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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.)"
The xbox has limited HD space. If they allowed developers to release patches, it would more rapidly fill users drives and it would open the floodgates on bug acceptibility at launch. i.e. "It's okay to release in this state because we can patch it later..."
I think a better solution would be to send replacement discs with fixes to those that have already purchased the game, and begin putting pre-patched versions on the shelves.
As I said, the last thing we (users) want is for buggy games to be acceptable. It is important that Microsoft exert the same level of quality control required for the other two consoles.
Go here for teh [sic] funny.
I believe this was because MS didn't want to be in a position where developers saw Live as a way to get into the same release and patch rut as PC games have got into. MS probably didn't want that stigma attaced Buggy console games are actually far less common that buggy PC games simply because there's no easy patch mechanism in place. The only bugged console games that spring to mind, apart from this one, are WWF No Mercy on the N64, and Morrowind on the X-Box, though Slashdotters could probably think of more.
I wish this would happen more often. Then maybe people would realize that the PC development process is inferior, because the release-and-patch system coupled with overly aggressive marketing pressure and non-standard/evolving hardware has sent PC games straight into the toilet. The Xbox version is an innocent victim here, but will get screwed the hardest. Time to review the policy on accepting ports of PC games again.
I noticed early on that the difficulty settings specified in DEFAULTS.INI can be changed to make each difficulty level easier or harder (yeah, I'm nosy and like looking for things to tweak in games); that would be a useful intermediate "fix" to this issue, since you could specify NORMAL difficulty to be the same as EXPERT. The problem is, the difficulty isn't reset to the NORMAL specified in the .ini, but apparantly to some default setting specified in the game executable.
I spotted this a few hours after installing the game; wtf are they hiring to do their testing!?
...and this is why, when people start talking about how consoles are going to kill the PC gaming market, I don't get all that worried.
One of the big advantages PC gaming has now is the ability to fix bugs after the game has shipped. Even if that does lead to some greedy and short-sighted business decisions. "Ship now, patch later" is a lousy way to run a game company, but at least, with a PC game, you can patch later. With consoles, you're generally going to get the shaft.
But as consoles get more sophisticated and come with internet connectivity as a requisite, this problem is only going to get worse. So the big advantage of consoles, "just stick a disc / cartridge in and play" is going to become "just stick a disk / cartridge in and wait an hour for the latest patch to download." Because the bottom line is, game companies won't ship a finished, polished game if they don't have to.
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?
Sadly, no. The current tactic is to keep from losing money, which means optimizing the development cycle to a minimum amount of time, thus reducing overhead such as rent, by employing far more people at any given time than are necessary. Then, when the game is done, you don't want to keep paying salary for all the extra people, so you let them go. This also has the benefit of reducing the amount of vacation time you need to give people, and it keeps you from continuing to employ burnt-out people. Because everyone will be burnt out, since there's been mandatory overtime for 3 months, forcing people to work 70-80 hour weeks to get the game done.
It is very sad, and it will eventually change, but not immediately by any means. Personally, I think there needs to be a union for video game professionals. Unfortunately, too many college kids are happy to "live the dream" of working in video games, so it would be very difficult to start one; you'd always have some punk kid ready to take your place and put in 80-100 hour weeks for at least 3 years before becoming a shell of his former self. I've seen it happen far too often.
=Brian
There is nothing so good that someone, somewhere, will not hate it.
It's also a rather tricky bug that may not have been caught in their testing process.
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?). Save and reload probably got some visible verification (inventory there, start point correct, etc), so that was probably checked off without further testing. Most testing probably never used save and reload - mainly because that is one of the last completed parts of the game completed. Portions of save/restore may work, but until item placement and inventory items are complete, why test it?
I admit, what they need is to have some people run through the "finished" product once or twice at every difficulty to verify there are no outstanding showstoppers, but that's not always possible (time demands), so maybe they settled on a runthrough only at moderate difficulty. Due to the limited lifespan of games (about 3 months) they probably didn't want to have an open beta (no sense leaking the code to pirates any earlier than possible).
Yes, I will argue that. Because they do. Is there a groundswell opinion that "console games are usually buggy, so buyer beware"? No, there isn't. 99% of the time, they work and they work perfectly. The good console game devs know that they do not get a second chance to fix their game, so they have to get it right the first time or risk falling on their face in the marketplace.
The PC game world on the other hand, it's common thought that if you buy a game, you better start haunting websites and newsgroups for the inevitable mention of an upcoming patch. I'm not saying that patches shouldn't exist, just that the ability is completely abused and should not be seen as an amazing benefit of PC games.
I'll go Redundant here and point out that the hardware environment is responsible for a lot of this. But this Thief problem was not... it could have been found and should have been found... it was rushed, it was unchecked, it is typical.
And I don't accept a 'complexity' excuse for one second. Games will always push that envelope. That's no excuse for releasing something buggy.
Another example of a major bug in the middle years of console gaming is at the end of the optional Ancient Cave in Lufia 2. The graphics are competely gliched up on the 99th level of the cave, though it is still possible to blindly make your way to the boss at the end. Of course, most people who played that game (before emulation, anyway) never got that far, so this is another example of a bug that really didn't mean much.
Considering I couldn't get even to the 50th level of the Ancient castle because Lufia 2 crashed and ate my save... twice... I would consider a total graphical glitch to be the least of the team's offences.
The Relm sketching bug, however, was priceless. It took her from the realm of a useless additional character to one of might and importance. Sure, if you sketched invisible things there was a pretty good chance you'd spend 20 minutes selling off thousands of unusable dirks, but small price to pay for an exploit that might give you a dozen masamunes, twenty glass swords, two lightsabers, and about a million other random useless items (frying pans, etc). Total corruption of your save was also rare, even when the glitch did occur. I wouldn't be surprised if an unofficial grouping of QA people saw the problem and decided that it improved the character significantly. Sometimes bugs like that make it into the shipping game on strength of their side effects.
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