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I hope this will encourage big studios to stop releasing broken games, but I doubt it will. The incentives are just so broken due to ease of patching, a need/de

I hope this will encourage big studios to stop releasing broken games, but I doubt it will. The incentives are just so broken due to ease of patching, a need/desire for cash after a drawn out dev process, and a general disrespect for their customers. I think releasing a "broken" game in the form of "early access" from smaller studios can be good in terms of iterative and community development, but also that can be abused too. These bigger studios really don't have as much of an excuse in my opinion. The only solution I see is to stop pre-ordering games and don't reward studios that do this, but easier said than done.

Pfhreak 6y ago
The problem isn't releasing a broken game. There's a huge challenge in making and releasing games and meeting a specific quality bar. That said, knowing you have a broken game and saying it's great is extremely avoidable and totally should stop. Tell me the game is a mess and let me play with it.
- enahs-sf 6y ago
  Having played Cyberpunk on a PS4 and then a PS5, It is nowhere near what you'd expect from a AAA title in terms of quality. Had to stop playing it because it's not worth it to ruin the experience. I can only imagine what the folks at Rockstar are thinking about this launch and what they can take away from it.
  - krzyk 6y ago
    And to have a counterpoint, I'm playing on PC and have a lot of fun. I've seen so far only one bug (Panams phone somehow freezed in mid air during her talking scene) I must say that I'm a bit glad that this time consoles were taken less seriously than a PC, in majority of cases is quite opposite (with a few exceptions like GTA V and CP2077).
    - jjoonathan 6y ago
      My PC experience was good too. I saw the "T-pose on a motorcycle" bug a couple times and I sequence-broke a mission once, but that's it. If 2077 had been enterprise software, it would be the smoothest and least-buggy enterprise software I had ever used by a mile. It sounds like last-gen consoles leaned very heavily on the LOD system, it caused more bugs than expected, and they didn't allocate enough time to fix them.
    - 2pEXgD0fZ5cF 6y ago
      I played the game on PC too, and for the first half or so of the game I agree, the first half of the game was more "very very unpolished and rough" as opposed to "broken bugs". However it got worse and worse the closer I got to the finale, on total I encountered around 10-12 situations that prevented me from continuing and required game restarts and/or loading of older saves, and I had to repeat my final mission 3 times because of a game breaking bug. That is on top of all the minor bugs others have already mentioned. While I was able to at least get between 50 and 80 fps, the performance was absolutely terrible if I consider my specs (>3500$ PC build). All in all I was "relatively bug free" compared to the experiences of others. What I don't understand are people saying it would be "a masterpiece" without the bugs, I disagree, the game was very bland in my opinion and I regret my purchase and the time I invested regardless of the bugs and problems. It wasn't TERRIBLE, but I wish I had spent the money on another game.
      - nonamenoslogan 6y ago
        Geeesh I get 40-70 fps on a $250 GPU in a $100ish PC from the recycle pile.
    - jasonladuke0311 6y ago
      You are fortunate. I've encountered at least two dozen different bugs that were only resolved with a reload (or in some cases reverting to a previous save). And the crashes, my god. I would wager at least one crash per hour or two of play. That being said, I think it's a fantastic game (though somewhat shallow in terms of choice) that I am still having a great time with.
    - 6y ago
  - threeseed 6y ago
    > I can only imagine what the folks at Rockstar are thinking I imagine they are thinking the same thing since GTA5 Online was released. Why even bother making new games when you can just drip feed some DLC every now and again and continue to print billions.
    - ethbr0 6y ago
      I'm not going to say that's a worse model. We saw outsourcing of engines to companies who focused on that as their core competency. Then middleware. As AAA budgets go up to maintain pace with SotA, it makes less sense to trash-and-start-from-scratch (traditional practice). DLC on online games is the ultimate realization of this. Why sink the cost of rebuilding a game, when you have a battle-tested core, with bugs already fixed, and content tooling already created, that you can start from? Essentially: EA {Sport} {Year} model, for everything else.
  - munk-a 6y ago
    > It is nowhere near what you'd expect from a AAA title in terms of quality. Had to stop playing it because it's not worth it to ruin the experience. Can you clarify a bit whether you were hitting game play bugs or visual issues? On the PC side there are occasional visual glitches but the game play is relatively stable - I've had trouble with one quest line (the delamain one) and the enemy AI can get stuck sometimes - but it hasn't interrupted game play too badly.
  - puranjay 6y ago
    Rockstar is smart in that it they don't hype up their games at all. You won't even know GTA6 is going to be released until the product is 6 months from finishing.
    - munk-a 6y ago
      I think this is the crux of the issue - Rockstar seems to be pretty heavy handed in keeping their marketing department in check, it's a thing more developers and publishers need to learn. Early and inaccurate marketing is a liability - quantity does not equal quality and marketing departments generally feel like they're judged based on quantity (and often escape issues with over-hyping in favor of shifting blame onto developers).
- falcolas 6y ago
  > releasing games and meeting a specific quality bar. Only if you're holding yourself to an impossible deadline. Given time – and, I'll argue, developers who weren't burnt out by the work schedule – and this could have been resolved. But they didn't take that time, they went ahead with a non-functional game just to meet the deadline. They abused their developers to meet an (demonstrably) impossible deadline. This is a terribly way to run a business on many levels.
  - Pfhreak 6y ago
    I'm not sure that's actually true. Having worked in the industry, games do not always get better with more work and time. Some systems are just too complicated to fix fast than bugs get introduced.
- MaxBarraclough 6y ago
  > The problem isn't releasing a broken game. There's a huge challenge in making and releasing games and meeting a specific quality bar. That's true for any complex product. There are reasonable expectations, and indeed laws, about products being fit for purpose. I don't see why video games are unique. It's possible to patch them after release. This partially explains, but does not excuse, the pattern of games releasing in a broken state.
  - Pfhreak 6y ago
    I'm not suggesting it's unique, but I am suggesting that expecting them all to be delivered fast, high quality, and reasonably priced is a very tall order.
warpech 6y ago
I wonder if CDPR released the game at that stage because they thought that the window of opportunity on last-gen consoles was closing
jgust 6y ago
It's a tragedy of the commons situation with gamer enthusiasts acting against their own best interest. If people can't delay gratification for something as inconsequential as "non-broken video games", I don't see how any personal responsibility campaign has any chance of working for things impacting society at large such as climate change, overfishing, public health, etc.
- falcolas 6y ago
  This isn't on the players. That's very much in the same line as blaming someone driving their car for the Gulf Oil Spill. This is 100% on CDPR management. It's their job to set the right deadlines, to manage expectation and hype. They failed, and should be held accountable for that failure. EDIT: Yes, downvote this. Support CDPR's management and their shitty practices with their employees and their lying to players and investors. I'm sure you'll love the games that come about as a result.
  - munk-a 6y ago
    I think there were some really big marketing mistakes but most of the backlash on CP2077 seems to be over the insane levels of hype. I had pre-ordered this game a long time ago and it was genuinely fun on release, there are some bugged quests and I don't have a card capable of rendering ridiculously good graphics but it's playable and fun. From what I've heard the PS release is absolutely worth getting mad over - it's likely that CDPR should have just given up on even attempting a PS release given how poor the performance is but it probably needs some serious investigation to see what pressure Sony was putting on them to make sure it was available.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- Sodman 6y ago
  I don't think it's fair to blame this on gamers. With all of the hyperbole over various games being "broken", most people that are hyped about a specific game are just going to buy it and see for themselves. Unless it's literally unplayable (as may actually have been the case here), most people won't refund it. This has been going on for years and years, it's just getting worse over time. It's always some variant of this conversation at $GAMEDEV_STUDIO: Focus group feedback: Our test groups are noticing 10% of players are running into this bug/issue. It's frustrating them, but there are workarounds. Management: All of our marketing materials target release date XX/XX/XXXX. If we try to fix this bug we'll have to push the release... How many people will _not_ buy the game because of this bug? Focus group feedback: Nobody that would have otherwise bought this game would decide not to buy it over this issue. Management: So we ship as planned, and fix the bugs in a patch. Over time studios realized that you can get away with much bigger bugs affecting much larger portions of players. Ship sooner, start recognizing revenue, and push post-launch patches to fix the "really bad bugs". It's shocking how bad the quality has to get before it starts making headlines.
nightski 6y ago
The thing is CD Project Red has released it's games in a really rough state before. All of the Witcher games were brutal on release. But every time they have not only released thousands of bug fixes/improvements for free, but also delivered large dlc/content updates. The difference with CP2077 I believe is that it was just the highest profile launch they have ever had by a wide margin. They are too big now. I don't regret pre-ordering at all, because they have always done right by me.
- devonkim 6y ago
  Yeah, the other situation is that PC players have oftentimes gotten buggy and unplayable ports from consoles for years, and now that a PC first development studio wound up screwing console players first it’s much more visible and the outcry worse. They never launched simultaneously on 9 platforms at a time. Heck, not a lot of titles do that at all that are well established veteran studios across many prior console generations. CDPR is no saint but compared to the rest of the industry they are relatively. I’m thoroughly enjoying it despite some small bugs here and there but given the massive size of the game and the really ambitious stuff they’ve done in animation it’s amazing what they got done in the time window they had between Witcher 3 and the original launch timeframe. I hope CDPR learns the right lessons though and focuses upon engineering management and how to rein in their marketing better.
  - chii 6y ago
    a lot of CDPR staff left in the wake of TW3 because of crunch and other various factors (presumably, they weren't as well compensated for such a successful title as they presumed they would). CDPR cannot replace talent that's gone - and it shows in cyberpunk.
    - devonkim 6y ago
      This seems to be a longstanding trend in game dev houses across the industry worldwide, so the question is whether it was sufficient enough to cripple Cyberpunk development into its current state and whether the churn was worse than industry averages. It's not clear whether spending more money on developers would have been sufficient to make release better given Cyberpunk is the most expensive game in history and with only 30% of the budget spent on development.
ekianjo 6y ago
There is no need for action. The only thing people need to do is to stop preordering games.
outworlder 6y ago
> I hope this will encourage big studios to stop releasing broken games The game wasn't "broken" at all. I've finished it a couple of days ago. It works fine on the PC. It wasn't a matter of releasing an unfinished game as in the "early access" model like you are describing. It was a matter of deciding to release the game in platforms that were underpowered, like the PS4.
- rasz 6y ago
  Even stock poor spec PS4 wasnt as bad as media would led you to believe. It runs at 30 fps with occasional drops to 20 fps and seldom/very rare 15fps, MUCH better than past critically acclaimed games like Control which shipped garbage running at literal _10 fps_. Ps4 will also crash on you once every ~5 hours, probably not fixed memory leaks. Still game saves often so its not a problem, more of an annoyance. Other than that its smooth sailing. You can check it out for yourself here https://www.twitch.tv/ckplayer0ne/videos?filter=archives&sort=time https://www.twitch.tv/ckplayer0ne/videos?filter=archives&sor... CK is doing a full play thru on base PS4 and its fine.
- rrrrrrrrrrrryan 6y ago
  Arguably, they just needed (much) more time to optimize the game for underpowered, older consoles. Which would mean they released it unfinished, in a sense.
lumost 6y ago
I wonder how much of this is broken QA throughout the industry. I burned ~60 hours in cyberpunk on a ps4 pro, the content of the game was fun - but the bugs were pretty dumb. Many of the worst bugs originated in story pathways that would only be triggered if various conditions had occurred (which undoubtedly changed during development). From a testing perspective It seems like it would require an impossible amount of QA time to vet all of the quest paths as a player, and it would be easy to miss game breaking bugs if QA testers were using manipulated save files. Issues like the bad police AI only crop up once in the main game, but are pretty noticeable throughout free roam. If players want games to get bigger, will we need smarter and more automated QA tools? what would these look like?
- pythonaut_16 6y ago
  > Q: Open-world games are often really buggy, because there’s just so much going on. But I experienced very little of that in my time with Breath of the Wild. How did you pull that off? Was it just a really extensive QA process? > Dohta: There was another point that we developed during our QA process. We came up with a number of scripts that would basically allow the game to be played automatically, and allow Link to run through various parts of the game automatically. And as that was happening, on the QA side of things, if a bug did appear I’d suddenly get a flood of emails about it. That was one tool that we found to be really handy. https://www.theverge.com/2017/3/11/14881076/the-legend-of-zelda-breath-of-the-wild-nintendo-interview https://www.theverge.com/2017/3/11/14881076/the-legend-of-ze... Breath of the Wild used a tool to do automated run throughs as part of their bug testing suite. This is just a quote from one interview, but if you do a bit of Googling you can find some good information about their development and planning process.
- ethbr0 6y ago
  It's not rocket science. It's devs treating QA like second-class citizens and substituting (cheap) person-hours for proper technical tools. Any sequence of events can be represented as a directed graph. Any event check can be validated against that directed graph as feasible. Instead, Bethesda (equally guilty) and CDPR seem to let their devs add whatever checks, and then trust QA to untangle and validate the infinite number of combinations. tl;dr - open world games are incompatible with traditional QA methods and tools
tstrimple 6y ago
Somehow I doubt Polish law is going to have much impact on the larger game industry.
- chundicus 6y ago
  Agreed. By "this" I actually (confusingly) was more so referring to the general negative feedback Cyberpunk has been receiving.
  - tstrimple 6y ago
    "Don't preorder games" is the new "year of the Linux desktop". I've heard it over and over but have seen no evidence that it's any closer to being a reality.
macspoofing 6y ago
Absolutely the big studios should stop releasing broken games. From a consumer standpoint - just wait a little. Don't get AAA games at launch. If you wait a few months, you'll get a much more stable game. If you wait 1-2 years, you'll get the game with DLC for $20.

Pfhreak 6y ago

The problem isn't releasing a broken game. There's a huge challenge in making and releasing games and meeting a specific quality bar. That said, knowing you have a broken game and saying it's great is extremely avoidable and totally should stop. Tell me the game is a mess and let me play with it.

enahs-sf 6y ago
Having played Cyberpunk on a PS4 and then a PS5, It is nowhere near what you'd expect from a AAA title in terms of quality. Had to stop playing it because it's not worth it to ruin the experience. I can only imagine what the folks at Rockstar are thinking about this launch and what they can take away from it.
- krzyk 6y ago
  And to have a counterpoint, I'm playing on PC and have a lot of fun. I've seen so far only one bug (Panams phone somehow freezed in mid air during her talking scene) I must say that I'm a bit glad that this time consoles were taken less seriously than a PC, in majority of cases is quite opposite (with a few exceptions like GTA V and CP2077).
  - jjoonathan 6y ago
    My PC experience was good too. I saw the "T-pose on a motorcycle" bug a couple times and I sequence-broke a mission once, but that's it. If 2077 had been enterprise software, it would be the smoothest and least-buggy enterprise software I had ever used by a mile. It sounds like last-gen consoles leaned very heavily on the LOD system, it caused more bugs than expected, and they didn't allocate enough time to fix them.
  - 2pEXgD0fZ5cF 6y ago
    I played the game on PC too, and for the first half or so of the game I agree, the first half of the game was more "very very unpolished and rough" as opposed to "broken bugs". However it got worse and worse the closer I got to the finale, on total I encountered around 10-12 situations that prevented me from continuing and required game restarts and/or loading of older saves, and I had to repeat my final mission 3 times because of a game breaking bug. That is on top of all the minor bugs others have already mentioned. While I was able to at least get between 50 and 80 fps, the performance was absolutely terrible if I consider my specs (>3500$ PC build). All in all I was "relatively bug free" compared to the experiences of others. What I don't understand are people saying it would be "a masterpiece" without the bugs, I disagree, the game was very bland in my opinion and I regret my purchase and the time I invested regardless of the bugs and problems. It wasn't TERRIBLE, but I wish I had spent the money on another game.
    - nonamenoslogan 6y ago
      Geeesh I get 40-70 fps on a $250 GPU in a $100ish PC from the recycle pile.
  - jasonladuke0311 6y ago
    You are fortunate. I've encountered at least two dozen different bugs that were only resolved with a reload (or in some cases reverting to a previous save). And the crashes, my god. I would wager at least one crash per hour or two of play. That being said, I think it's a fantastic game (though somewhat shallow in terms of choice) that I am still having a great time with.
  - 6y ago
- threeseed 6y ago
  > I can only imagine what the folks at Rockstar are thinking I imagine they are thinking the same thing since GTA5 Online was released. Why even bother making new games when you can just drip feed some DLC every now and again and continue to print billions.
  - ethbr0 6y ago
    I'm not going to say that's a worse model. We saw outsourcing of engines to companies who focused on that as their core competency. Then middleware. As AAA budgets go up to maintain pace with SotA, it makes less sense to trash-and-start-from-scratch (traditional practice). DLC on online games is the ultimate realization of this. Why sink the cost of rebuilding a game, when you have a battle-tested core, with bugs already fixed, and content tooling already created, that you can start from? Essentially: EA {Sport} {Year} model, for everything else.
- munk-a 6y ago
  > It is nowhere near what you'd expect from a AAA title in terms of quality. Had to stop playing it because it's not worth it to ruin the experience. Can you clarify a bit whether you were hitting game play bugs or visual issues? On the PC side there are occasional visual glitches but the game play is relatively stable - I've had trouble with one quest line (the delamain one) and the enemy AI can get stuck sometimes - but it hasn't interrupted game play too badly.
- puranjay 6y ago
  Rockstar is smart in that it they don't hype up their games at all. You won't even know GTA6 is going to be released until the product is 6 months from finishing.
  - munk-a 6y ago
    I think this is the crux of the issue - Rockstar seems to be pretty heavy handed in keeping their marketing department in check, it's a thing more developers and publishers need to learn. Early and inaccurate marketing is a liability - quantity does not equal quality and marketing departments generally feel like they're judged based on quantity (and often escape issues with over-hyping in favor of shifting blame onto developers).
falcolas 6y ago
> releasing games and meeting a specific quality bar. Only if you're holding yourself to an impossible deadline. Given time – and, I'll argue, developers who weren't burnt out by the work schedule – and this could have been resolved. But they didn't take that time, they went ahead with a non-functional game just to meet the deadline. They abused their developers to meet an (demonstrably) impossible deadline. This is a terribly way to run a business on many levels.
- Pfhreak 6y ago
  I'm not sure that's actually true. Having worked in the industry, games do not always get better with more work and time. Some systems are just too complicated to fix fast than bugs get introduced.
MaxBarraclough 6y ago
> The problem isn't releasing a broken game. There's a huge challenge in making and releasing games and meeting a specific quality bar. That's true for any complex product. There are reasonable expectations, and indeed laws, about products being fit for purpose. I don't see why video games are unique. It's possible to patch them after release. This partially explains, but does not excuse, the pattern of games releasing in a broken state.
- Pfhreak 6y ago
  I'm not suggesting it's unique, but I am suggesting that expecting them all to be delivered fast, high quality, and reasonably priced is a very tall order.

warpech 6y ago

I wonder if CDPR released the game at that stage because they thought that the window of opportunity on last-gen consoles was closing

jgust 6y ago

It's a tragedy of the commons situation with gamer enthusiasts acting against their own best interest. If people can't delay gratification for something as inconsequential as "non-broken video games", I don't see how any personal responsibility campaign has any chance of working for things impacting society at large such as climate change, overfishing, public health, etc.

falcolas 6y ago
This isn't on the players. That's very much in the same line as blaming someone driving their car for the Gulf Oil Spill. This is 100% on CDPR management. It's their job to set the right deadlines, to manage expectation and hype. They failed, and should be held accountable for that failure. EDIT: Yes, downvote this. Support CDPR's management and their shitty practices with their employees and their lying to players and investors. I'm sure you'll love the games that come about as a result.
- munk-a 6y ago
  I think there were some really big marketing mistakes but most of the backlash on CP2077 seems to be over the insane levels of hype. I had pre-ordered this game a long time ago and it was genuinely fun on release, there are some bugged quests and I don't have a card capable of rendering ridiculously good graphics but it's playable and fun. From what I've heard the PS release is absolutely worth getting mad over - it's likely that CDPR should have just given up on even attempting a PS release given how poor the performance is but it probably needs some serious investigation to see what pressure Sony was putting on them to make sure it was available.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Sodman 6y ago
I don't think it's fair to blame this on gamers. With all of the hyperbole over various games being "broken", most people that are hyped about a specific game are just going to buy it and see for themselves. Unless it's literally unplayable (as may actually have been the case here), most people won't refund it. This has been going on for years and years, it's just getting worse over time. It's always some variant of this conversation at $GAMEDEV_STUDIO: Focus group feedback: Our test groups are noticing 10% of players are running into this bug/issue. It's frustrating them, but there are workarounds. Management: All of our marketing materials target release date XX/XX/XXXX. If we try to fix this bug we'll have to push the release... How many people will _not_ buy the game because of this bug? Focus group feedback: Nobody that would have otherwise bought this game would decide not to buy it over this issue. Management: So we ship as planned, and fix the bugs in a patch. Over time studios realized that you can get away with much bigger bugs affecting much larger portions of players. Ship sooner, start recognizing revenue, and push post-launch patches to fix the "really bad bugs". It's shocking how bad the quality has to get before it starts making headlines.

nightski 6y ago

The thing is CD Project Red has released it's games in a really rough state before. All of the Witcher games were brutal on release. But every time they have not only released thousands of bug fixes/improvements for free, but also delivered large dlc/content updates. The difference with CP2077 I believe is that it was just the highest profile launch they have ever had by a wide margin. They are too big now. I don't regret pre-ordering at all, because they have always done right by me.

devonkim 6y ago
Yeah, the other situation is that PC players have oftentimes gotten buggy and unplayable ports from consoles for years, and now that a PC first development studio wound up screwing console players first it’s much more visible and the outcry worse. They never launched simultaneously on 9 platforms at a time. Heck, not a lot of titles do that at all that are well established veteran studios across many prior console generations. CDPR is no saint but compared to the rest of the industry they are relatively. I’m thoroughly enjoying it despite some small bugs here and there but given the massive size of the game and the really ambitious stuff they’ve done in animation it’s amazing what they got done in the time window they had between Witcher 3 and the original launch timeframe. I hope CDPR learns the right lessons though and focuses upon engineering management and how to rein in their marketing better.
- chii 6y ago
  a lot of CDPR staff left in the wake of TW3 because of crunch and other various factors (presumably, they weren't as well compensated for such a successful title as they presumed they would). CDPR cannot replace talent that's gone - and it shows in cyberpunk.
  - devonkim 6y ago
    This seems to be a longstanding trend in game dev houses across the industry worldwide, so the question is whether it was sufficient enough to cripple Cyberpunk development into its current state and whether the churn was worse than industry averages. It's not clear whether spending more money on developers would have been sufficient to make release better given Cyberpunk is the most expensive game in history and with only 30% of the budget spent on development.

ekianjo 6y ago

There is no need for action. The only thing people need to do is to stop preordering games.

outworlder 6y ago

> I hope this will encourage big studios to stop releasing broken games The game wasn't "broken" at all. I've finished it a couple of days ago. It works fine on the PC. It wasn't a matter of releasing an unfinished game as in the "early access" model like you are describing. It was a matter of deciding to release the game in platforms that were underpowered, like the PS4.

rasz 6y ago
Even stock poor spec PS4 wasnt as bad as media would led you to believe. It runs at 30 fps with occasional drops to 20 fps and seldom/very rare 15fps, MUCH better than past critically acclaimed games like Control which shipped garbage running at literal _10 fps_. Ps4 will also crash on you once every ~5 hours, probably not fixed memory leaks. Still game saves often so its not a problem, more of an annoyance. Other than that its smooth sailing. You can check it out for yourself here https://www.twitch.tv/ckplayer0ne/videos?filter=archives&sort=time https://www.twitch.tv/ckplayer0ne/videos?filter=archives&sor... CK is doing a full play thru on base PS4 and its fine.
rrrrrrrrrrrryan 6y ago
Arguably, they just needed (much) more time to optimize the game for underpowered, older consoles. Which would mean they released it unfinished, in a sense.

lumost 6y ago

I wonder how much of this is broken QA throughout the industry. I burned ~60 hours in cyberpunk on a ps4 pro, the content of the game was fun - but the bugs were pretty dumb. Many of the worst bugs originated in story pathways that would only be triggered if various conditions had occurred (which undoubtedly changed during development). From a testing perspective It seems like it would require an impossible amount of QA time to vet all of the quest paths as a player, and it would be easy to miss game breaking bugs if QA testers were using manipulated save files. Issues like the bad police AI only crop up once in the main game, but are pretty noticeable throughout free roam. If players want games to get bigger, will we need smarter and more automated QA tools? what would these look like?

pythonaut_16 6y ago
> Q: Open-world games are often really buggy, because there’s just so much going on. But I experienced very little of that in my time with Breath of the Wild. How did you pull that off? Was it just a really extensive QA process? > Dohta: There was another point that we developed during our QA process. We came up with a number of scripts that would basically allow the game to be played automatically, and allow Link to run through various parts of the game automatically. And as that was happening, on the QA side of things, if a bug did appear I’d suddenly get a flood of emails about it. That was one tool that we found to be really handy. https://www.theverge.com/2017/3/11/14881076/the-legend-of-zelda-breath-of-the-wild-nintendo-interview https://www.theverge.com/2017/3/11/14881076/the-legend-of-ze... Breath of the Wild used a tool to do automated run throughs as part of their bug testing suite. This is just a quote from one interview, but if you do a bit of Googling you can find some good information about their development and planning process.
ethbr0 6y ago
It's not rocket science. It's devs treating QA like second-class citizens and substituting (cheap) person-hours for proper technical tools. Any sequence of events can be represented as a directed graph. Any event check can be validated against that directed graph as feasible. Instead, Bethesda (equally guilty) and CDPR seem to let their devs add whatever checks, and then trust QA to untangle and validate the infinite number of combinations. tl;dr - open world games are incompatible with traditional QA methods and tools

tstrimple 6y ago

Somehow I doubt Polish law is going to have much impact on the larger game industry.

chundicus 6y ago
Agreed. By "this" I actually (confusingly) was more so referring to the general negative feedback Cyberpunk has been receiving.
- tstrimple 6y ago
  "Don't preorder games" is the new "year of the Linux desktop". I've heard it over and over but have seen no evidence that it's any closer to being a reality.

macspoofing 6y ago

Absolutely the big studios should stop releasing broken games. From a consumer standpoint - just wait a little. Don't get AAA games at launch. If you wait a few months, you'll get a much more stable game. If you wait 1-2 years, you'll get the game with DLC for $20.