Buggy Games: Lazy devs or sneaky tactic?

[MalicE]

So this has been bugging me (pun not intended) for quite some time now. How can developers and publishers release games that are so obviously broken? and to make it even worse, it has become such a standard thing in our gaming lives that we have just come to accept this as "the norm". But why? Are we nothing more than sheeple to these people?

Today the term "launch day patch" has become so common that we all just expect and accept it. Our biggest gripe these days are how big that patch download will be. AND IT SHOULDN'T. excuse my ignorance but are you telling me that in the time between the publisher signing off on a game and it going into production and onto the (digital) shelf the devs went "Oh shit guys! we missed a few things! Let's make a patch quick before it launches to fix it". And then you download the day one patch AND IT'S STILL BUGGY! And then there will be 9 more patches after that and there will still be bugs.

Back in my day (ugh) there was no such thing as a launch day patch. Hell there were barely such a thing as A patch, They made a game, they tested the game, they fixed the game, they released the game. DONE.

Let's take Fallout: New Vegas as our example:



NOW! That is right at the beginning of the game. Broken. Completely fucked. Now even if it was your first day on the job as a software tester and the only previous experience you've had as a software tester was that one time your colleague asked you to check if his Excel formulas were working correctly, while you were working as the receptionist at PricewaterhouseCooper, you would have been able to spot that little dev faux pas. Which brings me to my next point...

Because my brain is struggling to make sense of this "phenomenon" it starts looking for answers in strange places. So it came up with this; It is my theory that developers/publishers are intentionally releasing the broken games in an attempt to deter piracy. If you pirate a game you get it broken and it stays broken, and in some cases the cracked copies are even more broken. You can't patch it cause you're a filthy pirate. If you want a semi fixed patched game you have to go download an entire new copy. Or if you do manage to get hold of a standalone patch your crack will stop working and then you have to wait for a new crack to be released.

Could this just be the best/worst piracy prevention method ever? But at what price??? Is it really worth alienating your loyal paying consumer?

except for Batman: Arkham Knight. Don't know wtf they were doing there.

Of course, that's just my opinion, I could be wrong...

TL;DR : devs be whack yo!

[DieGrootHammer]

No, I do not agree with your theory of developers intentionally releasing broken games. No developer in the world wants to release a broken or buggy project or game, no matter what type of software they have created.

The problem is the financial modeling used for game development and the increasing complexity of games as technological advancements are achieved. Today games are many times more complex than games written just a few years ago, with different graphical and arithmetic processes being incorporated to make games appear "smarter" or "more advance", yet the financial modeling implemented by studios have stayed the same.

You see, in management of any project you are presented in balancing the Time Cost Quality Pyramid:



This theory states that you cannot have an abundance of one element without compromising on the others. Keeping cost low, i.e. moving to the cost side of the pyramid, will cause a decrease in time and quality of the project. It is up to the management team to ensure there is a balance between these three elements too ensure the successful implementation of any project.

And here is where the economics of game development makes for a further complication of this balancing act. Any game development company will have a fundamental problem with cashflow, as games are not sold as steadily on a monthly basis as other products. You simply cannot budget for the same amount of cashflow for the months after release of a game, as it's widely known that games generate most of their overall lifetime income from the first few months after release. This will cause the company to ensure proper income management to ensure there is enough working capitol available in the company to keep operations going, and to keep covering expenses.

Now, when a company starts with a new project or game, they are given a specific budget that will be financed by previous sales performance, investments and loans made by the company. This is the cost aspect of the project, and to ensure efficient management of that cost, the rest of the two elements, time and quality, must be balanced accordingly. Development houses will then schedule out development and testing to ensure that the project is kept in the black throughout it's lifespan, and a projected time of release is set. This will be planned out in Gantt charts and WBS's and the costing for each will be set out in full.

Now comes the quality part, which is the hurdle in the equation. Many tasks as set out by the project management team is too short to ensure full and proper testing of development. An increase in time will ensure that most, if not all, bugs and quality checks will be implemented, this is also up the cost and time spent on each task in a big way. Some things I'm sure the project team will be lenient on and give the team additional time to bug fix, but at some point during the process, the time and cost factors becomes too much for the company to handle, and cashflow is needed, and so decisions is made to cut certain processes short.

Now, with all this balancing being done, there are inevitably some issues that would have been unaddressed by the development team to keep budget spend as low as possible. With games being so much more complex, it's completely understandable that some issues would have been left out of main development run to ensure budget and time frame is reached. So, when the game goes gold, these issues will be addressed in the form of a Day One Patch. These patches are additional time given to the development team to fix the majority of the biggest bugs to ensure proper stable state of the game.

So, as is my opinion, it is more business and cost management decisions that drives the need for day one patches, even though games these days are too complex for the same time frames and the same financial models implemented for games.

PLEASE NOTE - The views expressed are my own views after many days of careful consideration, but I may be very wrong...

[VirtualForce]

I sometimes wonder if it isnt the amount of software and hardware variations we have. I mean, from the various versions of graphic cards, to CPUs. Then you have anything from Win XP to Win 10....from the most virus filled pirate ed to the most up to date patched version.
Besides that, people install all kinds of crap on their PC at times creating issues....and not to mention cracked game versions people love to complain about too. (See Garys Mod pirate error and Serious Sam's scorpion DRM)

Windows OS has also become a more complex beast as time moved on from DOS.

I wonder if the ecosystem for PCs isnt to varied. I know Direct X and whatnot is suppose to make it easier. I am not a programmer, so I'm just thinking out loudly.

I am not trying to shift blame from devs, very obviously they should wake up, that New Vegas is bad animation issue, plus loads more.

[Dohc-WP]

The problem with game development these days is there's a shitload of money riding on titles and most devs are under pressure to release a title on a deadline ie must be released for the christmas period etc, these types problems have been going back for ages, We all remember the shit ET Game that was coded in less than a month. so devs normally dont bother fixing minor issues, they'll rather finish the game to be released on time and tend to the bugs later.

[MalicE]

/snip

fair enough, but my old boss used say "the time you spend fixing your fuckup is time you could have spent doing it right the first time".
End of the day it's probably costing them more money having to go back and keep fixing their mistakes, while simultaneously pissing off the end user.

Today games are many times more complex than games written just a few years ago, with different graphical and arithmetic processes being incorporated to make games appear "smarter" or "more advance"

true, but remember back then they also didn't have the tech we have today to make those games. Or graphic engines to piggy back off of. they did everything from scratch with raw coding talent. I almost want to say making game have gotten easier over the years.

I sometimes wonder if it isnt the amount of software and hardware variations we have. I mean, from the various versions of graphic cards, to CPUs. Then you have anything from Win XP to Win 10....from the most virus filled pirate ed to the most up to date patched version.
Besides that, people install all kinds of crap on their PC at times creating issues....and not to mention cracked game versions people love to complain about too. (See Garys Mod pirate error and Serious Sam's scorpion DRM)

Windows OS has also become a more complex beast as time moved on from DOS.

I wonder if the ecosystem for PCs isnt to varied. I know Direct X and whatnot is suppose to make it easier. I am not a programmer, so I'm just thinking out loudly.

I am not trying to shift blame from devs, very obviously they should wake up, that New Vegas is bad animation issue, plus loads more.

good point but that would only account for some incompatibility issues, which are understandable and completely forgiveable. it's near impossible to test a game on every variant of a pc build. but once again, Batman: AK has no excuse with this regard.

And where does that leave consoles?...

[ArchieChoke]

So this has been bugging me (pun not intended) for quite some time now. How can developers and publishers release games that are so obviously broken? and to make it even worse, it has become such a standard thing in our gaming lives that we have just come to accept this as "the norm". But why? Are we nothing more than sheeple to these people?

Today the term "launch day patch" has become so common that we all just expect and accept it. Our biggest gripe these days are how big that patch download will be. AND IT SHOULDN'T. excuse my ignorance but are you telling me that in the time between the publisher signing off on a game and it going into production and onto the (digital) shelf the devs went "Oh shit guys! we missed a few things! Let's make a patch quick before it launches to fix it". And then you download the day one patch AND IT'S STILL BUGGY! And then there will be 9 more patches after that and there will still be bugs.

Back in my day (ugh) there was no such thing as a launch day patch. Hell there were barely such a thing as A patch, They made a game, they tested the game, they fixed the game, they released the game. DONE.

Let's take Fallout: New Vegas as our example:



NOW! That is right at the beginning of the game. Broken. Completely fucked. Now even if it was your first day on the job as a software tester and the only previous experience you've had as a software tester was that one time your colleague asked you to check if his Excel formulas were working correctly, while you were working as the receptionist at PricewaterhouseCooper, you would have been able to spot that little dev faux pas. Which brings me to my next point...

Because my brain is struggling to make sense of this "phenomenon" it starts looking for answers in strange places. So it came up with this; It is my theory that developers/publishers are intentionally releasing the broken games in an attempt to deter piracy. If you pirate a game you get it broken and it stays broken, and in some cases the cracked copies are even more broken. You can't patch it cause you're a filthy pirate. If you want a semi fixed patched game you have to go download an entire new copy. Or if you do manage to get hold of a standalone patch your crack will stop working and then you have to wait for a new crack to be released.

Could this just be the best/worst piracy prevention method ever? But at what price??? Is it really worth alienating your loyal paying consumer?

except for Batman: Arkham Knight. Don't know wtf they were doing there.

Of course, that's just my opinion, I could be wrong...

TL;DR : devs be whack yo!

Ill add my own personal opinion here, though i do not consider myself an indie or pro dev. I just take a huge interest in how things work in gaming.

First thing that comes to mind is you take note they have quality testers, do you take note that a team of tester's will generally have the same hardware spec for all rigs, I.e. everyone has a GTX 780, i5 4GB RAM as an example.

Now to expect them to have every hardware spec available to test their game would be unfair towards the devs as the cost to have all that hardware would be huge. Now in most game engines they use techniques like every frame fresh do something for example, physics models are based on this. Now think of it this way, you built your game engine around everything running at 30 FPS, anything above that will cause a calculation to be a 1 to 1 floating point (Take note floating variables is not procession value, but is very light on memory ) example:-

int main()
{
using namespace std;
float f;
f = 9.87654321f; ---- 1 ---- ----Values
cout << f << endl;
f = 987.654321f; ---- 2 ---- ----Values
cout << f << endl;
f = 987654.321f; ---- 3 ---- ----Values
cout << f << endl;
f = 9876543.21f; ---- 4 ---- ----Values
cout << f << endl;
f = 0.0000987654321f; ---- 5 ---- ----Values
cout << f << endl;
return 0;
}

This program outputs:

9.87654 --- 1
987.654 --- 2
987654 --- 3
9.87654e+006 --- 4
9.87654e-005 --- 5


Now that touches what happens when users directly try to modify the game based on their personal opinions without the knowledge as to why they locked it.

As for the video you showed, that seems like a rigging issue, where the neck seems to think its the head of the character and the head of the character is just receiving the incorrect values. But to cover perhaps how it got missed is exactly the testers. When you test something it will work then you move on, so lets say 6 months ago, the testers were told to test the intro into vega's, all was clear six months ago. Now fast forward to 6 months they are busy testing a level or a mission extensively, they don't go back to the intro to test the mission they need to test. They just merely
load the required assets to test the mission, for example Load NPC X, load level Y, load test player character. Then you just test, they need to create a test level as loading times will account to a large amount of time the testers are doing. If they loaded the entire game every time a crash occurs, a bug is detected and needs to be reproduce, they would have spent almost half a year on load times.

Going back to the the Vegas story, lets say the devs had to redo their character rigging model to adapt a function they required. This would entail them going through all their Assets again and testing to see the side affects and repair them.

To answer this question:-

Our biggest gripe these days are how big that patch download will be. AND IT SHOULDN'T. excuse my ignorance but are you telling me that in the time between the publisher signing off on a game and it going into production and onto the (digital) shelf the devs went "Oh shit guys! we missed a few things! Let's make a patch quick before it launches to fix it". And then you download the day one patch AND IT'S STILL BUGGY! And then there will be 9 more patches after that and there will still be bugs.



Yes you would.

Any corporate environment sometimes you are forced to just deploy something even though the devs know its not 100%, what usually happens is a discussion comes round like can we proceed with deploying with minimal impact of success of the project. Generally if there is no show stoppers they will launch. Its the same in factories, if a machine breaks down, Engineers will debate if a part that broke is a show stopper or not, if it is it needs to get sorted. If it is not then the machine will continue to operate (Yes, even if it may damage something else) .


As for the piracy story, im half half about that. While some companies do it openly (I.e. Ubisoft) others just have bugs, not intentional bugs, but stuff that was not caught because of a change made by the devs.

Another fantastic example is Chris Roberts space industries I.e. Star citizen.

They using Cryengine, now when i was using it many of the C++ libraries have not been changed since 1997, if you downloaded cry engine and opened the source files you will see it for yourself.Now if you look at what has changed since 1997 there is just so much. DirectX, hardware architecture etc etc... Now if some of the code is real old and your just slapping new code expecting it to cater for 64-Bit architecture then things will break and crash.


This is the very reason we have not got Star citizen, they bought Cryengine's staff (After that liquidation story) and they have been for about a year re-coding the libraries to cater for 64-bit architecture, so alot of time will be spent on building and testing code non stop.


Now going back to the whole thing, I really think its a mix of problems:-


1. Shareholders do not care for your I.T. jargon and reasons why you cant release. We need money now.
2. Public pressure if you do not release.
3. Internal organization
4. other factors

At the end of the day look at the bigger picture. There is just so much involved with making games and releasing them that I highly doubt they really wanna release broken products.

[MalicE]

/snip

ow... my brain...

all good but New Vegas was riddled with bugs across the board. NPC's floating in mid air in the open world. The dog's eyes sitting on the side of it's head. you can't help but feel there was a bit of laziness there. especially since it was basically a copy/paste of Fallout 3

As for Batman, how did they not notice during testing that it doesn't work on the PC?

[MetalSoup]

ow... my brain...

all good but New Vegas was riddled with bags across the board.

[MalicE]

[ArchieChoke]

ow... my brain...

all good but New Vegas was riddled with bags across the board. NPC's floating in mid air in the open world. The dog's eyes sitting on the side of it's head. you can't help but feel there was a bit of laziness there. especially since it was basically a copy/paste of Fallout 3

As for Batman, how did they not notice during testing that it doesn't work on the PC?

I know TMI TMI... But needed to get across that gaming is far more complex than just make a game.


- NPC's floating in mid air in the open world - Caused by the Character models World translation being incorrect or the model offset by a non initialized value.

Lols- wish I could agree but programming is a beast. We are all human and make mistakes. I mean today I initialize all my code, tomorrow I don't cause I did not sleep.

As for Batman, how did they not notice during testing that it doesn't work on the PC? - back to the same thing I mentioned, they buy the same pc specs for all game testing. But i cant answer this with knowledge, all I know is people complained about frame issues which i can understand.


Do some research around Level, Texture and Mesh streaming techniques.

It's hefty reading, but to give a run down, they don't load the full high res Texture/meshes/levels as it would take forever. They load a lower Res Texture/Mesh/Level then gradually bump it up, they also profile what stuff is important first and then go down that list.

Textures:-
https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest...ing/index.html

Mesh:-
https://www.cs.unc.edu/~isenburg/papers/il-sm-05.pdf - Heavy reading

Nowadays, we want more physics, more texture quality, more bumps and triangles on objects. But we never stop to think what the poor computer has to do to show it.


"Recent years have seen an immense increase in the complexity of
geometric data sets. Today’s gigabyte-sized polygon models can
no longer be completely loaded into the main memory of common
desktop PCs. Unfortunately, current mesh formats, which were designed
years ago when meshes were orders of magnitudes smaller,
do not account for this. Using such formats to store large meshes is
inefficient and complicates all subsequent processing.
We describe a streaming format for polygon meshes that is simple
enough to replace current offline mesh formats and is more suitable
for representing large data sets."