Everyone's A Beta Tester

kukyfrope writes "Many people dream of being videogame beta testers but, in reality, a lot of us already are. GameDaily's Greg Atkinson discusses how developers are using the ability to patch games as a crutch for launching games ahead of schedule, using a 'we'll patch it later' mentality, as opposed to extensive play testing." From the article: "What's going on lately that so many games are being released unfinished? Why are the people now paying to essentially beta test the games rather than purchasing completed games? ... If you scan through the PC reviews, on this and any other site, you will notice an overabundance of games that lost points or otherwise hampered their players' experience by being unpolished, full of bugs, and sometimes downright annoying to play. Everything from controls and camera movements to balancing issues, broken quests, and of course graphical errors are abundant in probably half the titles on the shelf these days. It's become habit to look for any patches to a game while I'm installing it, and that's not right."

Comments

Alpha

[networkBoy]

The new beta.

Consoles

[Quiet_Desperation]

This is why I like console games a bit better. There's exceptions, but they tend to just work. They're kind of the Macs of the gaming world: just one system to design for.

Ding! Wrong answer.

[pcgamez]

"If you scan through the PC reviews, on this and any other site, you will notice an overabundance of games that lost points or otherwise hampered their players' experience by being unpolished, full of bugs, and sometimes downright annoying to play."

That is precisely what I am NOT seeing. One if the biggest problems with reviews is that the reviewer rarely depends on the product (or even pretends to). For instance, take a new car review. The reviewer might mention (this happened in a long term study in a major car magazine recently) that they had to have it in the shop on average once every three weeks for eight months. For those of us in the real world, being without our vehicle for at LEAST 2-3 hours (often 2-3 days) every month would cause major problems. For them, it is a minor issue because they are not dependant on the product.

The same applies to gaming. If I purchase a product and it won't work correctly out of the box on my system (most recent example: galciv2), I can't play it. This is because I have one decent gaming system. Sure, for those out there that have more than one gaming system it is a minor inconvenience, but for the other 99%... Reviewers constantly ignore this. If they have that issue they simply use another review system and note it in the review. The game may lose 2/10 points for that. Unfortunately, saying a game is say 7/10 including that issue does not reveal the actual rating of the product, because many people will be unable to use it, making it a 0/10.

The response to this is often "just wait for a patch." Fantastic. I paid $50 for a game that by the time it is playable for me the retail price has dropped to $40 and I am just then getting to play. Can I take it back? Nope, not under current laws. Does the consumer get screwed? Yep.

He's pretty close.

[RomSteady]

First off, I should probably lay out my credentials. My name is Michael Russell, and I'm the QA Manager for Ritual Entertainment. We're going to be releasing "SiN Episodes: Emergence" over Steam on May 10.

In some ways, Greg Atkinson is absolutely right, but he seems to be right for the wrong reasons.

There are three global problems in game development: marketing usually promises a date that cannot be met, throwing more people at a problem cannot fix it, and bugs found at the end of a project are hard to impossible to fix.

The marketing date is a huge issue because 90% of the time, the people making the game have no buy-in regarding it. They're working towards being done when it's done, and then when they get told that they have six months when they need a year, things get implemented too fast and half-assed.

Of course, here we are at six months out with no testing so far. In fact, the game is generally in an untestable state due to the huge influx of new, untested, unstable code and/or assets. Several major developers and publishers are now moving to the "monkey" model of testing: hire 100 temps for six weeks at the end, have them hammer on the game, and the end result is 5,000 bugs with little time to fix it.

So, the team gets the game to a basic level of functionality, throws it in a box, and gets to work on the patch while the box winds its way to retail.

Until the industry as a whole learns that QA is no longer just a line-item expense but a necessity, we're going to have issues like this.

Console developers are starting to get it, but mostly because the platform holders have a set of tests that every game released on the console must pass. Fail one test or a permutation of one test, and there is a high likelihood that you won't ship. Suddenly, spending an extra few dollars on testing early to find and fix the problem doesn't seem like a big expenditure compared to the nightmare that is missing your street date.

I'm happy that we've had testing on "SiN Episodes: Emergence" from day 1. Are there still going to be bugs? Always...there's nothing you can do to eliminate bugs entirely. It's the nature of software development. But by getting on the project early and testing through to the end, we're able to make sure that the game is stable, completable, and fun out of the box.

And for a game, that's all you can ask.