I talk about why there are bugs in RPGs, forever and always. Videos I reference: Emergent Gameplay: • Emergent Gameplay Playtesting The Outer Worlds: • Playtesting The Outer ...
Unless someone shows videos of gameplay form like alfa/beta. Devs of Hogwarts Legacy did exactly that few weeks ago, some of the phisics glitches are quite a horror show :P
I wish that was true. I've seen let's plays that have found many bugs from my game that I know I had fixed and no one in the team could reproduce anymore.
I imagine that's because most here are aware that individual game developers have about as much say in industry goings on as players do. There is one more thing "making it worse, at the moment, I don't blame Tim in the least for not mentioning: the bursting of the "live service" financial bubble. A good number of live service games were in development when the live service bubble burst and those games were rushed to market when it burst, long before development on those games was remotely close to being finished. They were essentially dumped on the market, their publishers more or less washing their hands of them while the studios developing them took all the blame for their unplayable states at release. A number of exceptional studios' reputations for creating and producing interesting, innovative RPGs have taken a direct hit as a direct result of that financial bubble bursting. Coupled with the privatization of everything related to gaming in the loving care of a handful of megacorporations and we have the perfect storm the industry is weathering today, developers themselves taking the brunt of the sea changes and suffering the most due to massive layoffs, studio closures and the like. Of course, this phenomenon isn't confined to the gaming industry and the longer it goes on, the more brittle, as opposed to resilient, all industries -- including the Arts & Entertainment industries -- will become. Following is an excerpt from the PC Gaming article (not directly related to the bubble bursting), 'John Carmack goes off about online-only games being abandoned'. (The same article touches on how this trend is affecting single player games.) "''John Carmack.[...] advocates for building games that will still work 'at some level' without central server support, encourages LAN support for multiplayer games (because this allows people to write proxies), and supports user-run servers both because they can help save on hosting costs and for the community creative angle.... 'Be disciplined about your build processes and what you put in your source tree, so there is at least the possibility of making the project open source,' said Carmack. 'Think twice before adding dependencies that you can’t redistribute, and consider testing with stubbed out versions of the things you do use. Don’t do things in your code that wouldn’t be acceptable for the whole world to see. 'Most of game development is a panicky rush to make things stop falling apart long enough to ship, so it can be hard to dedicate time to fundamental software engineering, but there is a satisfaction to it, and it can pay off with less problematic late stage development." It's been asked before what Tim thinks of Carmack's proposals, so a video may be in the pipe about them or game abandonment may be one of those topics for which he doesn't feel he has an answer.
@@lrinfi gotta remember - this isn't the first time it happened, and it won't be the last. It's cyclical, and this time has only been worse than the others because the gaming industry is still growing. I reckon it'll get better because there's only so many people in the world and so much money to spend - It can't grow forever.
@@lrinfi And it only gets better, because said megacorporations can be shockingly clueless. I was reading a statement earlier today from WB Games, re: SS:KtJL's middling launch. Their conclusion to the success of single-player-only title Hogwarts Legacy and failure of their most recent live service game was that pursuing big game projects was too costly and too unreliable, and they need to double down on live service content for the forseeable future. Which... uh. What? There's a lot of carelessness in the architecture that the designers and developers are fully aware is unsustainable. But someone higher up fails to see that, so it doesn't really matter.
@@mattc7420 it's pretty much spot on though. We saw a wave of games chasing the trends because higher ups saw dollar signs from Destiny, Warframe, Payday 2, and waves of other properties that were made to profit over the long haul despite sneaking their way into the premium game market (as opposed to subscription based). Then we got a slew of mismanaged attempts to capitalize on that like Triad Wars, LawBreakers, Battleborn, Outriders, Redfall, SS:KtJL... so many good studios with newly tarnished reputations from bad ventures. And it didn't lead to new direction. It led to mass layoffs and closures at said studios that KNEW the direction was a mistake and couldn't really do much about it. When that market proved to be unsustainable, all the studios working on titles actively got stuck shipping what they had before the 2023 market dictated the entire studio be laid to rest.
In-house QA is so important. I don't know what the situation is for games, but over in enterprise-land it's basically unheard of these days, and it's a real pain for us devs. Devs are expected to do their own QA now, but they're very different skill sets and we're just not as good at it as dedicated QAers.
My old work used to pull the IT helpdesk people up for testing duty on rotation because we interacted with the users all day and ran into all the issues that they got (double clicking the print button printed twice for instance) We were alright at it but to save on desk resources, and also to be new and hip they moved to agile and everything went to shit
It would help if QA were given the most basic respect instead of being paid the minimum and being first on the chopping block come layoffs. I was looking at job listings recently and Blizzard is hiring QA for less than I made in food service. It's pathetic to see such a profitable massive studio treat their employees so poorly.
@@anchorlightforgeGame tester is a lot of people's dream jobs so they know that they can get away with anything they want because there's always millions of people who are wanting the spot it's pure evil
Yeah, I used to be the only in-house QA tester at a firm and you could really tell how much the programmers loved being able to go through issues with me instead of just having to read reports
What is your opinion of dev leads or creative directors being transparent or addressing their community about the project. I appreciate how you get on youtube and share you opinions, and experiences with game dev from different stages of your career. I have always found that just having someone address the player base in a sort of devlog or something goes a long way. I know it's not as relevant but something like DE with warframe or how Jeff from the ow team used to do. I just feel like it humanizes us and the team behind the game.
I think it’s great when devs address the community directly, but there are a lot of reasons why they don’t. In fact, that’s the subject of tomorrow’s video.
Miss Jeff too, overwatch is not the same without his devlogs. Though i think the issue is when Dev's are not able to talk freely due to internal issues like it happened with Jeff and Bobby not giving them budget and also making them waste time on stuff he would cancel. In those situations the dev can't speak freely but also at the same time people will get frustrated and start getting toxic. Also Jeff and Tim are like rare exceptions most Dev's won't even want to be in public domain, it's stressful if you are not built for it.
The reality is that only a tiny fraction of players ever actually watch/read/care about that kind of thing. Most players don't obsessively follow games on Reddit, Twitter, Discord, blog articles, etc., they just play casually and don't interact with those external/meta elements of games. :/
@@arcan762 Obsessively seems like the incorrect word to use. It's still a significant enough amount of players to have some studios do it or consider it. I could only speak for myself; as I am not sure what most gamers do or don't do but I play warframe extremely casually and still watch a recap of their dev streams.
I love bugs in RPG's. They are always one of the easiest mobs to kill which brings a lot of fun during early leves when you grind for XP. For example radroaches in Fallouts. Best bugs ever. Badum-tss.
Damn I thought this was going to be a place for me to post about my arachnophobia and how I've always hated how RPG devs throw a ton of spiders in their games!
True. I am kinda of an old new gamer, and I started by buying an Xbox series S and installing fo4. I was shocked by how many times the game crashes on an always-online console. Really!? No bug fixes for a popular game that has been in the market for so many years?
I actually found some of the bugs in CP2077 enjoyable 😁 Or funny. Like the time I lost my head and was riding a motorcycle without my head haha. But yeah that game is so complex there would always be some bugs. Still I love Cyberpunk. From day 1.
I was making a prototype for a turn based JRPG with menu based combat a couple years ago, and because of the nature of how those games work and how I was basically teaching myself how to make it, I had bugs with literally every step of the way. Speed and turn order brackets, using skills and items, arrows indicating buffs and debuffs, and most particularly the unique mechanics involving starting a combo with one party member, and passing your attack phase to the next party member to have them continue the combo. I had left the prototype working as intended minus a couple visual bugs after about a year of working on it. And the cars in the overworld still kept spawning in the wrong direction and drove through sidewalks and buildings.
I've coded for years. Thought I'd planned out my game's design just fine last month. Coding was going so well. Today I introduced quickload aaaaaand it all broke. Like, everything. I forgot to design a way to reset world state w/o reloading the entire map. Cue lots of hacks and fiddly bits. I tend to prototype with "known bugs" to be smoothed over later as the jank becomes noticable. This was not one of those cases. I just... forgot that a load without reloading everything needs a reset. The entire save/load system was misdesigned. And that's the thing: you can know what you are doing and still miss really obvious states for no other reason than we humans are fallible. Design & code is seriously hard. The fact you got a thing running is saying a lot. My first (and only released) game was written the same way. In the 6 years since I finished that project I learned a lot. And yet, every time I think I have a design thought out, reality rears it's head and I spend hours trying to figure out which of the bazillion interconnected bits and pieces I messed up on. And 9 times out of 10 the solution is less than elegant, designed more to be robust and harder to mess up later than fancy, mostly cause over the last 10 years I've come to learn that predicting every possible interaction just turns into whack-a-mole while crude but functional tends to work... well, until it doesn't and you need to redesign with better information but that's just design in a nutshell.
On the subject of bugs, as I was going through my first Outer Worlds playthrough, there was word of a crazy powerful Science build using a sledgehammer that could destroy bosses in two charged swings. It turns out there was a bug in the damage calculation of that weapon, and by the time I was done with my playthrough and ready to test that on a second run, it had already been fixed. 😢
Lock-picking into the Brotherhood bunker in Fallout causes everyone inside to assume you retrieved the holotape (or whatever it was) from the Glow. You have to get the electronic lock-pick from Loxley first.
Another good video, Tim. I'm playing Prey (2017), and now I'm wondering if you've ever considered making a game in another genre. Since player agency and emergent gameplay are very important to you, what do you think about immersive sims? How much does the development process change compared to traditional RPG's?
I have no desire to make games but your videos make me appreciate games so much more because of all the things that go into them that I didn’t know or think about.
2:32 That its in theory, add to that a competitive community and its development difficulty as a game service exponentially grows. Woshige, the battle balancer from SF6, for sure will have to examine a LOT of data (competitive) and be fair with every character balance in the next patch, and thats very complicated, you can measure his success by the amount of death threats that he will personally receive after the patch launches.
Thank you for touching on this. I doubt one can release any sizeable piece of software without bugs, let alone an RPG game which can get absurdly complex. I believe there is a common expectation in the tech industry that there is ~10 bugs per 1000 lines of code. What is immensely frustrating is that you had fixes for many of your bugs in Troika's games and you were not allowed to release them.. that's just an unfair hit to the team's reputation. :( Anyhow great stuff. I would love to hear more about interesting debugging techniques you have used in your games (like the barriers in the fallout crash bug). Also bug prevention strategies (unit tests, automated game agents, etc). Thank you again for the video! Have a great weekend!
In another video you mentioned the future of gaming lies in dynamic emergent gameplay where various scenarios aren't programmed in. I think HellDivers 2 owes a lot of it's success to this. Between the day night cycle, weather, players having different builds and experience, mission parameters, it leads to endless extremely cinematic moments. The missions themselves are often boring. But the way the mission plays out is endlessly dynamic and leads to things like glorious last stands, or escaping with no bullets left and multiple broken bones, being surrounded, saved at the last moment by napalm strikes as you dive for cover, getting stuck behind enemy lines, a major battle through the night and dawn breaks right as you're being saved. None of this is programmed in, it's just how the mission played out. A different team could have went faster and never saw day break. And then if you have music going in the background it's amazing. Amazing grace bagpipes hit right as extraction comes, you're covered in blood and battered. It's incredible. And again, not programmed, not predetermined. But shout out for the programmers who were smart enough to implement these free flowing mechanics and who did great things like adding in diving, the prone mechanics, stratagems, a decent amount of varied missions, fun enemies. Everything they added feels like it was made with the explicit function of being cinematic and dynamic.
@@Steak514 did you never play Cod:black ops? Looks very funny in 3rd person, but it doesn't work too good in first person because you hit your face on the floor. Which makes this game more of a running joke slapstick. Like a Jackie Chan film but unlike Jackie Chan Stuntmaster.
Thanks tim for taking your time to give a detailed insight on it, it makes so much sense now, haha money certainly would help fix many stuff, esp i feel rpgs dont get the budget nowadays like other titles whose budget seems to be increasing rapidly often, also ya certainly the way you said about priority of bugs stuff we often dont think about what bug before that was clouding the one present now, though devs may have been busy fixing the bigger one, Always a delight to hear the detailed explanations from you😊
Question for some future video: What are some of the challenges for fixing game issues post release, or close to the release, when there is no translation budget available at all. For text, as well as voice overs. The same question as above, but if there is no art budget available.
2:35, that’s interesting that you bring up Street Fighter cause I’ve heard that the *combo system* was initially a bug. I’ve heard conflicting accounts where it was supposed to be intentional but I still find that fascinating.
Hi, Tim. Can you please talk about video games containing gameplay tutorials and when video games hold, or choose not to hold, the player's hand? I couldn't find a video of you talking about it and I wanted to know your thoughts on it.
Hi Tim, I know from your previous statements that new/original IP is always your preference when making a game, but I was wondering what if any pre existing IP you would like to see as a game whether it be from film, books etc. ? If so why would you like to see it and if its not already a video game why do you think it would translate well into one ? Thanks so much, love your videos.
I can attest to that. Crashes are my most hated of all bugs. Close second is being stuck in or falling through the geometry. Third but definitely not last is items disappearing from my inventory. Sometimes however bugs can be fun, like bunnyhopping in Source and GoldSource games, also propelling off of moving objects, explosion boosting, prop surfing etc.
I do think some types of bugs can be worse than crashes. For example, a Deus Ex style game with a sloppy physics engine prone to objects falling out of the world means you could brick your save for daring to experiment with the mechanics. But it's true, once you're dealing with instability there's an unsettling feeling that makes you rush through sections playing as "safely" as possible instead of enjoying the experience. Maybe you'll skip cutscenes you've never seen and rush your way past major encounters just to see a bad level through. It's a real dealbreaker.
Hi Tim, Do you have any advice regarding giving feedback from the player perspective? I have seen your video "Giving Good Feedback" but I felt a lot of the video focused on giving feedback as a developer rather than player. Usually when I play early access game (from RPGs: Pillars of Eternity2, BG3) I struggle with figuring out what feedback might me relevant. I feel a lot of time is being wasted talking about things that aren't finalized (balance, story), rather than focusing on things that actually might be helpful to devs. On a flip side, occasionally I have been too optimistic about a feature (*cough* PoE2 ship combat *cough*) assuming what I see is an early draft of a system, rather than its almost final version. Do you have any feedback to us, playerbase, from your time working on PoE? Have you heard other devs saying what they wish playerbase would/wouldn't focus on when playing early access builds of their titles?
Opt-in mechanics that arise out of bugs are some of my favorite features in any game. Quake strafe jumping and bunny hopping are opt-in, most can't even do it, but it lets people like me enjoy your game where I probably wouldn't have otherwise. I really wish that opt-in traversal mechanics such as strafe jumping and the like were a feature in every game, particularly open-world RPG's, because the "immersion" players who value their time in the world won't have their experience be affected because they likely don't even know such a thing exists, and if they do, will choose not to do it because it requires a conscious decision to do so... but let me play the game how I want, and let me bhop and jump around like a madman because that's how I want to play.
Thinking about how the events, conditions, to unlock Law/Amane's route in Devil Survivor had to be heavily simplified late in development because it was literally impossible to get that ending... even in the final game, it's the toughest to get.
Alright, Tim. First off, thank you for the explanation! Secondly, based on this explanation, I feel like i need to ask: how do you personally determine the difference between a bug and a "design" flaw? I feel like *a couple* of the bugs you described were issues with feature implementation rather than bugs (in my layman opinion).
Hey Tim, you briefly mentioned the game rating in this video and im curious of your experience with the ESRB and their foreign counterparts. In your limited experience, have you noticed that T rated games sell better than M rated games? I know you talked about the trials of getting Fallout approved for M but im curious of your experiences beyond.
Hi Tim, I'm months from shipping and we'll be going for a third party QA team. You think you could go more in-depth when it comes to what to look out for in that relationship? Perhaps things that raises green or red flags or just whatever experience you can share. Thanks!
Maybe not far into the future AI will be commonly used to not only play the game, but describe the gameplay it just did with natural language and then analyze the gameplay and be able to plan new ways of play-testing and writing reports on all that it did. That would be worth a few millions worth of work-time I presume in big projects. (not to mention performing deep linting right on the code with each push).
Did your QS build their own test levels, for example to pick every available container, run along a parkour to test movement, shoot every gun, have every class at a certain level fight a specific predefined encounter with an enemy group (balancing) etc. ? I guess a lot of issues can be found quickly by structured testing, that is not necessarily possible in actual game levels.
Part of the fun with the old rpgs, like during SNES/PS1/Ps2 era because they can't be updated is that, as gamers we find workarounds, exploits and strategies to work with the bugs. (Like how even tho RNG is seeded, some games it's completely broken or we figured out all the values)
Xenoblade 2 once had an update that made a late-game special move involving some of the main characters(!!) always crash the game... it took like a month to get patched
I have an experience with playtesting and bugs I'd like to share. TL;DR: Be sure to check for typos when bug hunting. I once ran into a bug while playtesting a mod that so disruptive that we had to stop using shotguns altogether because of what I like to call "the shrapnel wave". Any shotgun type weapon with "pellet" modifiers would lag the server and everyone's game. To give you an idea, one of my weapons fired around 7 pellets normally, add pellet+9 and add pellet+6. What should have been *22 pellets* turned into *378 pellets.* And we're talking about an Unreal1 Engine game here, so it strained the game and server pretty bad. The bug *multiplied* the pellets as many times as the trait was applied to the guns because the modder made a typo.
Do you play indie games? And given your own background, does it affect how you view them? Either in a curious way given the (usually) much smaller team, nostalgic if they reminds of the earlier days or is it a whole other world?
Hi, Tim, do you have a collection of the funniest bugs that appeared in your games during production? I know some devs like to keep the funniest bug videos for entertainment purposes, although they're rarely shown to the public.
I think something of interest is if bugs can be a good thing, ie the system isn't working as intended but for some reason or another the player is enjoying the way it has resulted in game
certification process really clashed with certain studios (looking at relic and dawn of war 2 here). I understand why MS would want to do it (largely reputation management) but as an end user it was excruciating to sit there waiting weeks for a hotfix after a patch came out
Tim mentioned in some video, he plays some Action, Adventure and RTS games every now and then, but mostly it's RPGs. And even with those, he hates getting shoe-horned into pre-defined characters, so things like The Witcher, Cyberpunk, Rockstar stuff or most JRPGs probably aren't his cup of tea.
Hi Tim, Regarding the Bard/ Nosferatu problem, isnt it in some sense reasonable that the least popular classes/races gets tested less? Or do you think that all classes should have the same polish, even if you know in advance that some will be more popular than the others?
They weren’t just tested less, they were barely tested at all. One of the bugs for the Nosferatu was that they could not transition between two maps on the main quest line, which means that no one even played them through the game one time.
@CainOnGames that is of course unacceptable. Not being able to complete the game as on of the clans offered to you must have felt pretty bad for those who tried. You ranked you bugs by severity, but shouldn't frequency and possibility to avoid be some sort of factor too? If lets say in fallout 1 the game crashes if you put 1024 objects on the ground in the same map (rare and avoidable behavior) be aless serious bug than the rats behaving weird when you start the game.
@@jontofteskov4897 As someonew who works in QA, they are indeed factors, but they are usually less important than severity. A minor bug with 100% repro rate is much less important in the grand scope of things than a big bug like "being unable to finish a questline" with 5% repro rate, because 5% repro rate bug becomes a MUCH bigger issue once your game ships and is being played by potentially hundreds of thousands of people.
I absolutely love Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty and Cyberpunk 2077, but it annoyed me to no end how both the base game and the DLC had a few boss fights that forced my sneaky neturnner corpo assassin to fight them headfirst with guns blazing: the spider thingy in Phantom Liberty, Adam Smasher and Oda. Now, all of these allow netrunning to help you a bit (Oda a bit less), but you can't rely ONLY on sneaking and netrunning, like you can almost everywhere else during the game. Since I like to play on the hardest difficulty, I personally had no choice but to bring down the difficulty for these fights, and that really irked me...
No poisoning? No manipulation? No killing in the night/darkness? A stealth fighter is supposed to be as strong as a vampire. The stealth is only there because the stealth character desires to relax and be away from the crowd.
This was a gigantic issue for Deus Ex: Human Revolution as well. The boss fights are so badly implemented that they can be showstoppers for certain nonlethal builds, even if they're not necessarily stealth builds.
Isn't it a case that some time ago a publisher or a developer firm made business decision to cut the QA, so that the players do it? Other developers/publishers saw this and copied because it worked from business standpoint
I love in arcanum when virgil dies he cries for help. some bugs when its charming is ok. thats how oblivion got so famous for its npcs doing and saying strange things.
Not sure Tim has had to work under such conditions but I wanted to ask about the recent thousands of layoffs in the gaming industry. People were layed off not only from studios that had issues or a bad release but also from studios that consistently create successful games that make profit. If you're doing good and the studio does good but that does not guarantee that you keep your job, how can people work under such conditions and do their best?
Hey, Tim. What's your opinion on automated testing, which is very prevalent in software development in general. What are the good proportions between automated tests and play-testing, or are there any? Do automated tests and play-testing cover completely different tested functions/systems and do not intersect?
I think he has been avoiding the automated testing topic tbh lol. I've noticed it is such a contentious topic in games that devolves into a lot of tribalism compared to mainstream software dev.
@@arcan762 > I've noticed it is such a contentious topic in games that devolves into a lot of tribalism rly? Why? I would be actually interested to hear from experienced gamedev, especially with experience as programmer, and not just designer/director/manager in software dev it is almost mandatory these days, at least unit testing, and even outside of coding, project managers/analysts/engineers that don't code use all sorts of tools like Selenium and such
@@nickrubin7312 I just find there are attitudes like "testing is the holy grail and will solve all of our problems" through to "testing is a waste of time as the feature being tested may just get completely changed/the requirements are too volatile right now for tests to be worth the effort of writing". I've worked in healthcare software where testing is a must, but do some game stuff too where everything is about getting maximum features out the door ASAP, as long as it works (mostly) then it is good enough. Automated tests are nice if you have the time, but you never have the time. TBF I find writing tests can easily take several times as long to do than implementing the actual thing being tested.
@@arcan762 interesting, I've never dubbed into gamedev, so I don't know. >maximum features out the door ASAP, Yeah, that's probably it, I usually (not always), worked in the process of creating MVP and then adding features while iterating. Or not MVP necessarily, but to implement requirements needed most to the customer. >I've worked in healthcare software where testing is a must I think would've been strange otherwise Personally, for a long time working in custom software dev, and right now, in the current company, it is TDD (Test Driven Development). Yes resource/time heavy indeed. Was just wondering, especially with the topic of "bugs", and play-testing and QA were brought up, how is it in games, since I rarely see it being brought up (and for the past 4-5 years with TDD my head is a bit warped around automated testing). Thanks for providing at least some insight, with the approach of "getting maximum features out the door ASAP" and how resource (time) heavy writing tests is, kind of makes sense if it was not so popular in gamedev.
The Outer Worlds shipped with a consistent crash bug very near the end of the game. Not for 100% of players, but for many. Luckily you could avoid it by walking on a ledge or something past the room where it triggered. Yeah very not buggy.
Ive had very very very few gamebreaking bugs in any game over 30+ years of gaming. Feel a lot of games get a bad rap when it comes to bugs that isnt fair. Bethesda for example. Yeah there are some bugs but really the games have worked very well (some i dont like but that is something else). New Vegas is also claimed to have been so buggy on release (not really, yeah there are bugs but how bad are they really in so far that they ruin the experience?) Bloodlines had a crash bug but i played full runs on release fine (may have gotten a patch or fix). And again it didnt ruin the fun in the game. Fallout 1 has some issues with the end slides but worked very well. Ive had a few corrupted games in Arcanum (but ive played it maybe 50 times? 100?). And ive modded it and use the uap. Anyway my point is that some of my favorite games have had these "yeah but they got a lot of bugs thing" following them and compared to most other games it isnt fair. They have no more bugs than them. And most importantly none of the bugs have ruined these games. However the current idea of release game fix later is just awful.
"on my lowest Tier are things that people say arent fun: maybe theres a skill that noone ever takes" me checking the Fallout 1 wiki: "Out of the 53 perks only a dozen are implemented in a fashion that gives a functional benefit." hmmmm yeah i can see that, it all makes sense now 🤣
Hello Mr. Tim Cain , In your video you said " RPG's are really complicated pieces of software , they are extraordinarily complex and made of many interlocking pieces " Soo kinda technically speaking RPG's main infrastructure is most likely based on calculations , mathematical equations and other stuff related with CPU and RAM usage rather than graphical usages . To prevent at least for crutial bugs isn't it possible to make a simulation to interact with almost every possible combinations that this game is using for soo try to figure it out that , if this game with some situations might be crash or not ? At least for fundamental testing . Or could it be too time and money consuming that , the companies ain't use these things for testing like that ? I'm asking this because recently released on In one particular game i wouldn't like to give it's name , this thing happened . The game itself not have crutial bug on , it can be playable and no critical bug that crashes the game . But the problem in this RPG game is , while you playing with a some certain characters with some combinations you spend on your skills and with some items you weared it in this particular RPG game , you become invincible . It's like character A can become invincible with some sort of combinations but if you choose character B you become way too less effective than character A . The developers said these things that , to shortened version is : " Ok you players are going to play with your characters and when we realize that some unbalancing things occured in this game we will balance it " Wouldn't at least this situation is possible to test with ?
Constant crashing has ruined so many great games for me on console. Wasteland 3, Pillars of Eternity 2, Path Finder King maker all on PlayStation. I just want to enjoy some amazing Isometric Rpg's without major issues. :'( I'm curious as to why games are allowed to be sold with major problems like this.
There is no rivalry between BGS and Obsidian. ;) (Well, maybe a friendly rivalry, but not the rivalry you likely have in mind.) Are you referring to the "dumb" rivalry between fans of Fallout 3 and New Vegas, originally revolving around the either/or question, "Which is better? Fallout 3 or New Vegas?" (That's somehow morphed into the either/or question, "Which studio is better? BGS or Obsidian?") Others, of course, appreciate both FO3 and New Vegas for different reasons and play them back to back, often using the mod, Tale of Two Wastelands, to carry one character through both games. The studios' approaches and design philosophies actually complement one another in many ways, the weaknesses of one being the strengths of the other and vice versa. I wonder what would happen if BGS and Obsidian collaborated on developing a new game? (And not necessarily a Fallout game.) I imagine it'd be one of the greatest RPGs of all time.
I think non of your titles ever did something remotly close to Early Access or pre-release access but do you see it as an opportunity to get 'free' QA and some funds or a good way to ruin the first impression you leave on the market? Or phrased differently , do you think EA is a benefit , a gamble or even a bad move for a developer? Does it change with size? Like obviously an indie company could use the free labour and additional funds while it might look bad if a big company releases a title as Early Access when people expect full ready titles from them.
The recent bug is when the game that the consumer expected was going to be on their hard earned paid for hardware investment, is no longer available on said hardware but on the rival hardware.
The worst kind of bug is one that destroys your OS installation. See: The Boot ini file being destroyed by EVE in a fatal bug from a few years back. Horrendous.
IMHO not all things Tim mentioned are “bugs”, such as adhering to platform certification, age ratings or things not being FUN. For our team, this Q&A thing is simple - as I am both game designer AND Q&A lead 😹
approach if taken by many would lead to worse quality worse games and overall decline but hey, you do you, if any bugs trigger you that much that you have to wait 2 years (lol, wut, that's a proper OCD right there), then hey, wait 2 years, wait 10 years even, it would be almost for free lmao (inb4 "well well, they shouldn't release buggy messes" -> yeah yeah, sure, waiters gonna wait)
@@nickrubin7312 that's your delusion so you can feel better triggered? huh? you're triggered, clearly, and projecting if no one bought games when they released because they were bugger, publishers would have to give developers more time&money to make better products but you are part of a culture of 'now now now!' and that is what leads to decrease in quality I CHOOSE to wait, do you not understand that? I have a life, full - I haven't played Pillars of Eternity or Numenera or UnderRail beyond ~20 hours each (less for Numenera) I backed Numenera at a high tier, btw and backed Pillars and Wasteland 2, and 3, and more yet I still waited to play them but you just want to create stories that make you feel better
I remember the Dos game, Mines of Titan, my friend discovered that if you went to the casino and played a few games, recorded the outcome of those games, reload before playing and bet on those same numbers, he won every time. Fun times.
As a customer, I understand that there will be bugs. But it frustrates me when devs/publishers quickly abandon a game and won't fix bugs. I've started to wonder if "Right to Repair" laws might eventually get extended to software and how that might change software publishing.
Please, if you're a developer, leave fun bugs in your game. Bugs in games, and RPGS especially, are some of my favorite moments in gaming history. Take Morrowind for instance, and how you can launch yourself, or stack to infinite damage, or get infinite money. Morrowind as a base game is an incredible experience for people who want to play an immersive RPG, but these additional aspects of the game create infinite replayability potential. I enjoyed Skyrim, but far less because of how sandboxed all of the mechanics are, and how they can't interact with one another, making the game less attractive for me to replay, whereas I still keep Morrowind installed to mess with the over-the-top unintended system interactions.
The consumer of games is not getting an honest representation of a game from a large studio. That is one of the reasons people get really angry when a game has bugs. When a large multi-million dollar game is marketed and hyped for a long time with out of this world advertising, the consumer expects a Rolls Royce. They instead get a Ford that needs a tune up.
I have a small question - what game engine Arcanum uses ? Someting bought or home (as in - in company) made ? Also, is it really the same engine used in both Arcanum and ToEE ?
I think they are both built upon proprietary engines. They most probably used some of the code from the fallout engine. It would make sense that they are different as well, at least looking at the features of both games. But the info on this is scarce, it is merely my speculation :)
"We'll patch it after we release it" reminds me of a film industry phrase that leads often to disaster. "We'll fix it in post" Which means rather than do another take, or attempt to compensate for the problem we are having while shooting, we are just going to move on and hope the editors can fix it.
@@nickrubin7312 If Implied that they were I'm sorry for the confusion. I was comparing what I saw as similar attitudes towards creation of media. I'm say that the attitude of putting off the work of repairing or improving problems is detrimental to the integrity of what you are making. I work in the film industry so I can relate more easily to "We'll fix it in post."
I think the newer Zelda games proved you can make a mass scale game without significant bugs. Granted it isn't an RPG, but it easily could have been one if Nintendo wanted it to be.
@@arcan762 Any game with polish takes a lot of money, I think that's a given lol, I'm just saying Nintendo proved it can happen on that scale. Bethesda & Xbox have a lot of money too, but their games are arguably more broken now than ever
@@evanorodd Starfield is the most polished title, that's why people look on other stuff about Starfield There is money and time, and then there are MONEY + TIME. Nintendo for Zelda has all the MONEY AND TIME in the world.
@@nickrubin7312 Starfield isn't really open world like Skyrim or BotW are. It's more like a series of randomly populated zones that take place on procedurally generated terrain. If anything, it's more comparable to sandbox games like Minecraft or No Man's Sky (in terms of the technology behind them) Starfield is polished on a technical level, but the design of the game doesn't even approach Nintendo's level of polish in BotW's design
i never care about bugs in a game, i care about, when a game is so bad.. you can't even play it. that's like.. why i even spend 60 euro.. on this shit?
do you use AI for coding? GPT, Copilot or something else? if not why not? also for testing? i think AI can be absolutely used for elimination bugs even today, but probably a framework needed for general purpose bugfixing in games the more complex RPGs (but programs in general) will be the more AI needed for testing, i have been using copilot for 6 months i dont know how could i have lived without it
@@coldwarpgates622it depends how you use it, there is a learning curve for that alone, im getting better and better every month in it and i absolutely love it what i really hate is google bard/gemini i tried it for the same purpose and i think it is trash
