoke, iPill
Nov 16, 2008
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Yeah....I don't believe them. Black Ops was a huge failure of a launch as far as I am concerned on PC. Gotta love how fucked up that game was when it first came out.
 

ItsAChiaotzu

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Apr 20, 2009
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zombie711 said:
Jack and dakster had no bugs what's so ever
And it had the upside of being the best game ever. So, you know.


But seriously, CoD Blops seems to have as much connection and technical problems as CoD 4 to me, which is ridiculous.
 

ImprovizoR

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Dec 6, 2009
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That argument is as strong as IW's "the game is not balanced for lean"
Maybe release a beta, or develop a game every 3 years instead of every year. That should do it. Or just do your fuckin' job the way you're supposed too.
 

CoL0sS

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Nov 2, 2010
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Oh it's my good ol' friend Josh Olin again. What's that Josh? Bit off more than you can chew, you say? Dear oh dear....

Thing is a simple beta test would have sufficed and fans would solve lots of these issues for him. Well at least he's off that "blame fans for everything" crap. Less apologies and more work Joshie.
 

Veloxe

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Oct 5, 2010
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but the truth is that there is no way to test every permutation of every situation in a game if you want the title to ship in this decade.
Does this mean Duke Nukem Forever will be 100% bug free?