Treyarch Would Love to Ship a Game Without Bugs

[imperialreign]

I've pretty much got to agree with everything that was said. As much as there are people out there throwing tantrums over bugs and glitches, you have to keep in mind in regards to these blockbuster titles that for every one gamer who experiences a bug or glitch, there will be another gamer who won't.

It's simply that those who do experience problems are the only ones throwing a fit. Perhaps if all the gamers who don't have issues with a title started becoming just as vocal, it might throw all this into perspective.

 

[Iron Lightning]

Yeah, it would be totally impossible to release a game without bugs so everyone should just be cool with paying 60 dollars for a broken product.

We gamers put up with a lot of crap, do you think this shit would fly in any other industry?

"Yeah sure, the windshield wipers don't work, the spare tire is irremovable, and the car automatically shifts to first whenever you go 70mph; we can't fix all the problems, that would be ridiculous."

Seriously Treyarch ramp up you QA, hire more competent programers, put out a beta, this stuff isn't hard.

Does anyone else miss the old days when games were released finished?

 

[CoL0sS]

Yeah, it would be totally impossible to release a game without bugs so everyone should just be cool with paying 60 dollars for a broken product.

We gamers put up with a lot of crap, do you think this shit would fly in any other industry?

"Yeah sure, the windshield wipers don't work, the spare tire is irremovable, and the car automatically shifts to first whenever you go 70mph; we can't fix all the problems, that would be ridiculous."

Seriously Treyarch ramp up you QA, hire more competent programers, put out a beta, this stuff isn't hard.

Does anyone else miss the old days when games were released finished?

Amen brother. We understand, tolerate and forgive but they just keep exploiting our good will. Wonder how long can they keep up doing that.

 

[Ironic Pirate]

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"

"Treyarch: Seriously, who the fuck left the toilet seat up again? God damn it..."

Treyarch, Black Ops has frozen on me a total of 45 times. I play less than an hour a day, and often not at all.

It lags almost constantly, crashes, kicks out half the party every few minutes...

I don't expect no bugs. Honestly, I don't. I do expect better than this from a team of several hundred with millions of dollars at their disposal.

 

[CombatEye]

Yeah, it would be totally impossible to release a game without bugs so everyone should just be cool with paying 60 dollars for a broken product.

We gamers put up with a lot of crap, do you think this shit would fly in any other industry?

"Yeah sure, the windshield wipers don't work, the spare tire is irremovable, and the car automatically shifts to first whenever you go 70mph; we can't fix all the problems, that would be ridiculous."

Seriously Treyarch ramp up you QA, hire more competent programers, put out a beta, this stuff isn't hard.

Does anyone else miss the old days when games were released finished?

Yeah, you'd think they'd have it figured out by now considering how few changes are required from game to game. The match-making on day one was pretty lousy,even though they had MW2's to start with. I know they can't get every bug, but can't they at least put QA into making the match-making work most of the time? It's sad how long it took them to fix it enough to at least be mostly functional.

 

[gigastar]

Not entirely impossible to get a game out without bugs.

Capcom for its PSP titles has perhaps the most ruthless QA team ever heard of. Testing Monster Hunter Portable 3, they had one guy constantly repeat one attack on a certain area on one monster then follow with a side roll, a thousand times over, just to make sure the animation was working correctly. Another MHP3 example they had someone else just running into a certain section of a wall for a whole hour. Just to make sure it was there.

Also im not sure its the scale of CoD that makes it impossible to get it out without bugs, im sure its the fact that Activisions wanking off the franchise in true EA fashion.

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?

Considering Gearbox's previous project, Borderlands, dont count on it.

 

[Catalyst6]

It really depends on your definition of "broken". I've played the game for a bit and had no problems at all. Granted, it was only a rental, but it didn't burn out my hard drive and kill my cat in those four days, so gold in my book.

Really, it's all about being realistic. A game is an incredibly complex thing, and someone is bound to screw up somewhere. It's all a matter of whether those issues really have an effect on the players.

A lot of people complain about a beta, but bear in mind that there WAS a beta, *you* just weren't in it. They hire professional testers to break the game, people who know what they're doing. An open beta might be bad for business.

And, frankly, if it's so bad then you can show your distaste by not *buying* it. Otherwise, well, wait for a patch. All the guy's saying is that gamers should be reasonable.

 

[gigastar]

A lot of people complain about a beta, but bear in mind that there WAS a beta, *you* just weren't in it. They hire professional testers to break the game, people who know what they're doing. An open beta might be bad for business.

Sorry but the entire point of beta testing is to iron out bugs. To find the bugs that will affect normal gameplay you want as many people playing as possible. Thats why every (Steam) TF2 player can now participate in beta testing the next TF2 update, no matter how big or small.

And an open beta is a demo by any other name.

 

[Therumancer]

Meh, I have a hard time taking these kinds of claims seriously given the total contempt the developers typically have for the people who do beta testing for them. I've personally watched bugs discovered by a beta community months before release go unaddressed until months after release.

Sure, there is no way to totally end bugs, but at the same time the state we see so many games released in is because the devs typically do not seem to care. Bugs are something to be addressed after the fact nowadays, and honestly I blame the ease with which games can be patched for this kind of attitude.

 

[USSR]

Does this mean Duke Nukem Forever will be 100% bug free?

Ooh, how I laughed.

 

[paketep]

There are bugs and then there are BUGS.

This game never would have passed QA if it wasn't for Kotick holding a gun to their heads.

 

[Twilight_guy]

And thus everyone complains "why didn't you make it better?" While out of complete ignorance pulling "facts" from their behinds about how Treyarch screwed up. Well the truth is kiddies that unless you worked on the game or saw its development you don't know so the only thing you can state are observable facts. I doubt if most of the complainers have worked on the development team of a large Triple A game (I doubt if the Escapist is a developer magnet afterall) so most people don't have the experience of working with such things and even if they did the code and structure of each game is different. Comparing code quality of diverse game is risky business and even comparing games on the same engine can be risky. I think this guy handled himself well but the fact that he even needs to say anything says something very negative about gamers. Why do we honestly think that a developer isn't doing everything possible to make a good game? What possible reason could they have for that beside trolling us? I think the truth is that the community of gamers is just whinny and paranoid and likes to ***** way too much.

 

[mjc0961]

Pah. At least when Obsidian and Bethesda said this for Fallout New Vegas, it makes some sense because it's a massive, open world RPG with multiple ways to complete each quest. But this just sounds like a piss-poor excuse coming from the developers of first person shooter eleventy-billion on the 4th run (at least) of the engine that was used. And neither of them have excuses for the game-breaking bugs anyway. I know that no developer can ever catch all the little ones no matter what kind of game they are making, but if it's something that makes the game unfinishable, you had no excuse not to catch that. And a lot of those problems were in both Fallout: New Vegas and Black Ops at launch.

We'd all love to have games ship without bugs. But it'd just be nice if every developer strived to ship a game with no game-breaking bugs and only leave players to worry about smaller bugs later that couldn't have reasonably been found by QA testers. Right now, too many are just treating their fans like game testers that don't get a paycheck.

Does anyone else miss the old days when games were released finished?

[HEADING=1]Fuck yes![/HEADING]
Back when console games didn't have patches, we got games that weren't broken messes at launch. Every now and then something would slip through and that would be suck as the bug would be stuck there unless they did a second printing of the game with a new version that fixed it, but for the most part, the games worked properly on launch day as they should. Now, they just say "Oh well, we can patch it later. Just ship it now regardless of how broken it is."

Sometimes I really miss my old consoles that didn't know what the hell an internet connection was. Namely, every time I open another new game that needs to get patch 1.01 before it starts working properly. These days, instead of stores asking if you want to pre-order, they should ask if you want to sign up for the open beta that requires a $60 entrance fee.

 

[Snotnarok]

I'm pretty sure a bulk of complaints were because despite the game box and steam saying this game supports dual core processors, it DIDN'T for 2 months or so. It was unplayable, no matter how low you put the settings the game ran like ass and was just impossible to play.

And I'm pretty sure that at this point where you've spent 60 bloody dollars you've every right to complain and get your god damn money back. That's not a bug that's a SERIOUS PROBLEM, what other product can you get away with lying like that and take 2 months to send out a fix?

How hard could it have been to test this? It's not like it's a specific thing where you gotta rub the wall the right way, you just need a DUAL CORE PROCESSOR and you'll find the game won't work.

 

[The_root_of_all_evil]

No bugs? Never.
Broken Game? Not the same thing.

I've played more than a few buggy as hell games that I've enjoyed. And stories of "Well, it worked fine for me", don't really help.

C'mon guys, you know where to get reliable feedback, you know where to find people who will stress-test your game to hell...

Oh, you hate bitching from the fans? [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/107489-Contrarian-Gamers-Suck-Says-Treyarch] Well, perhaps they could help find those bugs?

 

[Darth Sea Bass]

Why would they even bother to try and and fix all the bugs they know you'll buy it regardless and come back same time next year for another helping.

 

[The Lunatic]

That would require taking your time with a game, rather than releasing a minor adjustment every year.

And Time, is money lost!

Seriously though, what incentive does Activision Blizzard have to devote more time to a game when people are going to buy it like crazy and give it insanely high scores regardless of what state it's in?

 

[Calico93]

.... no shit, so would alot of developers.
Why dont they worry about making new fun games rather than the samey bland uninspiring (admittedly fun .... for about a week) COD games.

 

[Gizmo007666]

Utter bollocks. Yes it may be "impossible" to ship a game without bugs, and fair enough for some of the bugs in WaW (getting under the map by rubbing up a wall) and MW2 (javelin glitch) but some of the bugs in Blops were evident just from putting the game in a couple of times.

So yes a beta would have helped, but I'm guessing the blops beta was 360 exclusive and they didn't bother testing it on the other platforms and just figured there wouldn't be any issues from porting.

 

[thenumberthirteen]

Bugs are annoying, but it's not as heinous as New Vegas was. Though for such a massive franchise I'd have thought they'd have the manpower to sort these issues out sooner.

An open beta might be bad for business.

Unless they do what Halo 3 did and say "If you buy this other game you'll get in the multiplayer demo". I'm sure that Activision could make even MORE money that way.