• KᑌᔕᕼIᗩ@lemmy.mlOP
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      1 year ago

      It’s truly amazing what can happen when they don’t cut quite so many corners and release the minimal viable product.

      • Harrison [He/Him]@ttrpg.network
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        1 year ago

        I’m not sure that using the entire QA staff of the world’s largest agglomeration of Dev studios on a single game only qualifies as “not cutting corners”. That’s surely going above and beyond.

        • Neato@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          If that’s what it takes to ship a game that doesn’t have multitudes of game breaking bugs like they’re known for, perhaps the company has bigger problems. Like still using an engine that is this bad.

          • derpo@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            This engine is a house of cards that is decades past collapsing.

        • Rolder@reddthat.com
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          1 year ago

          It really depends on if that dev studio conglomerate collectively cut costs on QA and by how much

        • Haui@discuss.tchncs.de
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          1 year ago

          I really don’t like the word agile since everyone I ever met who had this in their job title was blowing up steam someones butt. Is that the job description or what is it with these agile types?

          • ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Agile used to refer to a very specific way of developing software, but then it got coopted by the mainstream where companies kept doing shit the same way they always had but calling it “agile”. It’s basically like when early Christianity became the state religion of the Roman Empire.

            • Haui@discuss.tchncs.de
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              1 year ago

              That’s a pretty cool comparison. Can you elaborate on that a bit? I have no idea what actually happened with christianity in ancient rome.

            • legios@aussie.zone
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              1 year ago

              Yeah, every single workplace I’ve worked at aside from one has been “iterative waterfall” - AKA waterfall with sprints.

              Companies shouldn’t be allowed to say they’re “agile”…

    • fidodo@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      Also helps to come out with a game so popular you can bank on it for the next decade

      • glibg10b@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        That’s a fine excuse if you’re a developer, but not if you’re the one who chooses the deadlines

        • twelve20two @slrpnk.net
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          1 year ago

          Do the people who choose the deadlines (especially if they’re the publisher) really have that much influence on the programming and development side of things?

    • synicalx1@sopuli.xyz
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      1 year ago

      I’m only a few hours in, but aside from the usual weird NPC behaviour this engine is known for I haven’t encountered any actual bugs so far.

      • Dubious_Fart@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        yeah, the game stinks of gamebryo, but… I’ve only had one crash so far… Who would have that that all it would take to make a less buggy bethesda game was the entire QA department of one of the biggest companies on the planet.

          • Dubious_Fart@lemmy.ml
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            1 year ago

            You are missing the very important “so far”

            because it has crashed on me many times since that post.

    • daellat@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Strange, I’m about 12 hours in and apart from minor glitches like odd character movement every now and then it’s been pretty smooth sailing. What are you guys running into?

      • Mojo@ttrpg.network
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        1 year ago

        I walk by a shelf and it randomly explodes from some physics glitch.
        Things forever rolling that should not be rolling, like books.
        NPCs just keep sprinting into a wall.
        NPCs stuck halfway through the floor, both alive and dead.
        Enemies teleporting into mountain, and can shoot me from there.
        Creatures not attacking when they should.
        Ships clipping into stations.
        My character stuck in a pose.
        Guns floating.

        Nothing game breaking though!
        Just immersion-breaking.

        Im more concerned about other stuff. Performance. Design choices.
        I get 37fps in towns with an “UFO rated” computer on userbenchmark.
        The menus are horrible.
        And what good does the spaceship do? I just fast travel everywhere. I think I’ve seen the inside of my ship twice i 10hrs.
        Story is the most lazily written, generic scifi tropey stuff I’ve seen.
        No maps. No clue where shops are.
        The game is marketed as huge and open, but in reality it’s all just setpieces with empty planet surfaces. You cannot get into your ship and fly 500m east to your mission marker. If you do that, a new map is loaded and none of your missions are there.

        • daellat@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          I haven’t even run into half of those somehow, always curious how different experiences we can have

          • Mojo@ttrpg.network
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            1 year ago

            Yeah. People have vastly different combinations of hardware and software. Different manufacturers and drivers. So it can be really different.
            If they play on pc, I mean.

            I seem to unknowingly have built myself a real shit-magnet of a computer. Basically no new game has worked well for me since I built that one.
            I had like 20 bad bugs per hour with Cyberpunk on release while my buddy had like one mildly annoying per 5h.
            Darktide just didn’t work at all. Kept crashing six months after release, then I gave up.
            Etc etc…

        • Dubious_Fart@lemmy.ml
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          1 year ago

          I concur with pretty much everything you said, though I will say my FPS has been significantly better than yours. You got an nvidia card? I heard they are bugged with bad performance and waiting for a driver update.

          Game, while less critically fucky than previous Betehsda efforts (No doubt thanks to Microsoft dragging Bethesda into QA kicking and screaming), still carry the heavy stink of gamebryo, with classic bugs that have been there for decades… Like items/NPCs falling through floors for no reason.

          I dont mind the very plane world map on random gen planets and shit, but how the fuck am i supposed to navigate New Atlantis or Neon on a field of useless floating dots and a collapsing fast travel icon stack?

          edit I want to add that the autosaving fucking sucks, too. Especially since i got set back by a significant margin due to the crash i just had.

          • Rehwyn@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            The issue with Nvidia cards is that Bethesda had an agreement with AMD for the game dev, so NVIDIA DSLL isn’t included. This means NVIDIA cards can’t by default take advantage of their full resolution upscaling ability.

            I say “by default” because there’s already mods that replace AMD FSR with NVIDIA DSLL. I installed DSLL 3.5 and have been running it essentially without issues (very rarely the screen goes black for a second or two). Getting smooth frame rates on my 2070 super, 3440x1440, High settings other than resolution scaling (which I set around 58%, essentially DSLL “balanced”).

            • Dubious_Fart@lemmy.ml
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              1 year ago

              I cant find where I saw it, but what I saw was not a lack of DSLL, it was like an actual driver bug requiring a driver update to address.

              a driver update isnt gonna add DSLL.

      • MeatsOfRage@lemmy.ca
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        1 year ago

        Same, it’s been exceptionally smooth considering the scale and scope of this game

  • iAmTheTot@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    I’ve watched multiple reviews though that have said some variation of “yup, it’s a Bethesda game, bugs and all”

    • ImFresh3x@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      Watched twitch streams out if curiosity. This is a bathesda game in every way. Which is fine, but it feels like we’re being told it’s not. And it is.

    • emptyother@programming.dev
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      1 year ago

      But it IS still the least buggy Bethesda game yet, that I believe. If all people got to complain about is lack of some HDR shit, theres not much to complain about.

      I’ve only found a few bugs so far: One enemy floating in air, and followers who aren’t good at following.

      • Ser Salty@feddit.de
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        1 year ago

        I’ve had some of the usual physics glitching out and exploding stuff all over the place, and one guy phased through a bar counter… other than that, pretty smooth sailing.

      • Shiggles@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        Oh boy, I’m sure an account with a username like yours is definitely here to make good faith arguments and have productive discussions.

          • DreamButt@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            You realize that’s from people who get free copies right? Let’s wait to see how the average worker feels about shelling out 70~100 for it

            • Dubious_Fart@lemmy.ml
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              1 year ago

              I got a free copy with my GPU. I wouldnt have spent 100 dollars on 5 days early access. thats just stupid as fuck.

            • Pieresqi@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              I am average worker who preordered it 2-3 days ago for 100€ with intent that if it’s bad that I will be able to refund it.

              So far I have like 6 hours put it and except some stuff sometimes clipping through walls or weird movement and 1 crash I didn’t notice anything else broken. There are some game mechanics I am annoyed about and “open-world” performance is bad but it’s not broken game the bitching make it outs to be.

              So far I am experiencing the Bethesda RPG™ I though it would be and I am happy. Can’t wait for modders to put more stuff in.

      • BruceTwarzen@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        If you don’t mind the puppet faces, the Bethesda jank and playing from loading screen to loading screen, the game is great. I wouldn’t even pirate that crap.

          • secret301@sh.itjust.works
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            1 year ago

            In all other Bethesda games I only have minor bugs because of mods to fix a majority of them. I’m not buying star field for another 2 months at least because I’ve played previous Bethesda games and I rather buy it once it works

            • CaptnNMorgan@reddthat.com
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              1 year ago

              Yeah! Fuck all the evidence showing this is the one Bethesda game we wouldn’t have to wait for mods to make it enjoyable. I only like learning from my own experience, can’t trust anyone.

    • CreateProblems@corndog.social
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      1 year ago

      Hey, I work in QA (not in the video game field though.) However, I can tell you there is a difference between “QA missed” and “deadlines required prioritizing other fixes.”

      One implies that the employees are bad at their job. Which is almost certainly not the case. I haven’t played Starfield (or even clicked through to your link lol) but presumably this is something blatantly obvious. And I’m sure the QA team was frustrated letting a glaring known issue through.

      QA finds issues but it’s up to development teams to fix them, and strict deadlines will always hamper delivering a flawless product. But deadlines are driven by management and until the industry changes (i.e. don’t preorder games) we’re going to keep seeing these problems.

      But as a QA professional, please don’t blame us ✌️

      • stratoscaster@lemmy.zip
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        1 year ago

        As someone who works in software dev, QA is a godsend to developers. Thank you for your sacrifice lol

      • Alien Nathan Edward@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        This. You don’t know what’s sitting on a jira somewhere with “won’t fix” tagged to it. As an ex-QA who’s now a dev, we want to fix everything and we get told what we will and will not be fixing. When you see bugs in the final product that are relatively easy to reproduce, the story there is almost certainly that we found it and then the money told us not to bother with it because they think you’ll buy the product anyway.

        • _stranger_@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          My favorite interaction ever, as a QA:

          me: Our integration testing environment is constantly broken due to bad practices among all the teams that share it. They need to be aware of the contract they expose and how they’re changing it before they deploy their code to any shared space.

          management: Given the recent complaints about the instability of the QA environment, we’ve decided to shut it down and eliminate all QA positions.

          • Alien Nathan Edward@lemm.ee
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            1 year ago

            Our managers did that shit, too, back when I was in the durable medical equipment industry. They said some shit like “QA as an org is dysfunctional, as evidence by all the complaints. We’re gonna streamline the process by eliminating them and having dev teams do their own QA according to this checklist we’ve developed. We think that we can get the same quality for less money and less bureaucratic overhead communicating between the dev teams and the QA team.” They cut about $2 million in annual salary right then and there. A lot of our QA engineers and even a couple of their managers found out about the restructuring at the all-hands where they announced this.

            Fast forward a year, they’re getting the shit sued out of them and have to do a multi-billion dollar recall because of…let’s just call it an “emergent use case” among our customers that no one foresaw and therefore no one tested. That emergent use case was sending people to the hospital. I’ll go to my grave confident that someone whose only job was QA would have absolutely been able to catch that.

            • Alien Nathan Edward@lemm.ee
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              1 year ago

              Lol some of their devices absolutely shipped w privesc bugs, including at least one that could be rooted and I know cuz I was on the team that pentested it but I’m not tryna feed Lemmy some shit that a basic security scan could tell y’all. All I’m gonna say is that if it has wifi or Bluetooth throw scans at it.

      • MeatsOfRage@lemmy.ca
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        1 year ago

        Hell yea brother. Lazy Dev / Lazy QA talk is shit that’s gotta stop. Dev here. No one likes to ship buggy code, it’s just gonna come back to bite us. Sometimes all you can do is ship good enough code because there are 20 more Jira tickets coming down the pipe.

        The teams behind a single AAA game are often as big or bigger than your average tech startup. It’s competing priorities all the way up and down the ladder and devs and QA often have very little influence over this.

      • BorgDrone@lemmy.one
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        1 year ago

        It’s blatantly obvious and makes the game look like shit. This should not a low-prio bug, this should be a showstopper.

          • BorgDrone@lemmy.one
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            1 year ago

            Yeah I don’t buy it. This is not a new engine they just developed, or some obscure complicated feature. This is one of the core functionalities of the game engine: render the game world onto the screen. And it’s an engine they developed in-house. They have been working on this game for years and years, and all that time no one noticed that output of the rendering engine is incorrect and everything looks washed out?

            In the current state, the game should not have been released at all. If this is something that was fundamentally unfixable they should have pulled the plug and cancelled the game.

            • bleistift2@feddit.de
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              1 year ago

              Is it possible you only watched the first half? From 3:30 onwards the video digs into why it’s hard to push a release date.

              • BorgDrone@lemmy.one
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                1 year ago

                Yes I did. I’m not saying they should have pushed the release date but cancelled the release entirely. As in: never release it and refund everyone who preordered it.

    • DreamButt@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      As a developer who works with great QA people. I can guarantee you that the QA team were not the issue here. Where the developer’s time was prioritized and what fixes where even allowed to be patched would have been a direct result of leadership decisions

      • ipkpjersi@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        Yep. A lot of people don’t realize that games are not bad because of the developers but rather because of leadership. They incorrectly attribute the blame to developers and think developers want to build shitty games or something.

        • InputZero@lemmy.ml
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          1 year ago

          I don’t know why everyone is acting surprised, it’s been this way for a while now. Pre-ordering any game is just paying early so you can be a dev-tester. I can’t think of a major release in video games that hasn’t been a buggy mess on release. I was fool with No Man’s Sky, and I won’t be fooled again. My plan is to just wait a few months until the second patch, same thing I do for all new releases and they’re usually discounted a bit by then too.

    • ShortFuse@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I’ve been in the SpecialK discord all of yesterday messing with stuff and went to bed.

      Now I wake up and find that not only did they (SpecialK devs) fix the 8bit pipeline problem, but it paves the way for real HDR in all Direct3D12 games.

      You have until launch day to return pre-orders and I was considering it, but we might have fixed HDR/black levels now.

      • DreamButt@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        It’s not even really an rpg with how few skills/abilities there were to select from. And how little the environment changes to allow you to solve problems differently

    • Orphan@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Starfield is Fallout 4 set in space. No man’s sky is exploration in space. I prefer the latter.

    • R0cket_M00se@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      It doesn’t.

      Basically the space flight mechanic is somewhere between Mass Effect: Andromeda and CoD: Infinite Warfare.

      You use your galaxy map fast travel to go anywhere and can only fly the ship around each small “instance.”

      Planetary landings are restricted to POI’s or you can land on some random spot, but the planets are broken up into chunks so you can only walk around so much before having to go back to your ship for another fast travel moment.

        • 小莱卡@lemmygrad.ml
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          Outer worlds is closer to “fallout in space” than starfield is.

          Starfield is fallout without the fun stuff, which is dissapointing tbh.

        • EmotionalSupportLancet [undecided]@hexbear.net
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          Not really? I feel like that was a lot closer to new Vegas. That felt like a continuation of obsidian whereas starfield very much feels like a continuation of the trends between Skyrim and FO4 within bethesdas game design. If that makes sense.

          • MartinXYZ@lemmy.ml
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            Thank you for elaborating. I honestly didn’t notice the “4” in the first comment and thought it just said “Fallout in space”, so that’s where my comment came from.

          • MartinXYZ@lemmy.ml
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            Thank you for elaborating. I honestly didn’t notice the “4” in the first comment and thought it just said “Fallout in space”, so that’s where my comment came from.

    • Ser Salty@feddit.de
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      1 year ago

      The NMS like gameplay is like a tiny part of it. It’s a story heavy RPG first and foremost. Sure, you can do a lot of NMS style stuff, like gathering resources and scanning wildlife on a thousand planets, but that’s really not why you should get the game. You should get it if you want a massive space RPG in the style of Bethesda. And yes, this time Bethesda actually made a proper RPG.

    • ZC3rr0r@lemmy.ca
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      It’s been that way for a while now.

      When online patching became a thing most games studios quickly figured out they could push the game to press in whatever state, then work on fixing the bugs in between code complete and GA, and simply push those fixes as a launch day patch.

      And commercially, it makes sense. The greatest the game is on the shelves, the earlier the investors see ROI. It’s just a shame if this calculated gamble backfires and the degree find way too many bugs to fix in the window between code complete and release. That’s when you get Cyberpunk 2077…

      • Haui@discuss.tchncs.de
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        1 year ago

        To be fair, I haven’t played 2077 on launch day but like 3 months later, on a medium-high gaming laptop. I‘ve had zero crashes, no T-poses and generally nearly no bugs.

        The real problem was them releasing the game on last gen consoles which were (like low tier pcs) unable to handle the game. I would even go as far as to say that they made a game that was only playable on high tier hardware.

        And interestingly enough now 2.5 yrs after release, the game has more bugs for me than it had 3 months in.

        I‘m not a game dev so I can’t say why that is but as a dev I can say that fixing one bug might introduce another which becomes a lot harder to fix.

        • CaptKoala@lemmy.ml
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          I played at launch, and there were game-breaking issues every 15-30min for me, constant crashes etc. I rage uninstalled for the first time in years, due to a bug in the smasher fight the game would crash in the same spot every time, as such, I couldn’t actually finish the game.

          I revisited it after a broken leg earlier this year and it’s come a long way, but yeah I really wish it had spent far more time in the oven as well as cutting out older hardware. The time they spent trying to get it to run somewhat stable on old hardware could’ve been far better used in QA and bugfixes.

          I’m 7 characters deep, and I’ve stepped back to play other games (BG3 came along at the perfect time) while I wait for the DLC later this month. I foresee another few hundred hours of my life being sacrificed, if only so I can try my luck against maxtac.

          • Haui@discuss.tchncs.de
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            1 year ago

            Sounds like you did have some fun after all. Happy to hear I‘m not the only one. Yes, the launch must have been a catastrophe.

          • daellat@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Cp2077 will be an odd case for me always. It wasn’t literally perfect but I couldn’t complete two gigs and I experienced some graphical glitches and that was it, incredibly lucky somehow… I 100%'d the game pretty much at launch, though I didn’t do all of the possible endings I did do about 3.