Have Game Testers Gone Extinct?

[Xaositect]

I have to say, I think you inadvertently hit a point that I had felt very strongly about there. I heard many people talk about Mass Effects "MASSIVE technical flaws", and I can say aside from some frame rate dips against rachni, the only technical issue I had was texture pop ins. I often have to restrain myself from diving in randomly at any point that statement is used and specifically label Oblivion and Fallout 3 as officially unplayable due to technical issues.

As for the problems testing misses overall, I would have to say its partly our "fault". Im sure nobody here is unaware (despite hardcore gaming being labelled a social rejects hobby) the vast profit that gaming brings in. Im actually certain gaming is in fact bigger in moneymaking terms than the movie industry. Partly I think these things are missed simply because they cant get these games out to us fast enough. Crist, if you check out forums for soon to be released titles, you have people desperately clamouring after these games, expressing their complete inability to wait. I mean on the Mass Effect forums Ive seen people unable to wait for E3 simply for the Mass Effect 2 announcement.

I just think the occasional bugs make it through because too many people want these games, and they in turn mean there is too much profit to made to be set back by a few glitches.

 

[xChevelle24]

I am a console gamer. I will never be a PC gamer. I am quite content with a controller in my hand playing on my TV. Lets put aside our fanboyisms for just a minute and focus on a problem that effects us all no matter what console you own/love or game(s).

Why is it more and more when I buy a brand new game on the release date it doesn't work properly? Lag, freezing and characters stuck in walls are just a few issues. Some are minor issues and others are game breaking. So you are left with a coaster til they fix the game. Since you can't play it you are left with going to a forum and complaining about the technical issues you are experiencing. Usually to find you are not alone and someone else has already made the same post you were about to. And as you scroll through the posts you will usually find there is gamers who are experiencing the same problem and another camp of gamers saying "wait for a patch that may or may not be coming." And generally defending it. Before I go any further I should mention that this is only directed at a single player game or the single player campaign. MP is a different beast and you never know what may happen when 1 million + people log on and try to play together.

Am I wrong in my belief that a buggy broken game is an unfinished game that should not have hit retailers shelves? That this type of practice is unacceptable in any other vocation so why is game development an exception? Or why the bigger the game (like GTA or Fallout 3) seems to get a free pass because of the size of the world but a linear shorter game doesn't?

And just so I am perfectly clear I am not talking about poor game design choices like repetative missions or a bad camera (bad QTEs probably fit in there as well) but unintentional glitches that hinder the game no matter how good or bad the game could be otherwise.

Being a video game tester is my ultimate fantasy. Every summer Microsoft in Seattle (I live in Spokane, 400 or so miles away) offers people the chance to come spend the summer testing video games, while staying in a hotel for free and everything is paid for. Well, one of my friends got to do this and said it was the best time of his life. I'm still waiting for my call.

Aside from that, video game testers should be EASY to find, because honestly, who wouldn't want to get paid to play games?!?

But the lack of testers shows. Take Cod5 for example. We all remember playing the demo (I think it was the demo) on Roundhouse and seeing EVERYONE using the underground glitch. How they not catch that? Whatever.

Point in case, you're absolutely right.

 

[Prons]

I have a friend who was a game tester.

He spent all his work days emailing me and talking about white women.

 

[SimuLord]

The best release games I've ever played were the ones that had open betas. Sadly, with piracy being what it is (that's right pirates---fuck you for making gaming the trustless wasteland that it is), an open beta test goes right out the window unless the game is solely online. These days it's just the indie games (like Mount&Blade) that have enough eyes on enough different hardware configurations to catch bugs big and small. The closest any other game ever gets to that kind of exposure is the kind of exposure that comes from a retail release, and that's where good post-release support is critical. (Creative Assembly, I'm looking at you---please keep doing what you're doing as far as constant Empire updates are concerned! You're about 85% of the way there.)

 

[klakkat]

I've done a fair bit of programming, so I'm sympathetic to how hard these things can be to debug. I'm sure they have a lot of testers, usually. I saw Fallout 3 mentioned a lot, which surprises me, because the only bug I found in the game is that it crashes when I try to exit the game. That's right... It crashes when I close it (weird, but not really annoying). Other games have had some pretty glaring flaws, so the amount of quality assurance seems to vary wildly. There's also the publisher breathing down their necks for arbitrary deadlines, and odds are most programmers would rather add a few features than fix a couple bugs that may or may not be minor.

So the main issue is that the sheer amount of data being generated is too complicated to debug quickly, and the cost of a game is directly related to how long it takes to complete (cost to developer/investor). Since people like profits, that cost has to be kept down somewhere, and the part that usually gets cut is testing.

 

[squid5580]

Or you could be the poor soul who has to load up then exit the game for 8 hours a day. No playing just load, wait, exit. I would go crazy.

 

[xXGeckoXx]

Am I wrong in my belief that a buggy broken game is an unfinished game that should not have hit retailers shelves? That this type of practice is unacceptable in any other vocation so why is game development an exception? Or why the bigger the game (like GTA or Fallout 3) seems to get a free pass because of the size of the world but a linear shorter game doesn't?

No, you're absolutely right. Gaming is the only industry where people can get away with releasing an unfinished product, and it's absolutely ridiculous. To be fair though, minor bugs in games like Fallout 3 are forgiveable on occasion, simply because it would take so much time to test everything. That said, they still should test everything.

It's not exactly a new problem, either. If you were unfortunate enough to have bought Daggerfall when it first came out, it would have been impossible for you to complete the main quest until you'd patched it because of a game-breaking bug. It's stuff like this that's truly unacceptable.

And, of course, my pet hate, Battlefield 1942. As good a game as it is, I honestly think it should have been boycotted. Why, you ask? Because it is a multiplayer exclusive game (to all intents and purposes) and unless you downloaded a patch, you couldn't play multiplayer. It's absolutely ridiculous; and, yes, I know the patch was available on release day, but surely they should have just kept it in development for an extra day so they didn't end up releasing an unfinished game?

To sum up: yes, the practice of releasing unfinished games is ridiculous and needs to stop.

I believe in the free pass.

Fallout 3 is an amazing game despite the lag and glitches and annoying as they may be I do not scrutinies Bethesda for it. They made a massive massive game and The larger the map the more potential there is for bugs. I don't think they would ever have released fallout 3 if they had gone for the correction f fallout three and I am content to play the game as it is and hope future patches make it better. If a game is shorter and more linear I don't have time to wait for updates. Understand that I have played fallout 3 for nearly a hundred hours and in that time some problems have been fixed.

 

[Anachronism]

Fallout 3 is an amazing game despite the lag and glitches and annoying as they may be I do not scrutinies Bethesda for it. They made a massive massive game and The larger the map the more potential there is for bugs. I don't think they would ever have released fallout 3 if they had gone for the correction f fallout three and I am content to play the game as it is and hope future patches make it better. If a game is shorter and more linear I don't have time to wait for updates. Understand that I have played fallout 3 for nearly a hundred hours and in that time some problems have been fixed.

Read my post, please. I actually said minor bugs in huge games like Fallout 3 are forgiveable.

To be fair though, minor bugs in games like Fallout 3 are forgiveable

See?

My point was that the game-breaking bugs like you can find in The Witcher are unforgiveable: the ones that prevent you from finishing the main quest. They, at least, should have been found in testing. In huge games like Fallout 3 bugs in the side quests are practically unavoidable, and, like you said, provided they fix them, there's no issue. But if there had been a bug in the game that prevented you from finishing the main quest, I suspect your reaction would have been different.

 

[sirdanrhodes]

Saints Row 2's testers were sacked. I'm sure it wasn't just for money reasons.

 

[xXGeckoXx]

Fallout 3 is an amazing game despite the lag and glitches and annoying as they may be I do not scrutinies Bethesda for it. They made a massive massive game and The larger the map the more potential there is for bugs. I don't think they would ever have released fallout 3 if they had gone for the correction f fallout three and I am content to play the game as it is and hope future patches make it better. If a game is shorter and more linear I don't have time to wait for updates. Understand that I have played fallout 3 for nearly a hundred hours and in that time some problems have been fixed.

Read my post, plaese. I actually said minor bugs in huge games like Fallout 3 are forgiveable.

To be fair though, minor bugs in games like Fallout 3 are forgiveable

See?

My point was that the game-breaking bugs like you can find in The Witcher are unforgiveable: the ones that prevent you from finishing the main quest. They, at least, should have been found in testing. In huge games like Fallout 3 bugs in the side quests are practically unavoidable, and, like you said, provided they fix them, there's no issue. But if there had been a bug in the game that prevented you from finishing the main quest, I suspect your reaction would have been different.

Fallout 3 has some of these bugs as well. Completing the main quest may easily become impossible.

However I know one thing about fallout 3. It's save system is really good. A lot of the game comes down to making a LOT if saves and if you do that you should be fine.

Then again I guess that fallout 3's main quest is an assortment of side quests to go with the rest excluding the final one which blocks of certain game areas if activated.

 

[pdgeorge]

Fallout 3 was horrible with this I think.
You could go nearly an hour without auto-save, and saving isn't something you should be forced to think about when your being immersed in a game like fallout 3 where you explore alot. You should be able to just keep playing and the only time you REALLY think about saving is when you think "there are/might be enemies around... better save just incase" not "hmm The terrain up ahead looks like it'll cause me to glitch... better save!"

Worst thing.. Fallout 3 was CLOSED BETA TESTING! 100+ hours of gameplay (they said) and they trusted a small collective of people could find every single issue! NO! WRONG! FAIL! DIE YOU *SWEARING SWEAR SWEAR*

Any other thing out there (tv, dvd players, dvds etc) if they are released and they arn't finished they have to do a full recall and/or refund everyone that bought it and get the problem fixed.
Game designers assume everyone who has a console is connected to the internet. While the majority are... there is a large portion that arnt.

Come to think of it... I know a couple of people who work in the games industry... I'm going to punch each of them in the face when we go drinking next for this. Even if it's not their fault. If it isn't connected to them... I buy them a drink and ask them to pass my face-punching to people who are more deserving of it.

 

[AztecaDragon]

Really, unless you're still living on your parents' dime or have a business on the side, testing video games is NOT a job I'd recommend for anyone. It's only slightly less tedious than some people have made it sound (testing multiple parts of the game as opposed to just one part!), huzzah?

Testers on the bottom are paid peanuts and the job is a cut above thankless (your name in the credits with a free copy of the game you've tested damn near 100+ hours! Huzzah?). Though I could be jaded, in the time I spent as a tester it opened my eyes to some of the reasons why games are released the way they are.

For one of the games I tested there were plenty of bugs even with the game only a couple of months away from release, like clipping and texture issues, along with assorted graphical errors that really made the game look unprofessional. Me along with a few other people, still being new and maybe doing our jobs too well, got reprimanded for dropping these bugs as bugs and they were never fixed.

Why?

Because our project was a half-hearted PS2 port of a well-known golf franchise, with only ONE GUY on its development team fixing the bugs. I mean, this game had LESS features than its handheld counterpart.

As a tester who took her job too(?) seriously, it was irritating to drop bugs like this, but find out they'd never get fixed because the higher-ups were just pushing a shoddy product out of the door. Eventually, the higher-ups or just the dev got tired of the minor bugs we'd send, so a new rule was instituted:

"If the bug existed in a previous entry they specified, it wasn't a bug."

So that ball going through a tree that's been in the past two games? No, that's not a bug.
That case of massive slowdown near the waterfall they put in last year? No, that's not a bug.

Of course, they would fix all the things that could cause them legal problems or the things that would crash the game, but at the end of the day the product really did end up looking like one guy gutted all the features, slapped a new menu screen on it and pasted some things that somebody wearing aluminum foil claimed was in it last year. Bugs that come short of crashing your console every 20 minutes or frying your computer (or anything that runs the risk of a game recall) aren't big enough to be fixed a month before release date, usually for money and convenience's sake.

Then again, if your game is weeks away from release and still causes BSOD 9 times out of 10, there was a meltdown in the testing process somewhere...

 

[Knonsense]

It's impossible to catch all bugs in something with the scale of a commercial game. Obviously, game companies should polish their work as much as possible, but there will be bugs, no matter how many suicide inducing hours the Quality Assurance guys clock in.

 

[Therumancer]

The problem is of course that game developers tend to see Beta-Testers as mindless cattle that exist to stress test their code. They care nothing for feedback except on the handfull of points they are looking at, at the moment.

I've betaed a lot of MMOs and this is pretty much the way it's always been. I send in feedback, I'm ignored. They just keep on doing whatever it is their doing, and in the end it's almost like what the beta-test community said never existed, except for maybe a handfull of people who by and large told the devs what they wanted to hear.

Granted, producers are also at fault to some extent, if Beta testers complain about certain fundemental aspects of the game, and it would take too much effort to redo (perhaps scrapping and redoing huge tracts of code) they really don't care since the producer wants their game out on the market now, now, now.

The fact that the devs doing the beta have no communication with the graphics artists and animators and such in many cases, it's pretty disconcerting when you notice things like your character's hairline merging with their costume, or their weapon going THROUGH their cape, and even after release this still hasn't been fixed since it took three months after release to get the guys who do the graphics to finally get around to doing their job properly. :/

But yeah, real beta testing is dead (if it ever was). Your not in beta to give opinions, rather to stress test the game and see if you can crash it. Lack of polish, messed up content, something doesn't jibe. 9/10ths of the time they really don't care, even if they would your just a tester.

 

[Cpt_Oblivious]

Lionhead still do it. Although they cancelled my Work Experience week of game testing

 

[DragonsAteMyMarbles]

Lionhead still do it. Although they cancelled my Work Experience week of game testing

That'd be where all the testers have gone then - they now form part of Peter Molyneux's army of lobotomised followers chanting about the flawlessness of fighting a giant spike instead of the massively-superpowered primary antagonist we were all expecting.

Lucky escape, mate.

 

[Cpt_Oblivious]

Lionhead still do it. Although they cancelled my Work Experience week of game testing

That'd be where all the testers have gone then - they now form part of Peter Molyneux's army of lobotomised followers chanting about the flawlessness of fighting a giant spike instead of the massively-superpowered primary antagonist we were all expecting.

Lucky escape, mate.

I went to a motorcycle paint & repair shop. It was way better than Fable 2 would've been.

 

[Pendragon9]

We need more game testers. I've seen some really crappy games that almost had no excuse for being made.