Treyarch Would Love to Ship a Game Without Bugs

[ultratog1028]

Well, it's to be expected when a) you don't Beta test. and b) you are forced on a tight schedule and you don't learn about the previous games's bugs until you are half way done with the game you are currently working on.

I blame Activision's "Rush-rush-rush" additude.

 

[ThePuzzldPirate]

I still don't understand why there isn't more open betas for launches instead of demos. The amount of bugs the WORLD could find faster and free would help, no?

 

[tunderball]

I have nothing but sympathy for any game developers when it comes to bugs. I've made a few games/levels of my own and bugs happen in any form, crist you can even get bugs on a simple flash game. They happen they are hard to spot, and often annoying to fix, welcome to the wonderful world of programming.

 

[ultratog1028]

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.

unfortunatly, 360 "beta testers" tend to assume "beta" is a fancy word for "demo" (I've beta tested on both 360 and PC). And a lot of people (360 betas) don't report bugs they find in the betas, and if they do they report things poorly or incorrectly.

I'm afraid of how screwed up the Gears of War 3 Multiplayer is going to be, since the majority of those testing it will be to used to the crap that is Gears 2 multiplayer.

Note: This is all my observations and opinions. If you don't agree with it, congratulations on having an opinion. If you disagree with me, tell me in a nice civil way, but don't tell me I have misinterpretted my own opinion.

 

[Tiamat666]

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

That's what I was about to say. I can understand a Fallout/Oblivion style game to have lots of bugs. In Fallout, everything is scripted, quests, NPCs, interactions, items, etc. and most of the scripts are new from game to game. Whereas in CoD you run around and shoot things. The only thing that changes are the levels and the character animations.

 

[Catalyst6]

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.

I always wondered about the whole Crackdown thing. I mean, Realtime Worlds must have paid through the nose in order to score the Halo 3 beta/demo. But if it was within the company then that might make more sense.

A lot of developers are also doing the "pre-purchase this game and get in the beta", which is kind of weird. Yeah, I understand that players invested enough to pre-purchase will probably want to help make the game better, but it also colors the opinions of the testers.

Plus, a big thing is that actually keeping the secrecy agreements is a ******* for relatively open betas. May the gods help you if there's a plot to your game, because it will be out faster than you can say "Julian Assange".

 

[Andy of Comix Inc]

"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.

Ahh, that's reassurance! *sigh*

"Yeah, our game is buggy on EVERYTHING!" Olin said. "So RELAX, morons! Everyone gets the same shit!"

 

[SteewpidZombie]

If you take into account the number of variables compared to other games, Black Ops will NEVER be perfect. It'd take the dev's at least 2-3 more game releases before they could perfect Black Ops, by then nobody would be playing it. You can't even compare games like Halo to Black Ops in terms of gliches, because they run on different engines, have different styles, and Black Ops takes more processing power at one time to allow for the vast number of variables that need to be accounted for. In the end, pretty much no games are perfect...so Suck it up, stop crying yourself to sleep, be mature and accept that glitches will exist and they'll still be here 10 years from now.

Edit: Though the singleplayer is possibly the easiest to fix in terms of glitches. 90% of everything is scripted and programmed, so any glitches should easily be fixed since there aren't that many variables or changing aspects to the gameplay compared to playing online.

 

[terriblejustterrible]

Forget the bugs, I would like Treyarch to release this "first person shooter" game they say they develop... All I see is arcade shooters.

 

[bushwhacker2k]

Bugs are big and annoying, couldn't you make naggers shut up more by fixing them and showing us rather than complaining about how stuff has bugs? How does a company making a game as big as Black Ops have room to complain? Did you miss the part of your contract where you sold them your soul when you join the company too and thus don't really get any of the big bags of money that the other guys do?

 

[DaHero]

Plants vs. Zombies looked okay to me day one...

 

[qeinar]

some of the pc issues would have been pretty easy to detect, test your games on more than one operating system, see if it runs better on xp compared to windows 7 for instance (which it does, it is way more stable on a xp pc..) also try using more than 1 pc when your testing the game, use a variety of pcs, newer and older ones above the minimum specs with different graphics cards. i really thought this was routine procedure before releasing a game, seems it is not. and well there are tons of other games that have come out without such problems. i can mention for instance mw2, and well one would think that a game based of the same engine should work, right? wrong. ^^ mw2 was way more polished on release on pc than black ops is now. which is kinda sad when you think about it. a lot of people complain that IW did not release patches and a lot of people have aplauded treyarch for the patches they have released, well nearly none of them are on the pc.

by the time treyarch have made the game playable for the people having problems there will be a lot of cheats out for the game which will make the game anoying to play. however treyarch have done one good thing, including servers so playing on a server where you yourself is a admin or you know admins more or less makes it so you won't bump into cheaters.

this beeing said if mw2 was released with dedicated servers i would still play that because most of mw2's problems could easily be solved by the dedicated server system. (most servers would ban tubers, painkiller, martyrdom and people abusing glitches..)

 

[qeinar]

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.

yeh that's probably it tbh. I am tired of shitty console ports to the pc tbh.

 

[qeinar]

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.

yes it's like they made it for 1 pc with verry specific specs and never tested it for other computers. on release day i could not play the game, but a mate of mine had some minor lag issues..

 

[silverbullet1989]

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.

well im sure there's an argument about releasing a beta in there somewhere -_-

Also this.

i agree about halo reach, also stalker call of pripyat released in Europe with hardly any bugs considering the state the past 2 games were in, i don't blame treyarch for the sorry state cod black ops was released in for the PC and ps3, i blame the fact they have to keep to a stupid deadline of releasing a new game every year, they don't care about testing it before it gets released as they know its gonna make a tonne of money regardless.

 

[Firehound]

Everything I've come to know and visciously hate about 3arch. Our games are bad because of everything but we're lazy bastards who want money. three of these issues are in Black ops.

Issues in games that should not exist:
Lack of variety in map style.(Every trearch map is ridiculously tiny)
Balance issues(SMGs are useless, most perks jump either from OP to Underpowered, and there are very few competitive choices for equipment.)
Unfun multiplayer for new players(unlock everything, just use one of these five shitty weapons at first. we promise it'll be better, but you should have started when the game came out.)
Common bugs(I can understand and forgive getting stuck in a ankle-deep crevace in a rock in the middle of nowhere that I have to fast travel out of in New vegas, I can not understand a significant bug in the AI of one of your followers that causes her to run away, or a bug that causes a companion to turn hostile randomly if you complete a DLC that happens more often then not)

 

[Rack]

Just look at all the permutations.

Blops + 360
Blops + PS3
Blops + PC

There's no way they'd have time to try more than a third of them!

 

[slackbheep]

I think what they aren't taking notice of here is that they are being cut less and less slack each year, as they release the same game.
Edit: If the next Mario platform title has a broken jump key people will take to the streets, for example.

 

[GonzoGamer]

well im sure there's an argument about releasing a beta in there somewhere -_-

There's a Yackoff Smirnoff joke there.
"In Communist Russia....
I mean in the 80's companies pay YOU to test beta."

I haven't run into too many problems with Blops (mind you I haven't even gotten to level 50... for the first time) but playing Fallout New Vegas reminded me why people should get paid to beta test: it's not fun and it's not good for your hardware. It was bad enough when they started giving beta keys out as prizes and stuff, but asking people pay $60 to beta test is just a shitty thing to do.

And why is it always the ps3 version that remains broken for... shit, sometimes forever.