I'm not a beta-tester

The BBQ Pit
1

I went to Electronics Boutique, or whatever they’re calling themselves these days (EB Games), to pick up Strategy First’s new game, Victoria. Unfortunately, they didn’t have the game in, but I did pick up another game, this one called “Pax Romana”. It’s this simulation of ancient Roman politics and strategy. It’s a great concept, and something somebody should have designed a long time ago.

The game is so buggy, though, it’s virtually unplayable. It hangs, it crashes to desktop, certain parts of the game have arbitrary time limits that make it impossible to do what you have to do in the time allowed, the interface is confusing, etc. And it’s not just my computer. I’ve headed over to the game’s bulletin board system and found out that other people are getting the same bugs.

I have no doubt the company will release patches fixing these problems, but they shouldn’t have to. Companies are supposed to test their games before they go gold. I understand that beta testers miss things, and that a company, even a consciencious company, may have to release patches to address things like game balance and “tweak” the game, but when a game gets shipped that contains CTDs, hangups, and other things that make it virtually unplayable, somebody’s not doing their job, either the testers, who aren’t finding major obvious problems, or the programmers, who aren’t fixing them.

If it was just this game that was released buggy, I wouldn’t complain. But it’s not. More and more games are being released that are unplayable out of the box, or contain so much less functionality than promised, that it’s really not the same game as in the manual.

When I buy a game, I expect it to work. I don’t think it’s an unreasonable expectation, and it bothers me that, nowadays, it seems like one.

2

Ha! I just finished a review of that for the site I’m writing for now and my reaction was the same as yours. Did you get the nasty tutorial bugs, too?

Here’s something I said on the same topic on our staff boards:

3

Patches…such a godsend such a curse.

In the hands of a skilled development team a patch can fix unexpected bugs add content rebalance the game.

In the hands of some crappy team it’s an excuse to use the market as a huge beta test. Best part about it is that few people really recognize the different game companies so they have little to worry about with unsatisfied customers plus ‘dissolving’ that company and starting a new one with the exact same people is pretty easy too.

4

I do. Some of the tutorials have bugs halfway in that keep you from finishing them. I want to like this game…I really do. I’ve wanted to like it ever since I said to myself a few years ago, “Wouldn’t it be cool for them to do a game about politics in the Roman Republic?” But, as of now, I can’t like the game.

5

So… you don’t like buggy games, yet were going out to buy Victoria? Now, I love all of Paradox’s games, but their first releases are always buggy as hell.

6

I was pumped, cause I love a good Rome game. But it’s just too buggy/irritating to play.

7

These days, I don’t buy ANYTHING until the reviews are out. And I think the latest “Matrix” game bears that policy out…

8

Although the testers might have fallen down on this one, in most cases you shouldn’t blame them. I will bet you that most of these egregious bugs were known issues and the decision was made to ship the game anyway.

Of course all software ships with known bugs. Usually the decision to ship is made because fixing the bugs would be so difficult or so risky (since fixing the bug will probably introduce more bugs), or the bug is so low-profile that it doesn’t make business sense to hold the release.

Unfortunately, this has given a lot of project managers license to defer every single freaking bug reported, even egregious game killing bugs. Questions of balance or game design I can easily understand being defered, but crashes? But 90% of the time those crashes were found by the testers, and defered because they were thought to be low priority.

9

I blame the company, especially in this instance. Pax Romana just feels like one of those games that was shoved out the door with “We can patch it later!” as the mantra.

10

Because I’m an idiot. :slight_smile: No, I was going to buy Victoria because, for one, my standards are lower for Paradox games…I know they’re buggy as hell. But I also know Paradox supports them…you’re going to need patches, but they’re out soon after release (in fact, I think there’s a patch out already). One company that does it, even though it annoys me, I can take…when a bunch of companies do it, it bothers me.

11

At least it isn’t your video card that you get to beta test. My ATI 9800 has decided that, periodically, it would like to simply stop sending my monitor input. ATI claims that it’s a mobo problem and I need the latest drivers… but I have them already. Then they tell me I should disable a major feature (Fast Writes). I do that, and it crashes moderately softer, but still crashes. Then I find out that they are just stringing me along: they know about the issue I’m having, and are releasing hotfixes to fix it, and haven’t gotten around to one that would help me in particular. Sigh.

12

I was thinking of starting this same thread earlier. I’m replaying Arcanum, which is a great game that could have been fantastic. Even after I’ve applied the patch, the game hangs, and hangs, and hangs. There’s also what I consider to be a serious programming flaw…it’s impossible to SEE passages and items in the game! Surely, someone should have noticed that the player has to bump into walls in some areas of the game, even WITH a lighting source! I often can’t even see that there’s another person in a room with me. I don’t expect a FF6 type blinking point of light to alert me to various goodies, but I have to severely limit my gameplay in the indoor areas of the game because of the eyestrain and resulting headaches.

13

Yeah, there are two companies who I cut slack with regards to patches for : Paradox and Troika.

14

Well, I am a beta tester, and I can tell you it’s not even mostly a problem of testers not catching bugs, it’s the game companies KNOWING they have a laundry list of bugs, and being settled firmly into the “ship now, patch later” mentality. It’s especially bad with MMOGs (massively-multiplayer online games), simply because MMOGs are designed to be patched regularly, as the game world changes often. When a game goes gold and goes to press, there’s still about a month they can use before it hits the shelves to fix bugs and have a patch ready for release day.

As long as the execs make the release decisions, this is what will happen, because when it comes down to it, gamers on the whole would rather buy a buggy game and bitch about it on message boards, than simply not accept this business practice and not buy the games at all till the game company execs get the message. (Gamers are a hardened, cynical lot chuckle)

In almost every case, I can promise it’s not the dev teams releasing the games early (and therefore buggy), in my experience, it’s the execs who want to start seeing returns on their multi-million dollar investments. An MMORPG such as EverQuest, Star Wars: Galaxies, or Dark Age of Camelot run into the double digits (and that’s millions) just to get online, let alone running costs of the game itself, and when a project is a couple years in the making, at some point, ready or not, the execs want that game out the door and making money.

Now mind you, in alot of ways, gamers are getting exactly what they asked for. Every single game I’ve followed through development, or tested, has a public non-beta forum of people bitching to the entire world and flaming the shit out of the company of the day every time it delays an anticipated game’s release. The end result you have now, I believe, would fall under the heading of “Be careful what you wish for”.

For example, Blizzard is infamous for delaying game releases, often several times. They get flamed front, back and sideways, every single time anything is delayed. However, they’re also well-known for not releasing bug-ridden games such as the lamentable, problem-laden Temple of Elemental Evil, that most likely would have been a big seller, were it not crippled with bugs.

This is because Blizzard has been very concerned with producing quality games with as few bugs as possible. Many more companies are far more concerned with the bottom line, because in the end, no matter how much everyone bitches, we still accept these bugs, because we still buy the games, grumbling loudly while we download every patch.

Stop buying the games from companies who regularly fuck you and only give you part of what you paid for in good faith, upfront, and they’ll stop releasing buggy games…or go out of business, whichever comes first. Doesn’t matter either way, devs who make good games will always find a company to work for, so let the shitty game companies fall by the wayside, imo.

15

Sadly, one of the problems with waiting to buy until a game has been sufficiently patched is that the publisher (these are the majority of executives Cerri is talking about) will see that the game is a low seller and decide not to fund the patch.

Atari actually had to take some time to decide to pay Troika to patch Temple of Elemental Evil. As buggy as the game is, they almost didn’t pay for it, and Troika would’ve had to make a decision whether to work on a patch for free or not. The bug list the gamers came up with went over 15 pages on the forums. Hell, a group of gamers got together and patched the game faster than Troika did, and even reimplemented some of the code that was commented out for ratings reason (a brothel and the quests associated with it).

16

I was a beta tester for Star Wars Galaxies. It’s not like the testers don’t find the bugs, it’s that the release is on a schedule and it’s getting pushed out bugs or not. Tips for knowing how a game’s going to turn out:

  1. If the NDA doesn’t drop until just before release, or worse yet not at all, it’s going to be a bad game.

  2. If beta testers say it’s not ready, they aren’t just trying to milk more free playtime.

  3. Never buy a game at release anyways, at least wait until the reviews are in.

  4. Know which sites are really review sites. Don’t pay attention to sites that always give out good reviews for major franchises.

  5. Remember that games are usually graded on a scale of something like 60% to 100%, because they’re graded by fans.

PS- Think those problems are bad, I bought a game called Port Royale. Damn thing fried my vid card, apparently at the hardware level. Now I’ve got these blue lines on my screen and everything in 3D is totally fubared. What pisses me off is that there’s no possible way I’ll ever get recompensed for my Radeon 9800 from those no talent hacks.

17

[/quote]
3. Never buy a game at release anyways, at least wait until the reviews are in.
[/quote]
Masters of orion 3. Man I should have waited for the reviews on that one.

18

I have Victoria, and I haven’t run into any bugs yet - a few imbalances, but no bugs.

19

Ditto Bungie. Back when they were largely a Mac-centered company, they held back the latter couple versions of Marathon for months. And then Myth was delayed a couple of times as well. Good on them, because when the games hit, they rocked.

Now they’re getting hammered because the sequel to Halo was supposed to be out last month, and has been postponed indefinitely. Wouldn’t we all rather have a kickass sequel that plays the way it’s supposed to? In some ways, the delays just increase the drooling. It’s when a game like the latest “Crimson Skies” gets held up that the executives panic, because nobody in particular is waiting for it. “Halo II” is gonna sell a godzillion copies as long as it ships before 2010.

But then again, look at the early leaks; the fanboys will go nuts downloading the hacked alpha and complaining about that. Same thing happened when the rough cut of Hulk hit the P2P sites: “He looks fake!” No shit, the movie’s not done.

We just like to complain. It’s in the Constitution or something. :stuck_out_tongue:

20

What are some good review sites anyway? I’m looking for something that has good reviews and doesn’t scale from 8 - 10.

Plus a site that hasn’t given Max Payne 2 100% and game of the year crap – good graphics do not make up for a shitty story and only 7 hours of gameplay.