What is Digg?83 Comments
- shaun944, on 10/12/2007, -4/+39Yeah this goes under the "no ***** sherlock" category. Game makers have been taken advantage of the internet to distribute "patches" for at least a decade.
When I played Sierra games back in the day for ex., if there was a glitch, they sent you new disks. Bugs were not fixed, but there weren't too many. I'm blanking on the specific title, but there was a game in the late 90's that was a FPS but you could also pilot mechs that I swear was on like ver 9.x within a year of its release because of so many "patches".
Everquest for example, my god if you had to reinstall the game, you had to spend a few hours downloading all the patches before you could play! - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -2/+25shouldn't that be UNPAID testers?
- carguy84, on 10/12/2007, -1/+13Ya, much the same way a lot of us are Windows QA testers.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+11You got it ass backwards, pal.
As someone who in fact makes a living beta testing videogames, I can assure you that the company's beta testers find a hell of a lot more bugs with a project than the producers are willing to fix because of looming release deadlines. It's not a question of beta testing "everything" (which is EXACTLY what happens at videogame companies with in-house testers -- we literally DO test everything, that's what they pay us for), it's a matter of spending the time and the money FIXING things the testers find, and a matter of meeting deadlines that a publisher or the financial backers set. - AnotherBrian, on 10/12/2007, -0/+11re: theBrink
Not even unpaid, but PAYING beta testers - danpsmith, on 10/12/2007, -0/+10Beta means a complete game with buggy, generally not well tested functionality. Alpha means incomplete. Everyone misunderstands the difference between the two. Generally beta is lacking polish, alpha is lacking all of its substance, that's the difference.
I know because I was an alpha and beta tester for a little heard of and failed (well Sierra's version failed anyway and now a different software company retained rights) MMOG named "The Realm" for Sierra a long time ago and they'd talk about the different stages all the time. - errorjustin, on 10/12/2007, -0/+9The subject has a typo... should say "and how gamers are basically UNpaid beta testers," in case people were confused.
- gamerzworld, on 10/12/2007, -0/+9I beta test battlefield 2! YAY! Patch 5060644.1 here I come!
- fgiDangeresque, on 10/12/2007, -0/+8I don't really like the idea that we, as gamers are actually paying in a lot of cases to play something that is of substandard quality. If they are going to run with this mentality, then lets see them for cheaper, considering we are actually doing a lot of work for them, or a nice big red sticker on the front of the box: "THIS GAME IS NOT YET COMPLETE; NOT ALL FEATURES OR ELEMENTS WORK AS PLANNED" >:)
.. like any of that is ever going to happen. Meanwhile, these same manufacturers (EA is one) are requiring valid contact information in order to be able to play games, whereby they can send you 'latest news': aka free advertising. Grr
That said, (and a little off topic, sorry) there are legitimate uses for the patches, but one shouldnt have to patch their games often at all. And dont get me started on 400mb patch files- why oh why?
Dangeresque is angry at something today - fitzroydoll, on 10/12/2007, -2/+9Don't forget FEAR. Monolith released a patch for the game *the same day* it went onto store shelves. And CryTek, makers of Far Cry, who released a huge patch that had to be recalled.
id is the only company that has a good rep in this area. Solid games and few patches. - CJHtxGeek, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6BF2 has been the worst example recently... however it is almost a year old, I couldnt play it at all when it first came out, shovelware to the max...
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6I don't play WOW to know, but regarding Blizzard's previous games like SC/War3 - there was NO way they could discover the gameplay related bugs with such a limited staff of testers. Basically no matter how well you test, a bug will exist somewhere, to be found by someone at sometime under some circumstances. This especially holds true for game balance issues where 1 person can take 1 slight imbalance and exploit it 1,000,000,000,000 times to get #1 on a ladder or whatnot.
Basically my point is, for developers that can produce a game with FEW bugs like Blizzard, they have done their job and then some, no one has room to complain when they're releasing patches they don't have to release. - STKD, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6Half-Life 2? Go onto the steampowered forums and you'll already see going by the insane amount of bugs and problems still in there a year and a half on that a vast amount of people *do* consider it beta quality... at best.
- Karisson, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5Battlefield 2 is one of the most ridiculously-patched games around. Every time they release a new patch, it fixes some bug or aspect of the game, but creates a whole rash of other problems.
- deepsub, on 10/12/2007, -4/+9I think most people would agree that we can thank Microsoft for lowering the bar one what is considered 'beta'.
- augustwest30, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4...or it could say "PAYING beta testers".
- ModernTenshi, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5To quote Mr. Miyamoto: "A delayed game will eventually be good. A bad game is bad forever"
More companies should heed these words, I think. If your game is good, then backing it up a little bit won't cause anyone to abandon playing it. Well, maybe a few will, but the majority won't. I really am getting tired paying $50 for what is really an incomplete game, and having to patch it soon after. I can understand for minor glitches (slight hiccups in the graphics now and then, for example), but big ones like the skills system in Oblivion is pretty bad in my opinion. - PepeGSay, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5WoW has 6 million customers. Something like 2 million of those have been playing for over a year and a half. Calling it a Beta product is silly. Games are complex and human interactions on the scale of MMOs add greatly to the complexity. There will be some issues. The measure of success is dealing appropriately with those issues which Blizzard has largely done very well.
- CharlesDarwin, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4Was that game Shogo?
Also, this article reminds me of the Matrix Online. I bet if that game is still around, it is still ***** beta quality! - doddilus, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3No one has mentioned Star Wars: Galaxies yet? that would be the super ultimate prime example of what the author is talking about. SWG was nowhere near ready for launch when they launched it and nearly 3 years later its still not ready for launch
- antdude, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3I miss the days when game companies released test, alpha, beta, etc. to the public. Remember Qtests? :)
- nogami, on 10/12/2007, -3/+6How long are you willing to wait for a game just because some idiot has hardware that was manufactured a decade ago that conflicts with some portion of the latest game out there... Personally, I'd rather take the game now with a few minor glitches rather than wait another 6 months or more for more compatibility.
It's also worth noting since the majority of games are on PCs, and there are billions of combinations of hardware and peripherals, a lot of in-game issues won't appear until after the game is released and in the hands of the public with their own wierdly-configured machines.
N. - kwoff, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3This leads into an idea that I had. You know how you have the web, and with Mozilla/XUL, Ajax, etc. one tries to make a kind of platform-independent application environment out of a web browser, which is kind of dumb but it's something that's widely distributed. I was thinking, what else is widely distributed that we could use instead? I thought of games, at least multiplayer games have this kind of interconnectedness to them, even if they aren't as widely distributed as web browsers (I don't know what the actual numbers are). Plus ultimately games
promise to have more virtual reality capabilities, so someday you'll probably be able to interact with people like they're right there with you. So why not create an application environment from a gaming platform but that's capable of running more general GUI applications? (The equivalent of XUL, right, where you have widgets, event handlers, etc.) I guess it must be mostly a matter of efficiency, since my impression is that games are highly-optimized-assembler type of deals, at least for some parts. - G00mper, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Unfortunately, Xbox Live is slowly becoming the patch network. Expect the other consoles to follow suit.
- diggerStaz, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2This is actually one of the reasons I finally started only playing console games. You'd be half way through a PC game and find that you needed a patch. The catch would be that you couldn't load your saved game after patching your game. While console games aren't always as good, it seems that they're almost always complete (as the developers are guaranteed certain hardware).
- birdwatcher3000, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2SWG is still in ALPHA...
- estvir, on 10/12/2007, -12/+14your point being ? we're talking about software problems, gameplay isn't necessarily one of those.
- philovivero, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2"Meanwhile, these same manufacturers (EA is one) are requiring valid contact information in order to be able to play games, whereby they can send you 'latest news': aka free advertising."
Games, it would appear, are going the way of DVDs that make you watch advertising or simply won't play when you move. It's more convenient to get the PirateBay version of the game so that you can enjoy it in the manner games were meant to be enjoyed.
Consider this for a moment: the department that puts the most value into a game or DVD is the department that doesn't work for the company that produced the piece in the first place: the Digital Media Liberators ("pirates") that remove the DRM and crap from the product.
For my part, I just opted to stop playing games entirely, and I only play DVDs in Digital Media Liberating players like mplayer or VLC. - Hollister, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Aren't Oblivion and Half-life 2 reviewed in the gamerankings.com's top 20 of all time?
- doubleYou, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Console vs. PC game enjoyment is another matter for debate, but...
Console games have traditionally not had permanent storage and online access, thus there was no option to patch them up. I'm always surprised at how PC games even make it out the door with their glaring bugs, but then these developers can count on the faithful players to download the latest patch.
I fear that the onset of next-gen consoles with their hard drives and online features is going to make it easier for publishers to apply that same PC game patching rationale to their console games, as already evidenced on the Xbox. - klebel, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2When Blazing Angels came out you couldn't even fly with a joystick until they released a patch, how dumb is that.
- doubleYou, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Nah, it would only take about one more month to make these games more solid. DNF and Starcraft: Ghost and other vaporware are not in the same category as the games this article applies to. Those games haven't even made it to Alpha.
- OBKenobi, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Let's not forget KOTOR II. Entire levels, and the ending were cut because it wouldn't make it in time for Lucarts' unrealistic ship date. While this wasn't a code problem, it is still part of the same problem; which is publishers who think shipping on time (and saving development costs) is more important than quality. Maybe they're right? But we get crappy games from such a development model.
So wonder no more why you get such shoddy, sloppy games with bug-ridden interfaces and other bizarre bugs. If they'd spend more $$$ on gameplay instead of hiring high-priced celebrities or paying franchise fees, we'd get better games. - Cyberdactyl, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3Dear Michael Evans and Hamilton Chu,
Larry Niven called and wants his story line back as well. . .or at least would like SOME acknowledgment you shamelessly ripped off his series of novels.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringworld - tmcleroy, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2no *****. half life 2 was unplayable for me until they patched it up, and Battlefield 2 is probably still unplayable but i wouldn't know because i gave up on that turd because of its bugs
- Cyberdactyl, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Geesh are you misled. How many would fly on a plane if they thought for a second it wasn't fully tested?
- retawd, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2The patches also tend to slow down piracy, for a while at least. Not that I or anyone I know would ever do it, but I've _heard_ games like, I don't know, Quake 4 for example, work until they are patched, then they stop working until a newer code is entered. But, like I said, its just a rumor I've heard.
- xst4t1kx, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I was in SWG beta... it was a joke. Continued to be an unfunny joke well after release as well. Only played after release because they continually promised fixes that continued to go undelivered. Quit after my character (and all progress) disappeared due to their ongoing database problems and support told me "tough luck, start over." Alongside EQ2, one of the worst online games I have ever played. Unfortunately I gave them money for it.
Also, the poor state Oblivion was released in has just about killed my desire to play that game as well. - Mugros, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Half-Life 2?
I bought this game shortly after the release and played it without any problems. Don't see anything beta... I have seen much worse. - KMcG, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1My last job was a game tester and the state of commercial games is nothing like testing beta software. the publishers actually do a pretty good job of forcing developers to fix a large amount of bugs in the game. Games even in beta are still not always very stable and its when any flaws in the system interactions start to show and create unexplainable behavior. Most commercial games have fixed most of these issues before they see the shelves because if the publishers find it they won't approve the build.
Also, a huge part of being a tester is filling out bug reports and thus you must be able to repeat an error and come up with a chain of events that can recreate the bug so the programmers can fix it. It is a skill that you get better at over time, but the average gamer doesn't have this ability innately. - dimplemonkey, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1already a video tester? tell me something that I don't know!
- Cyberdactyl, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1You can always wait a month or two and let others deal with the crap code and read the boards to avoid the painful learning experience.
But the dichotomy of waiting is everyone who buys the day of release gets a big jump in the game experience. - Ionik, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Dont forget MLB 2k6. It is nearly impossible to finish a game without it freezing and having to reboot. The problem with this one is 2k sports is dragging its feet to get a patch sent out.
- LatvianHedgehog, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I totally agree - i myself have "tested" Championship Manager 06 this way.
- tizz66, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I can see the authors POV, but there's a crucial point here. He says it's not like the old days, but in the old days the games were comparatively simple. They were more linear, the engines weren't complicated and the systems they ran on weren't as complex. Nowdays, games are just immense, and they're non-linear which makes it even more complex because it means there's literally an infinite number of things to test.
A game like Oblivion or HL2 isn't like Office, which, although still massive, its generally only used in a few ways. There's no excuse for the blindingly obvious problems, but for the less obvious bugs it really should be expected. Even if 10 people experience a game-stopping bug in a game that sold 10 million copies, that's such a tiny tiny percentage that it's no wonder the real beta testing team missed it. - christoscamaro, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I remember qtest1. The Quake 1 test download.
Ran great on my pentium 90. Ran around for hours in empty levels getting even more excited for the release of Quake. - jmccorm, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2MASTER OF ORION III CALLED.
They want their concept back.
/Good Lord, please LET them have their concept back. - kwoff, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I realized that my comment probably sounded even more unrelated to the current topic than it needed to.
It's just when I read the comment for the story submission, it reminded me of how web development works. - STKD, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1The day they fix the clipping for AT rockets fired dead-on at a jeep speeding towards you, so that the rockets don't just fly harmlessly straight through it? Battlefield 2 players should be celebrating in the streets when it happens.
Again as many of you seem to be, I'm a current beta, alpha and indeed occasionally even pre-alpha software tester for what I'll just refer to as a "VERY large publisher". Many many hundreds of bugs will often be left in software, simply because it is a fact that people don't understand how the business actually works. I can't really speak for Oblivion bar comments picked up on it's reputation, but Half-Life 2? I'd fire myself before I signed off on a game as inherently screwed as H-L2. Missions that randomly break, do not a great game make.
Or something. - zimm, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1dungeon lords... worst game ever... you paid to be an alpha tester.. and then paid again to be a beta tester. and STILL dont have a complete working game...
HA HA! -
Show 51 - 83 of 83 discussions
© Digg Inc. 2009
— Content created and posted by Digg users is