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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.)"
Yeah, because a consistant platform is EVIL!!!!!!
You missed the short bus again this morning, didn't you?
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
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.
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.
thanks for the obligatory microsoft bash, it had to come out somewhere. lets blame MS for the poor programming of 3rd parties just like everyone has been doing for years. Thief is not published by microsoft game studios which is where microsoft 'signs off' on it.
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.
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.
Ah WWF No Mercy. About 50% of the cartrdiges had bad batteries causing the games to lose all their save data. It really sucks when a year and a half of stats and create-a-wrestlers disapear.
:) Every season mode match at exactly the 3:00 mark, every single enemy of yours in the league will run in to interfere in your match.. except.. THEY ATTACK YOUR OPPONENT! The poor AI and bad programming make playing anything but a normal match pointless. But oh well.. that's my only choice so I have to enjoy it for what it is, and be thankful that the dev team was fired.
:)
Morrowind was more tolerable. At least nothing was ever lost. Well.. except maybe all the loading time from reseting after crashes.
WWE RAW2 - Game is so buggy at times it's barely playable. At times you literally lose control of your character. How nice. The PC will often try to pin the player in excess of 20 times in a row. The player is unable to get up in between these pinnings. Basically it's 5 minutes of button mashing and cursing.
Buffy 2: Chaos Bleeds - Check out the official message boards. You will see the same repated messages over and over. In on mode you can't play more than 5 minutes most of the time without a crash. In the story mode / single player game most copies would lock up the console at the same specific points for all users. Nothing was ever done about it. It really sucks constantly replaying through 2 hour levels and having it crash right before the end.
The only way I could see all of the game was to get a game save from the xbox mag that had all levels opened. The first game was great, but this sequel was handed off to another team who complettly killed it off.
I know of a few more. But I don't own them, so I can't do the bugs justice.
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!?
"The nature of this one is pretty obscure."
Anyone that has ever played Thief, unless they were looking for a serious challenge (and had 4 hours to kill), has probably saved their game from time to time. This isn't an obscure bug that occurs only when you're in the pantry holding the knife and looking at your feet. Anytime you save the game during a mission, and then re-load that save game, enemy AI gets reset to normal. That's major and something that should have been found during QA. There's little excuse for having a save that doesn't save the state of the game.
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.
Someone already thought of that - certainly owners of modded X-Boxes could also try that - but it apparently doesn't work, according to the intial post in this thread at the Ion Storm boards. Shame.
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.
I don't take this as completely crazy. Patches for bugs - and this one is somewhat obscure in the testing - happen all the time. Too bad for consoles, but I disagree with the concept of them anyway.
It does let me in on a bit of how testing occurred. When we deploy a system, there is a "dashboard" (ug, i hate the term) of all the settings in the program visible on another screen. As you walk through the application, you can check the values live. If thief had a mode to display this (and most FPS have a console that should deliver this), they'd be able to check AI settings. Perhaps they did and it still isn't working correctly - now thats a bug.
mug
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
I don't have the full version yet, but I just double-checked in the demo and it appears you can set the difficulty on a per level basis. Is this true? If so, just play through a whole level without loading. Don't save and load after each enemy you manage to sneak by. That doesn't strike me as very 'expert' of a tactic.
Buy the game or don't buy it. This bug sucks, but is not a showstopper at all. A game deleting your boot sector when it is uninstalled, now thats a bug. The guy claiming to find the bug didn't shy away from making wild demands or promoting himself as a savior to gamers either. What a turnoff.
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
...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.
sorry, but did you understand the bash? no you didn't. it was a bash against their inability to control their licensees.
the platform is supposedly better because of their _required_ licensing they *can*(and according to them do) control what gets shipped to the shops and what doesn't. they act as if they control the quality, so they'd better deliver that promise as well..
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Agreed. I recall waiting on Enemy Territoty, the sequal to Return to Castle Wolfenstein. The game consisted of two parts, single-player and multi-player, that were being developed by two different companies. Eventually, Activision, the publisher, pulled the single-player project because the contractor was unable to produce the game that was designed. They went on to release the multiplayer portion of the game as a free download. But this was an unusual response for a company, IMHO. In most cases, I suspect that the publisher would just ram the single-player game through, warts and all, and let it earn some money in its failure.
I found this a remarkable feat. Rather than add to the bad blood created by cancelling the project altogether, they release the game for free (with PunkBuster support). The game proved quite popular and continues to remain fairly popular. It's my opinion that they did this to keep the Wolfenstein franchise alive in the eyes of gamers while they moved onto the next game engine - be that Doom3 or Quake4.
I don't have or play Thief 3 so I cannot really judge how important this bug is. But it strikes me that people aren't complaining about poor graphics, bad gameplay, predictable plotlines, boring characters... I've been thinking about trying the game (on PC - I don't have an XBox or a PS2). Given that a patch will no doubt be available for the PC to fix this bug, I am not that concerned.
jr
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
Ion Storm? You can't exit the level without Superfly Johnson!
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.
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.
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...
Does anyone know if Ion Storm was utilizing an in-house bug team, or if they were relying upon Eidos' "crack" Quality Assurance team?
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.