With this being an MMO, the best way to test updates is with a dedicated test server. One where player metrics are closely monitored and activities tracked to identify exploits or unexpected behaviors, and players are rewarded for playing on it and reporting bugs. One where players know they won’t be affecting persistent aspects of the game like PowerPlay or the BGS, but have the option to import their progress into the actual game, after correction of identified exploits.
No one at Frontier catches these bugs before an update is released?
Except they don't happen to all players. I haven't experienced either of those, literally not once.
Tha's not to diminish the fact that it does happen to others, presumably lots of others, but that doesn't make it immutably predictable.
LOL this reminds me of the "missing target orientation indication triangle" bug (idk the actual name, that triangle around targetted ships the game randomly fails to draw sometimes).
I'm not sure how old that bug is exactly, but it was already present when I started playing the game in 2016, so it must be at least 6 years old. That's kind of a record I guess.
If that is truly the case, then your gaming life has been blessed. I’ve experienced much worse. I’ve also experienced far better. ED has been on the lower end of middling when it comes to MMOs, and their chief failure IMO is their utter lack of a player testing program.
In fact, rather than incentivizing player testing, Frontier continues to treat player testing as a marketable commodity. I could understand that during the Kickstarter. After all, who better than the most passionate to test a developing game? Which is a bit ironic, considering how much of the original depth of this game was filled in due to feedback from the Alpha Veruca Salt cohort, long before the game reached beta.
There is always a cohort of players who, for whatever reason, tend to favor playing test builds over the live one. The least Frontier could do is provide an environment for them to do so. Even better would be a dedicated player testing program. But given that we're in the eighth year since release, I doubt Frontier will ever learn this lesson.
The plan from the start was for Frontier to keep updating Elite until it's no longer (financially) viable (ie, 'the 10 year plan'), so I would assume yes.
But remember, we've had public tests in the past, with bugs found by the players and... left as is in the release. And as has been pointed out, some bugs are so obvious that anyone at Frontier just firing up the game will have noticed it.
The average nerd in here concludes that nobody over at Frontier plays or tests the game, but the reality of course is that whether an update has known bugs doesn't on its own justify delaying it.
Last edited:
I felt this way for awhile, especially since I've avoided well-known "bad games" that others like to compare to Elite (Fallout 76, Cyberpunk, etc). But then I bought Microsoft Flight Simulator... THAT is the most frustrating game I have ever personally encountered. I preordered it thinking I was getting a finished game. And while it obviously wasn't when I first starting playing it, at least the amazing bits were amazing enough to make up for the unfinished and broken bits. But then the updates started, HUGE updates that take days to download (using a slow downloader that pegs CPU & GPU while doing nothing), and these updates just kept making the game worse and worse and worse, to the point where it looks nowhere near as good as it did when I first bought it. I finally uninstalled it completely and just gave up. Just look at the very detailed roadmap - MSFS won't actually be finished for YEARS. It would be one thing if they were adding new features, but they are still catching up on features available back in MSFS 95 like seasons!
I've had complaints about Elite, but I knew I was buying an unfinished (as in, an "in progress") game, and even after buying three different copies of Horizons, I can easily say I've gotten my money's worth and more. In contrast, I feel genuinely ripped off by Microsoft / Asobo, though I hope someday, like a dozen years from now, my $69 dollars will finally allow me to play a finished, working, nice-looking game. But by then I suspect I'll be an X-Plane convert, sticking my middle tail rudder up at Microsoft while I fly off into the sunset. Screw Microsoft!
Disclaimer - I know there are plenty of people who love MSFS (heck, its Steam reviews are way better than Odyssey by some strange freak of reality), but I ain't one of them! Asobo / Microsoft can kiss my ruby cheeks! (I don't think I've ever said that to Frontier, LOL)
/rant
Agreed Paul. I'm an old software developer as well, started fresh out of college in '95 and quit the industry in disgust in 2015. We used to build software like we build bridges, with proper planning and design work. But now we make software like we make fast food. I blame the agile methodology which swept through much of the industry in the early 2000s. Sure, it helps the company maintain the bottom line at the end of every quarter, but quality of the software product has suffered dramatically.
Agile in of itself is not really something that drives poor software. Leveraging agile to make it easier for you to hire the cheapest labor you can find and breaking development down into predefined pieces to be consumable by any disposable code monkey where they are hand-held and constrained in what they can work on does though.
Companies would rather throw money at a larger quantity of cheap replaceable labor and be in total control of their business and deal with the brain drain that occurs in that ecosystem than hire fewer much higher skilled programmers who are less replaceable and/or have invested in them and would quickly run out of solutions that warrant their pay rate. Companies just dont like finding themselves beholden to keeping an employee from leaving where if not, their business would potentially be disrupted.
1995, when Frontier First Encounters was famously released full of bugs? 1995, when lots of the core internet protocols of today were being implemented with minimal thought for the security implications? 1995, when people who really should have known better by then were still releasing code with 2-year datefields?
There was never a "good old days" when people knew what they were doing, it's just that when you were limited to 1Mb of RAM and 100MHz processors (or 32k of RAM and 1MHz processors), the application complexity had to be kept small enough that it could fit inside a few people's heads, so it was a bit easier to find the bugs before release.
What really made it seem like bugs were less frequent back in the day was the lack of the internet allowing direct transmission of applications. Distributing disks and cdroms was expensive and time consuming. So testing was very important and serious (should have been) to avoid costly issues at the point of sale, since distributing updates was not easy. The move away from physical distribution puts the focus previously spent on avoiding the costs associated with failures in physical media and replaces them with the costs of redistributing digital media. And since that cost is so much lower with digital distribution, the justification for avoiding it is equally lower.
Don't forget the Pentium bug! You make good points, but I do think the industry has become a bit "lazier" over time. Those hardware limits you mention were strong motivators to write clean, concise, efficient code. Now the answer is, "Program runs slow? Buy a new computer / phone / tablet!" I've seen it myself during my sprint as developer, where the OS APIs I used would get SLOWER with each new OS release, despite doing the same thing as before. Whether this was sloppy coding or purposeful planned obsolesce, I don't know, but quality has definitely taken a bit of a dive over time. Most people just don't notice it because faster hardware and "everything is crap so nothing stands out as crap" covers up many of these issues.
On the other hand, the value of software has steadily fallen over time, and I think this is a real shame and a driving reason behind the fall in software quality. I feel bad for the average programmer these days, working ridiculous hours under incredible stress and crunch with very large expectations, doing incredibly complex work, and usually for a paycheck that doesn't reflect the demands on them. That said, I'm not going to reward sloppy programming by paying full price (in other words, I'm not buying Odyssey just because I feel bad for programmers).
I don't know what the answer is, I'm just glad I'm out of this business and only program for recreation these days.
That's interesting to hear. I've been mostly hearing good things about MSFS. I haven't gotten on the MSFS bandwagon myself because I am not a fan of aviation - as someone who lives near some major NY airports, I have come to regard aircraft as noisy, smelly nusiances (I've become a grumpy old man!). I think the last flight simulator I played was back during the 486DX days. If only MS would make a sailing simuator with the detail and scope of MSFS. Now, that would be something I'm interested in! Who knows, they might slowly expand MSFS into other areas of transport. That would be really cool!
To be fair to Frontier, my annoyance with them and Elite could be due to the simple fact that Elite is by far my most played game...ever! I play a lot of games, but I usually just dabble for a few hours here and there, and then move on to the next game until the mood strikes me to return to it. Elite has always been different: it has been a near constant gaming experience for me since release. I think that is why I am so critical of Frontier: unlike most other games I play, I am so deeply invested in Elite that I have achieved a granular view of the game that I don't usually achieve with titles that I play far less frequently. To be fair to Fdev, the fact that I am still passionate about this game is testament to FDev that frustrated developement or not, they are still doing more right than wrong.
It's a very polarized topic if you go to one of their forums. Some people hate, others love it. Last I checked it was getting good Steam reviews. But then again I think a lot of people playing MSFS are doing just that - "playing" it, casually like a game, so they don't see all the faults it has as an actual simulator.
That and I'm incredibly fussy, as people figured out around here when I started complaining about flicker shadows on PS4
Well if they are gonna ask people to pay good money for summat then they better make sure it works as intended. Back in the old days we had 64k maximum to play around in and with that we had to have everything in there, imagine the joy when the 128k zx spectrum was releasedIt's a very polarized topic if you go to one of their forums. Some people hate, others love it. Last I checked it was getting good Steam reviews. But then again I think a lot of people playing MSFS are doing just that - "playing" it, casually like a game, so they don't see all the faults it has as an actual simulator.
That and I'm incredibly fussy, as people figured out around here when I started complaining about flicker shadows on PS4
Blows my mind that this community not only seems okay with every Update adding new bugs, but seems to actually promote it like it's a good thing.
Most other games I play that have frequent updates don't break their game anywhere near as much as Elite and FDev do, so no; it is not a common industry thing.
Most other games I play that have frequent updates don't break their game anywhere near as much as Elite and FDev do, so no; it is not a common industry thing.
In 1995 if my company shipped a release with a bug like, accidentally overloaded button mappings, someone would've gotten fired.
Today it's par for the course.
I mean
QA could include setting proper version management policies to prevent, say, pushing an old copy of a file into the latest build and accidentally reverting a bugfix.
Something which, if adhered to, should prevent the same bugs from mysteriously popping up over and over and over like a bad smell.
Welcome to the age of modern gaming.
Games are never finished, signed off, and shipped out anymore.
There's always updates, patches, tweaks, changes, and bundles upon bundles of DLC that will then need to be patched, hotfixed, updated and so on and so on.
One of the main reasons I still have a PS2. Just to keep that nostalgia of the "simple days" of gaming every now and then, where you felt like you actually "own" a finished and straightforward video game on a physical disc. Good times...
Games are never finished, signed off, and shipped out anymore.
There's always updates, patches, tweaks, changes, and bundles upon bundles of DLC that will then need to be patched, hotfixed, updated and so on and so on.
One of the main reasons I still have a PS2. Just to keep that nostalgia of the "simple days" of gaming every now and then, where you felt like you actually "own" a finished and straightforward video game on a physical disc. Good times...
Its one of the reasons i hate the ship and patch later culture we have now.