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Thief 3 Deadly Shadows Bug Neuters In-Game AI
Channard writes "You can add another footnote to the strange fortunes of Ion Storm. It's been revealed that Thief: Deadly Shadows has a bug that affects the intelligence of the guards and other characters in the game, both in the PC and Xbox versions. Ion Storm Austin, the creators of the game, really went to work on the character AI in Deadly Shadows - on Expert level, the guards notice things like open doors, missing objects and the like. The catch, as reported on the official Ion Storm forums, is that a bug in the game resets the difficulty level to Normal level if you save and load your position in-game. The word from one of the Thief developers is that: 'We're looking into it.Can't say anything more for now, and there aren't any guarantees... but the find isn't being ignored.' The PC version should be relatively easy to patch, but fixing the Xbox version would be trickier, perhaps requiring a full recall (Microsoft doesn't allow the Xbox Live service to be used for anything other than patches that affect online play.)"
Game Developers don't do adequate testing? No way! I refuse to believe it.
Sigh, this is just one more slap in the face of gamers everywhere. Companies will put millions into advertising and salaries for celebrity programmers, but then budget nothing for Q&A.
And how the hell did Microsoft sign off on this? Isn't the promise of console games that they will be of higher quality, as a result of mandatory licensing fees? Isn't that why we pay more than PC gamers? Looks like that $10 markup is all for nothing.
When most people were ga-ga'ing over halflife, i was cuddled in the corner of a very dark room filling my pockets in Thief 1. It really changed the way i looked at pc games, and had the most immersive gameplay i had ever seen...
Flash forward to today, and you see Thief 3 (albeit a fine, fine title) obviously rushed out the door, and most of the dev team laid off. What is it with this industries self destructive tendancies? I mean, really. Isnt the goal to make money? And isnt that a product of producing a good game?
I just want to scream at my monitor when i see things like this happen. Just remember, the fault probably doesnt lay on the dev team when something like this happens, something tells me a phb thought he could shave a buck or 2 and went for it.
Frankly its just xbox holding the developers accountable. Bugs have been around longer then software if you let someone patch you WILL get buggier games in the future. It comes down to numbers, we can add x feature for $3,000 and make the game this much better or we can test it all over again and MAYBE we will find something to fix. If they can patch after shipment they will just let the gamers do the testing.
Um, the game PLAYS FINE. You people need to quit thinking you can sue over every mistake that is made. If you are a developer, I ALREADY KNOW you have gotten a product to a client that has had a bug or two. The nature of this one is pretty obscure. Im sure it wasnt "lack of professionalism" that missed it.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
I was wondering why even on expert difficulty, the enemies seemed pretty clueless...oh well, it's still a fun game even at normal difficulty. Exactly. Give that man a donut. It was exactly that that alerted folks to the bug - some people swearing blind the AI was great on expert mode, others saying it stunk. The people who thought it stunk had either gone through a portal twice or saved and loaded game and, joy of joys, the guards went back to their 'normal' AI level, making them about as bright as the Thief 1 and 2 guards.
Yes, you could sue. And for winning you would get... a patched copy of the game, which you would have gotten out of a recall with MUCH less effort.
Try suing for damages, and you'd be laughed out of court and forced to pay for the defendant's legal costs.
Dark Nexus
"Sanity is calming, but madness is more interesting."
The PC version should be relatively easy to patch, but fixing the Xbox version would be trickier, perhaps requiring a full recall
Remember when console games that had serious bugs just didn't get licensed? Boy, those were the days.
Rob
"Microsoft doesn't allow the Xbox Live service to be used for anything other than patches that affect online play."
Good thing too, or we'd have a bunch of half-finished games with a "We'll patch it later" attitude.
I'm tired of being a beta tester.
Why is there such an outcry over this? This frankly huge letter on the ionstorm forum is just over reacting. The developers now know about the bug and they've said they'll try to fix it. Suddenly going on about class action and sueing the crap out of them is not going to speed it up.
Fair enough, if the developers next week announce that they've checked and they can't be bothered to fix the bug and basically screw you then yeah, start thinking about campaigning to get this fixed.
If I was a developer this entire incident would give me a bad view of the gaming community. It portrays everybody as being obnoxious impatient asses. The developers didn't intend to release it with a bug. There is only so much testing you can do and people make MISTAKES. It's a fact of life.
Wait and see what they do basically.
well.. you know.. microsoft COULD very well have their own testing team of say, 20-100 players that would OK the game before it went to disc production. and if that team found the game to either suck too much or just be plain buggy they would tell the developer/publishing house that they wouldn't get a license unless they fixed it.. ..or maybe they're giving the developers more freedom(as to what comes to quality) in issues like this because they want those games on xbox rather than on other platforms..
It's not a really obscure bug anyways.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
ah! the double edged blade that is coward- logic:
possibility 1- MS allows dev's to patch game via LIVE.
constant - everyone is disgusted because MS is the badguy for allowing sloppy and shoddy game development.
possibility 2- MS does not allowing dev's to patch bugs in xbox games via LIVE... constant - everyone is disgusted because MS is essentially 'crippling their own consol(sic) by not allowing buggy games to be fixed'
Get Virtual.
having played thief 1 and 2, i think it would be fairly obvious to notice whether a guard blindly walks past an open door, or looks in to see why its open (which is supposed to be the behavior at harder AI levels). It seems that in just the testing of the AI, this should have been an obvious flaw.
I'm well aware that QA on such a game must be a daunting task, but this is not a bug like Starcraft's immortal drones which you could only produce under extreme conditions (and which took the players months to uncover). The orignal discoverer of the error provided a simple test: find an enemy and save the game. Let the enemy hit you and watch how much damage you take. Reload your save game, and let him hit you again. Different amount of damage done. Easy proof of a bug and doesn't require any sort of extreme conditions to achieve. Bottom line is something like that should have been found.
I believe that his argument is that, regardless of what platform they are made for, modern games are routinely released with bugs. The PC platform is relatively easy to patch for. Consoles are not. Are you going to argue that console systems are better because they will somehow force developers to adopt better QA practices and eliminate bugs. Very utopian... and unrealistic.
That developers release programs with bugs in them is not a direct result of the ability of the developer to release later patches. It is a factor, but a more important factor is that the consumers whine, stomp their feet, type IN ALL CAPS, and otherwise make a idiot of themselves if the game does not come out quickly. Couple that with the growing complexity of modern games (perhaps the most important factor) and you are destined to have bugs slip through whatever QA system the developer's have.
jr
Undoubtably, bugs will happen. There isn't much anyone can do about this. But there's a deeper problem at issue here. Namely, games are being rushed out the door before they're ready. Now, this is most likely the fault of the publishers rather than the developers, but there isn't much we can do to distinguish when it comes to our purchases.
It's not like this is Ion Storm's first problem with this sort of thing. Did you try the abysmal Deus Ex II ? There were billions of issues there that should have been caught by simple playtesting. Likewise here...did no one test the difficulty settings for more than 5 minutes ?
The gaming industry really needs to learn that they can't blitz a product to market at less-than-optimal quality, and expuct the publc to shell out $50+ without complaint. Gamers are used to (virtually) blowing crap up, not grabbing their ankles and taking it from behind. PC games are complex constructions, no question about it. If you want your game to be a quality release (and thus keep customers) you have to expend a good deal of effort in QA/testing. Hell, resort to a semi-public beta if you don't have the inhouse staff to do it.
--LordPixie
I can entirely see how their Q/A team would miss the bug - Q/A would need to be playing on hard, probably with no cheats on (otherwise, why save and reload?).
IMO, playing without cheats is a pretty significant part of QA. Admittedly, you're going to need someone to breeze through the game easily just to make sure the basic mechanics work. But you're creating a game. The QA team NEEDS to make sure it has enjoyable gameplay, or they're just selling an overly expensive tech demo. Especially in a game like Thief III, where the AI one of the major selling points. If you don't have the time to test all your features, then make time. If you're not willing to do that, then be prepared to reap the whirlwind when your stuff breaks.
--LordPixie
My experience with the Thief series is that it is not possible to go through a level once without having to resort to saved games - while it's possible to ironman levels, they either take too long to do in one standard unit of time (i.e. 1 hour, as most popular games gear themselves to), or require lots of practice to breeze through it.
Being a "slow" game, you will need to reload, and therefore encounter the dumbed down guards. It is considered slow, since you have to generally sneak around occupied areas instead of running quickly to get to your destination.
Saved games are required - there are instances in Thief 1 and 2 where you need to do specific jump. The jumping occassionally failed because you were just beyond the tolerance range for making the jump (and therefore either fell to your death or made a loud noise attracting whatever guard is available.) Also, there were a few instant-killing traps that were not visible unless you had a really good eye - something that requires either prior knowledge or save-scumming to pass through.
Doesn't work - the problem occurs when loading a savegame, and the values in default.ini are not used in that case. They are supposed to be retrieved from the savegame, but are not and therefore remain at their *coded* defaults of 1.0. Read the threads.
If a vast majority of Xbox gamers were on Live, then the patching system would be okay. But, as many people have mentioned before, this would open the gates to studios pushing out products before they were ready. I'd prefer the game to work the first time. But, as a Live subscriber, I think the patches would be okay, but I understant why they don't allow it.
But with the vast majority of Xbox owners NOT on Live, this would give Microsoft a very bad name in the industry. (Yes, for a lot of you they already have a bad name) It's better if they make the studios do a recall, essentially to 'pay for their crimes'.
But then again, if they allowed patching via Live, they could take it out of the developers hide. "Okay, you want to patch via Live? That will be $2.99 per patch" (not to the subscriber, to the studio). That would be a dis-incentive, but at the same time would allow the service to go through when necessary. Personally, this particular instance would be no big deal to me, because I never play any game on 'expert' anyway.
No reason to lie.
A lot of people threaten to stop buying PC games because of the "no guarantees" license agreement, but they keep on buying them. I have actually stopped. Haven't bought a PC games in, what, two or three years now. It isn't because I don't want to play them, it isn't because I can't afford them, I'm just not willing to agree to a contract that I disapprove of.
It's amazing to me that a developer will publicly admit to a fairly major fault in a game and then say, effectively, "we might fix it or we might not, dunno yet". I'm sure this thought process goes on in many different industries, but game developers openly admit to having this attitude! It makes me wonder: If this is what they admit to then... well, finish the question for yourself.
This is our fault, though. (Well, depending on who you are, it's actually your fault, not mine!) Consumers tolerated unfinished games for so long that there became very little motivation for developers to bother finishing them. We told them time and time again that we'd buy their faulty products and they heard it so often that they said okay, in that case we're happy to sell them to you. So we did this to ourselves. Or rather you did...
Because the bottom line is, game companies won't ship a finished, polished game if they don't have to.
Can we please get away from this attitude of "All game companies want to ship crap." Even the attitude that all publishers want to ship crap is incorrect. Sure there are some toothbrush salesmen at publishers, but most of the people want something great. Now, whether or not they want a great game because they love the industry or because they know a million seller will get them a house in Florida is anyone's guess, but everyone is looking to release the next Diablo.
And as for the developers... Why would someone work 60 hour weeks on a game that they think will suck? Games suck because of bad timing, bad management, and bad decision making, not a lack of developer attention and intent. Many of the worst games in the past few years were paved with the best of intensions. MOO3. Daiktana. Killer Instinct. People worked very hard on those games, pouring in love and effort. The game company wanted to ship a finished, polished game, and in some ways did. But they also mismanaged their time, focusing upon the wrong things, and reached a point where they just had to ship what they had... No additional amount of polishing would shine those turds.
In other words, lay off us. Just because we can be incompetent doesn't mean our hearts aren't in the right place.
The ______ Agenda
Why? New console games have been in the $40-50 for the last couple generations. The complexity level certainly went up between the PS1 era and the PS2 era, and the price did not go up. In fact, for most first-party Sony games, the price went down. (Average price being $40 rather than $50.)
I believe that console systems of the future will eventually have an online patching system.
I hope not. Once you make the gaming process unwieldy, you lose people. More specifically, you lose the casual gamers, the families, that drive sales.
but PC games push the envelope much farther than console games. Both in terms of graphics and in terms of gameplay.
I accept that PCs push graphics further and faster, but that takes us back to the evolving/non-standard hardware issue. One poster here claimed that he routinely runs new games on his older system by dragging down all the graphics sliders (and he seemed proud of it.) Where's the benefit to that if users have to purposefully downgrade the graphics?
But gameplay? That's another issue. When you say that console games are more linear, I don't think you're comparing PC to console, you're more likely comparing MMORPGs to platformers. There are plenty of non-linear, complicated console games. And there's much more overall variety on the console game racks than on the PC racks. I'll take variety and polish over "This Year's Prettiest Way To Score Headshots."
Here's an example that I expect most /.ers will hate: Pokemon. Those damn little GBA games have an incredibly complicated stats management system, once you total up all the possible permutations of creatures/attacks/skills/stats/items/weaknesses and apply the math of it all. There's quite a lot going on under the hood, and that's "just" a Game Boy game. I would liken that to all the skills/items etc of any PC MMORPG. The only differences being the graphics and the theming.