Funny enough, I know the head of QA for a major game dev irl. Hearing it from him, it's a combination of a rapidly degrading quality of programmer, combined with unrealistic expectations of release windows. Not that I expected him to cop to being the problem, but it seems logical to me.
In my eyes this is compounded further by the realties of Clown World's economy. In which not only are approved products likely to see praise regardless of quality, but the consumer is on average completely retarded and lacking in any taste. So on the one hand why not bilk them out of their money, and on the other hand why bother working hard if only political orthodoxy is rewarded by the people giving out the awards and promotions?
Games is also a notoriously grueling industry. Plenty of people who are good programmers don't want to bust their ass that hard for someone else to make all the money. If you're capable of making a game end to end, or you can form a small group to do so, you can also make indie games, which you have more control over and potentially could keep more of the profits from.
Back in the day one programmer would be responsible for more of a game, too, or even an entire game. AAA titles are too big for that, so you have to have to be able to coordinate and scale development. I get the impression games are not big on the best practices that are applied elsewhere in the software industry. I don't know if games are particularly difficult to test or if game studios are just particularly uninterested in it. Relative to other software, the consequences are pretty low. Nobody gets hurt because your game bugs out. Fuckups in medical device software have killed people.
It was really funny watching the Half-Life 25th anniversary documentary and seeing only one woman with a speaking role and every other person fitting a classic nerd archetype.
And of course that dyke had to complain that "she was the only woman" when the documentary calls out at least 2 others who worked on the game, one being the wife of another programmer who left early due to pregnancy
The OG games devs also didn't go into "game development" as a discipline; they had to forge it themselves. Many of their degrees were largely tangential, such as Miyamoto and his degree in industrial design (and he originally wanted to be a manga artist). He even admits he wouldn't get hired by Nintendo with his credentials today.
Also anybody could get onto Baldur's Gate II and contribute. A 2d engine just isn't that complicated.
But a custom 3d engine is a whole 'nother level of complicated.
Worst part is it doesn't even make it better. BG3 could have been better on Infinity Engine in 2d because it was always about the fantasy world not the graphics.
A 3D engine would actively detract from what Baldur's Gate is. You're playing D&D and a large part of that experience has always been the player's imagination filling in the gaps left by the DM and lack of explicit visual depictions of everything. You bang something out in the Unreal engine and you lose all of that real fucking quick.
This reminds me of when I was on the Public Test Realm for Naxxramas in vanilla WoW with my guild back in 2006 (I think).
We were about to pull an early boss when a "GM" spawned in front of us. He whispered our guild leader for our Ventrilo information, then hopped in our server to listen in on our comms. We struggled on a few pulls, but after each wipe the "GM" would mass res and mass buff us to save time. Then he would randomly whisper one of our guild members with a tip, e.g.: "Have you tried Mind Control? ;)"
After we killed the boss on the PTR, he congratulated and thanked us, then he told us... that he was Tigole. Tigole was the lead developer for World of Warcraft. We were playing at like 3 am on a weekday, and this guy was watching us goof our way through an encounter while responsible for developing content for millions of players. That was super cool.
It would be interesting to see the stats on the amount of time that is played by each department on their own products and then compare that to how it used to be.
I can say from being a WoW player over the years that game devs playing their own game does nothing to help make the game better in any way. Often times, it just makes them more certain in themselves that the player is wrong.
Before we see success at the AAA level, we need to strike out as indies first. Indie gamedev is a moderately high risk, low reward venture. Leftists seem more willing to act like starving artists, as if not making money is some kind of ideal. (look at some of the twitter reactions to Eric July's success for proof of this) We continue to see them take degrees in Basket Weaving or some liberal arts bullshit despite everyone knowing it won't bring them financial stability.
One of the reasons I did not continue to pursue gamedev despite spending most of my youth doing it as a hobby is the lack of guaranteed profit. Would I be successful enough to support myself? Maybe. Would I be so wildly successful as to be able to fund a studio and live a comfortable life? Possibly, but most likely not. I'd enjoy working on games, but it was the rational decision to take a career with higher prospects and immediate returns. I think right-leaning people tend to make such decisions, planning for the future. Left-leaning people are more likely to say "I'll do what I want!" and damn the consequences. Sometimes they succeed.
So I guess I'm saying we need wealthy investors on the right funding a AAA industry devoid of woke crap. Like those who were successful in the indie-sphere first. The alternative is we beg someone like Ben Shapiro to fund our games industry.
Then there's the whole gatekeeping problem. I suspect there are a lot of right/conservative leaning people in the industry, but like a lot of us they don't want any politics in games. They believe in the liberal philosophy of tolerance, so they inevitably fail to gatekeep subversives.
I defiantly get your decision, but I think for those of us who are productive, we need to actually push money in the direction of competent creators and actually fund it.
I don't think we need true venture capital, I think those of us who are middle-class and above are wealthy enough to build separate institutions that can be separately monetized without simply being "the rightist brand for games".
I think we need to tell non-Leftist, or anti-Leftist stories in a subtle fashion (ie: boy learns the value of family and becomes a man by adopting or creating one, rejecting temptation), but we need to support that.
I suspect there are a lot of right/conservative leaning people in the industry, but like a lot of us they don't want any politics in games. They believe in the liberal philosophy of tolerance, so they inevitably fail to gatekeep subversives.
Again, this is what I mean. You don't want politics in game. You want to exploit the fact that nature has a right-wing bias, and make that the core of some game. The Reckateer is not a rightist game, but it teaches the value of entrepreneurship and trade. There's a very big difference.
I think those of us who are middle-class and above are wealthy enough to build separate institutions that can be separately monetized without simply being "the rightist brand for games".
A kickstarter or indiegogo that doesn't ban people for wrongthink would be a good start.
modern games are built on the shoulders of the people that came before, to the point where nobody currently working professionally has any idea how the basics like rendering and memory allocation even work. as a result, everything is cobbled together and if there is a bug, extensive workarounds are done instead of fixing the root cause of the problem.
now take this, and let it sink in that it applies to the entire technology industry.
Exactly why I do have some fear for it. Honestly, it's looking to be a fun co-op action RPG, but who knows what'll happen as we start finding out more in the final month before release.
It's a shit spinoff from a gacha hell mobile game. Even platinum hasn't released anything good in years and they fired platinum off the development - It's probably shit.
I don't know if I could convince a younger me back in '98 when I was playing Resident Evil 2 that gaming would be at a point now where you can have near photorealistic quality everywhere, and not have to have pre rendered characters and muddy textured human analogue looking characters in your games.
And yet, with all this supposedly helpful technology, people are mocapped and rendered horribly wrong. Game QA is non existent to the point of being laughable.
Release dates are just the -3 anniverary of when you can play a game from start to finish without bugs or issues, if the devs actually get to work on it after release. You might be stuck with a horrible barely playable game.
And not just badly done mocap, but intentionally wrong, for some reason. And it's diverse for the sake of skin color check mark go brrrrr instead of fun and interesting character that also happen to be non white.
That there are more ways to spend real money in the game than there are fun ways to play through the game. The real money in game shop never seems to have bugs or glitches for some reason, but the rest of the game always does.
The most played game of all time is an old english name for two weeks, and is a GaaS style of game that looks like a cartoon, and yet has the licensed looks from so many other games and popular media that kids don't really know where the originals are from, or where the dances come from, or that the game itself was something else entirely before it shifted gears and abandoned the very thing it was supposed to be.
Not to mention the myriad of other problems with gaming like physical media is slowly becoming extinct. DRM is controlling the downloaded games you sometimes can't play well, or at all if the server your game talks to goes down for some reason, or your connection is just terrible that day.
I'd probably laugh at my future self thinking something so dumb would never happen, and would never let it get that bad, much less somehow continue to happen more and more often.
And yet here we are.
Hopefully the Games as a service style of game will come to a head and hopefully forever be destroyed the day that Fortnite goes offline when the next big thing of the next few years crushes it. And the millions and millions of people that have played and love that game will never get to play it officially anymore, as it's never something they truly actually owned.
Before ~25 years ago, PC games were rarely patched, and if they were, you had to get a replacement floppy disk. Others would know better than I, but I think Xbox was really the first console with game patches? Maybe Dreamcast?
I remember being able to track down some update binaries or other patch-type files for some games in the mid-90s, either getting physical disks from friends or even downloading files from a BBS, but it was really widespread highspeed Internet that made patching feasible.
If you were releasing a game in 1990, you had to be SURE the game would work. There were of course bugs—always—but the game had to work.
I still remember being fucking enraged that Warcraft 3 TFT didn't even ship with its last two missions. They just assumed everyone who played the game must be in it for the multiplayer and therefore have easy online access.
That was only 20 years ago that it was still a problem. Because even well into the millennium most people were still on AOL and not in any state to download a full fucking file sized patch for a video game.
Its worse than it sounds. The final campaign is a pseudo open world RPG with 3 "missions" that can take 5-10 hours to fully explore and complete each.
So it launches with 1 huge mission for you to get deep into and start enjoying, only to then blindside you when you get on the boat that "oops we didn't have time to finish this campaign, give us a few months!"
And of course it was the canary in the coal mine of Blizzard's retarded politics baked into it too. Where Jaina's dad is "evil" because he was a veteran of the Old War and doesn't trust Orcs setting up a capital within a stone's throw of his nation after all the evil they did. So his own daughter betrays and murders him for her new Orc bf, because they said they were sorry and dindu nuffin because it was all da demons fault anyway.
I don't know about wherever you guys lived, but no one in any town near me had access to internet speeds that could download even a sub 100kb picture in less than an hour. On dialup where any moment you could lose it all.
So any size above 0 was a giant risk and struggle.
Why is this a surprise to you? Games have evenin a steady shit spiral to oblivion since the end of the 90s. Thankfully no one with taste gives a fuck about triple A IP or games anymore. I have plenty of stuff to play already that will last me through the next game crash, and boy I fucking hope that crash destroys the entire industry. Then we can start over again from scratch.
They're pulling their hair out trying to get the thing out the door with some semblance of functionality while being understaffed and overworked on a completely unrealistic deadline and lamenting the loss of a QA department even being a thing that exists.
No one's putting bugs in there intentionally you fool.
I'm working through rogue trader now. The amount of quests that don't update bugs is astonishing. So I have a bunch of quests that are technically complete or supposed to move on to their stage but don't.
As is the case with most of the problems that plague the gaming industry, this is the fault of Bethesda.
Skyrim basically being so broken that it was unfinishable without years of patches (or console commands) to the point of many of its ports still being broken beyond reason allowed this kind of mindset to enter the industry zeitgeist. They even had the audacity to just outsource it to the fans to fix with mods, but at least that was something you could do to fix it. Most AAA games aren't anywhere near moddable enough to be fixable.
Shit Skyrim isn't even the worst offender of that mindset, because at least no one pretends it isn't a broken skeleton of a game. The real worst culprit is Fallout New Vegas, which gets a pass from everyone because if you ignore the game being a giant bag of zero QA and bugs and crashes out the ass, there is good writing underneath.
Those games selling a gazillion copies or becoming massive cult classics that everyone raves about, respectively, is the kind of thing that turns exec's heads. So of course they will deprioritize QA.
It clearly has no effect on whether your game sells or gets loved, as long as you make it pretty enough, customizable enough, or have decent writing, you can release a pile of slop that qualifies for "gameplay."
So far I just started chap 4 of rogue trader and I've haven't had any game breaking bugs. The game does have bugs though like cut scenes sometimes not triggering properly and enemies glitching for a while and just pausing mid battle and ulfar not firing his damn pistol in close range
Funny enough, I know the head of QA for a major game dev irl. Hearing it from him, it's a combination of a rapidly degrading quality of programmer, combined with unrealistic expectations of release windows. Not that I expected him to cop to being the problem, but it seems logical to me.
In my eyes this is compounded further by the realties of Clown World's economy. In which not only are approved products likely to see praise regardless of quality, but the consumer is on average completely retarded and lacking in any taste. So on the one hand why not bilk them out of their money, and on the other hand why bother working hard if only political orthodoxy is rewarded by the people giving out the awards and promotions?
Games is also a notoriously grueling industry. Plenty of people who are good programmers don't want to bust their ass that hard for someone else to make all the money. If you're capable of making a game end to end, or you can form a small group to do so, you can also make indie games, which you have more control over and potentially could keep more of the profits from.
Back in the day one programmer would be responsible for more of a game, too, or even an entire game. AAA titles are too big for that, so you have to have to be able to coordinate and scale development. I get the impression games are not big on the best practices that are applied elsewhere in the software industry. I don't know if games are particularly difficult to test or if game studios are just particularly uninterested in it. Relative to other software, the consequences are pretty low. Nobody gets hurt because your game bugs out. Fuckups in medical device software have killed people.
It was really funny watching the Half-Life 25th anniversary documentary and seeing only one woman with a speaking role and every other person fitting a classic nerd archetype.
And of course that dyke had to complain that "she was the only woman" when the documentary calls out at least 2 others who worked on the game, one being the wife of another programmer who left early due to pregnancy
The OG games devs also didn't go into "game development" as a discipline; they had to forge it themselves. Many of their degrees were largely tangential, such as Miyamoto and his degree in industrial design (and he originally wanted to be a manga artist). He even admits he wouldn't get hired by Nintendo with his credentials today.
Also anybody could get onto Baldur's Gate II and contribute. A 2d engine just isn't that complicated.
But a custom 3d engine is a whole 'nother level of complicated.
Worst part is it doesn't even make it better. BG3 could have been better on Infinity Engine in 2d because it was always about the fantasy world not the graphics.
A 3D engine would actively detract from what Baldur's Gate is. You're playing D&D and a large part of that experience has always been the player's imagination filling in the gaps left by the DM and lack of explicit visual depictions of everything. You bang something out in the Unreal engine and you lose all of that real fucking quick.
This reminds me of when I was on the Public Test Realm for Naxxramas in vanilla WoW with my guild back in 2006 (I think).
We were about to pull an early boss when a "GM" spawned in front of us. He whispered our guild leader for our Ventrilo information, then hopped in our server to listen in on our comms. We struggled on a few pulls, but after each wipe the "GM" would mass res and mass buff us to save time. Then he would randomly whisper one of our guild members with a tip, e.g.: "Have you tried Mind Control? ;)"
After we killed the boss on the PTR, he congratulated and thanked us, then he told us... that he was Tigole. Tigole was the lead developer for World of Warcraft. We were playing at like 3 am on a weekday, and this guy was watching us goof our way through an encounter while responsible for developing content for millions of players. That was super cool.
Double-jumpen Sie die Boxen or I vill shoost your whole family in front of you.
I can say from being a WoW player over the years that game devs playing their own game does nothing to help make the game better in any way. Often times, it just makes them more certain in themselves that the player is wrong.
Perhaps saying it does "nothing" was hasty. The better way to say my point was "no guarantee, and even risky to" finding issues or improving the game.
For example, Dead by Daylight
The En-Shittification of Everything must go as planned.
It's that "fail fast" bullshit. It has its place, but it sucks mightily for games.
Muh devops! Muh agile!
This is the competency crisis. It's only going to get worse because Game Dev is wildly Left wing.
We really need to make our own games.
Before we see success at the AAA level, we need to strike out as indies first. Indie gamedev is a moderately high risk, low reward venture. Leftists seem more willing to act like starving artists, as if not making money is some kind of ideal. (look at some of the twitter reactions to Eric July's success for proof of this) We continue to see them take degrees in Basket Weaving or some liberal arts bullshit despite everyone knowing it won't bring them financial stability.
One of the reasons I did not continue to pursue gamedev despite spending most of my youth doing it as a hobby is the lack of guaranteed profit. Would I be successful enough to support myself? Maybe. Would I be so wildly successful as to be able to fund a studio and live a comfortable life? Possibly, but most likely not. I'd enjoy working on games, but it was the rational decision to take a career with higher prospects and immediate returns. I think right-leaning people tend to make such decisions, planning for the future. Left-leaning people are more likely to say "I'll do what I want!" and damn the consequences. Sometimes they succeed.
So I guess I'm saying we need wealthy investors on the right funding a AAA industry devoid of woke crap. Like those who were successful in the indie-sphere first. The alternative is we beg someone like Ben Shapiro to fund our games industry.
Then there's the whole gatekeeping problem. I suspect there are a lot of right/conservative leaning people in the industry, but like a lot of us they don't want any politics in games. They believe in the liberal philosophy of tolerance, so they inevitably fail to gatekeep subversives.
I defiantly get your decision, but I think for those of us who are productive, we need to actually push money in the direction of competent creators and actually fund it.
I don't think we need true venture capital, I think those of us who are middle-class and above are wealthy enough to build separate institutions that can be separately monetized without simply being "the rightist brand for games".
I think we need to tell non-Leftist, or anti-Leftist stories in a subtle fashion (ie: boy learns the value of family and becomes a man by adopting or creating one, rejecting temptation), but we need to support that.
Again, this is what I mean. You don't want politics in game. You want to exploit the fact that nature has a right-wing bias, and make that the core of some game. The Reckateer is not a rightist game, but it teaches the value of entrepreneurship and trade. There's a very big difference.
A kickstarter or indiegogo that doesn't ban people for wrongthink would be a good start.
modern games are built on the shoulders of the people that came before, to the point where nobody currently working professionally has any idea how the basics like rendering and memory allocation even work. as a result, everything is cobbled together and if there is a bug, extensive workarounds are done instead of fixing the root cause of the problem.
now take this, and let it sink in that it applies to the entire technology industry.
I'm just hoping Granblue Fantasy ReLink doesn't have issues next month. Cygames has had seven (or more) years after all.
Exactly why I do have some fear for it. Honestly, it's looking to be a fun co-op action RPG, but who knows what'll happen as we start finding out more in the final month before release.
It's a shit spinoff from a gacha hell mobile game. Even platinum hasn't released anything good in years and they fired platinum off the development - It's probably shit.
Remember the wise words of Shigeru Meat.
I don't know if I could convince a younger me back in '98 when I was playing Resident Evil 2 that gaming would be at a point now where you can have near photorealistic quality everywhere, and not have to have pre rendered characters and muddy textured human analogue looking characters in your games.
And yet, with all this supposedly helpful technology, people are mocapped and rendered horribly wrong. Game QA is non existent to the point of being laughable. Release dates are just the -3 anniverary of when you can play a game from start to finish without bugs or issues, if the devs actually get to work on it after release. You might be stuck with a horrible barely playable game.
And not just badly done mocap, but intentionally wrong, for some reason. And it's diverse for the sake of skin color check mark go brrrrr instead of fun and interesting character that also happen to be non white.
That there are more ways to spend real money in the game than there are fun ways to play through the game. The real money in game shop never seems to have bugs or glitches for some reason, but the rest of the game always does.
The most played game of all time is an old english name for two weeks, and is a GaaS style of game that looks like a cartoon, and yet has the licensed looks from so many other games and popular media that kids don't really know where the originals are from, or where the dances come from, or that the game itself was something else entirely before it shifted gears and abandoned the very thing it was supposed to be.
Not to mention the myriad of other problems with gaming like physical media is slowly becoming extinct. DRM is controlling the downloaded games you sometimes can't play well, or at all if the server your game talks to goes down for some reason, or your connection is just terrible that day.
I'd probably laugh at my future self thinking something so dumb would never happen, and would never let it get that bad, much less somehow continue to happen more and more often.
And yet here we are.
Hopefully the Games as a service style of game will come to a head and hopefully forever be destroyed the day that Fortnite goes offline when the next big thing of the next few years crushes it. And the millions and millions of people that have played and love that game will never get to play it officially anymore, as it's never something they truly actually owned.
Before ~25 years ago, PC games were rarely patched, and if they were, you had to get a replacement floppy disk. Others would know better than I, but I think Xbox was really the first console with game patches? Maybe Dreamcast?
I remember being able to track down some update binaries or other patch-type files for some games in the mid-90s, either getting physical disks from friends or even downloading files from a BBS, but it was really widespread highspeed Internet that made patching feasible.
If you were releasing a game in 1990, you had to be SURE the game would work. There were of course bugs—always—but the game had to work.
I still remember being fucking enraged that Warcraft 3 TFT didn't even ship with its last two missions. They just assumed everyone who played the game must be in it for the multiplayer and therefore have easy online access.
That was only 20 years ago that it was still a problem. Because even well into the millennium most people were still on AOL and not in any state to download a full fucking file sized patch for a video game.
Here I was just praising WoW too. I never played WC3 and had no idea. I agree that's complete BS, man.
Its worse than it sounds. The final campaign is a pseudo open world RPG with 3 "missions" that can take 5-10 hours to fully explore and complete each.
So it launches with 1 huge mission for you to get deep into and start enjoying, only to then blindside you when you get on the boat that "oops we didn't have time to finish this campaign, give us a few months!"
And of course it was the canary in the coal mine of Blizzard's retarded politics baked into it too. Where Jaina's dad is "evil" because he was a veteran of the Old War and doesn't trust Orcs setting up a capital within a stone's throw of his nation after all the evil they did. So his own daughter betrays and murders him for her new Orc bf, because they said they were sorry and dindu nuffin because it was all da demons fault anyway.
Warcraft 3 patches were much, much smaller than patches for games are now too.
I don't know about wherever you guys lived, but no one in any town near me had access to internet speeds that could download even a sub 100kb picture in less than an hour. On dialup where any moment you could lose it all.
So any size above 0 was a giant risk and struggle.
Why is this a surprise to you? Games have evenin a steady shit spiral to oblivion since the end of the 90s. Thankfully no one with taste gives a fuck about triple A IP or games anymore. I have plenty of stuff to play already that will last me through the next game crash, and boy I fucking hope that crash destroys the entire industry. Then we can start over again from scratch.
They're pulling their hair out trying to get the thing out the door with some semblance of functionality while being understaffed and overworked on a completely unrealistic deadline and lamenting the loss of a QA department even being a thing that exists.
No one's putting bugs in there intentionally you fool.
That is far more plausible. Diversity hires all the way down.
I'm working through rogue trader now. The amount of quests that don't update bugs is astonishing. So I have a bunch of quests that are technically complete or supposed to move on to their stage but don't.
Weird I'm on chapter 4 and haven't had that issue yet. I have failed quests though by killing things too fast
Who cares?
Shit it out fast!
Andrew Tate's Business Principle Number One:
SPEED
As is the case with most of the problems that plague the gaming industry, this is the fault of Bethesda.
Skyrim basically being so broken that it was unfinishable without years of patches (or console commands) to the point of many of its ports still being broken beyond reason allowed this kind of mindset to enter the industry zeitgeist. They even had the audacity to just outsource it to the fans to fix with mods, but at least that was something you could do to fix it. Most AAA games aren't anywhere near moddable enough to be fixable.
Shit Skyrim isn't even the worst offender of that mindset, because at least no one pretends it isn't a broken skeleton of a game. The real worst culprit is Fallout New Vegas, which gets a pass from everyone because if you ignore the game being a giant bag of zero QA and bugs and crashes out the ass, there is good writing underneath.
Those games selling a gazillion copies or becoming massive cult classics that everyone raves about, respectively, is the kind of thing that turns exec's heads. So of course they will deprioritize QA.
It clearly has no effect on whether your game sells or gets loved, as long as you make it pretty enough, customizable enough, or have decent writing, you can release a pile of slop that qualifies for "gameplay."
So far I just started chap 4 of rogue trader and I've haven't had any game breaking bugs. The game does have bugs though like cut scenes sometimes not triggering properly and enemies glitching for a while and just pausing mid battle and ulfar not firing his damn pistol in close range
RPG Codex is all over this type of stuff.