Which they haven't been doing either, so what exactly is your point? You also seem to be suggesting that is a viable business model, which it isn't. Apart from Cyberpunk, you don't see very many other games releasing as broken as EDO, nor do you see bugs and regressions being so prevalent and ongoing as you see in Elite.
Why every patch brings more bugs than fixes?
- Thread starter Salmonea
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I wouldn't say disabled. It probably wasn't finished in time or not quite ready yet - or less ready than the rest.
I am not asking the testers to dissect the whole game to bits, we can all agree that not all of the bugs can be caught in time.
I am talking about the most glaring issues that anyone who plays the game for 5 minutes can spot immediately. Those should never ever make it to the final release.
And we have such issues with each and every update.
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Less ready is a nice phrase... Pretty accurate for the 'release' of EDO, it wasn't in the best of states to release, even for those like me who play games on PCs with plenty of power it was surprisingly poorly performing!
I'm looking forward to the stream tomorrow and seeing how much the art dept. have improved the FC interiors, hoping they look better than they are currently - they are certainly 'in place', but not finished. (as can be seen from pics of one of my FCs below)
The FC displayed is not the layout I have, so still a WIP in EDO, currently.
Yeah I agree with this. Games like Skyrim for example still had lots of bugs, but most of them were pretty innocuous and small, or couldn't really be found unless you went out of your way to cause them. It's debatable that a standard QA team would have found most of them because of that.
Odyssey on the other hand, most of it's broken mechanics and glaring bugs are evident purely by interacting with the core mechanics, and are repeatable with relative consistency. Even a basic QA team would have found these almost immediately.
Its quite common in the software industry to have something called "Regression testing". It is needed because complex system have "Whack a mole" situations where you change something and something else breaks. For example, (and I am not saying this is the case) they fix the issue with materials appearing on the scanner above the ground by lowering them. This causes the biological's collisions to go underground so the hand held scanner cannot see them. Your vapour trails going the wrong direction, probably a badly placed minus sign. It's just too easy to introduce bugs.
A regression test consists of a list of the basic operations which needs to be double checked. You then have to work through it methodically. As time goes on, more tests need to be added. This works well if you have plenty of time. However, if you are rushed you tend to go "Yes, I think that is working" only to get users reporting that it does not. The problem is that if you spend more time testing, your list of known bugs takes longer to fix and you take longer to get to the "PC now working, not lets start on console version" stage. So another case of you cannot please all the people all the time.
It is difficult because there are far more users than testers at FDev. So we are more likely to find issues that the testers have not discovered. They cannot test every combination of every ship with every planet type with every plant with every suit with every weapon. That would take too long. On the other hand there are some basic issues that were not spotted.
Its a matter of balance. Something the FDev don't seem to have quite got right. Never mind practice makes perfect.
A regression test consists of a list of the basic operations which needs to be double checked. You then have to work through it methodically. As time goes on, more tests need to be added. This works well if you have plenty of time. However, if you are rushed you tend to go "Yes, I think that is working" only to get users reporting that it does not. The problem is that if you spend more time testing, your list of known bugs takes longer to fix and you take longer to get to the "PC now working, not lets start on console version" stage. So another case of you cannot please all the people all the time.
It is difficult because there are far more users than testers at FDev. So we are more likely to find issues that the testers have not discovered. They cannot test every combination of every ship with every planet type with every plant with every suit with every weapon. That would take too long. On the other hand there are some basic issues that were not spotted.
Its a matter of balance. Something the FDev don't seem to have quite got right. Never mind practice makes perfect.
With a game of such a large scale and so many loops, we probably underestimate the amount of critical stuffs to test.
My day to day routine in the game is probably very different from yours for instance.
Yes, that I agree with and I do understand that.
But some of the issues introduced with U9 are almost impossible to miss if you as much as start the game and play normally for a few minutes.
Broken biology scanner, broken fire groups and bugged Scorpion are the most obvious that come to my mind.
The same goes for U8 that gave us backtrails upon exiting SC, stations popping in seconds after you exit SC, borked restricted zones in settlements etc.
These could and should have been caught within a few minutes of regular gameplay if any such testing exists. Which for a long time now I am convinced it doesn't.
And all it takes is really to start the game and play it for a while.
Even that would be a great help and all these things could be avoided.
- about the Biology Scanner and Scorpion, I still haven't used them even once, now you see what I meant...
- "stations popping in seconds after you exit SC, borked restricted zones in settlements", doesn't seem uber critical to me (but have to be fixed asap)
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- You might not use it but certain checklists do exist and a regular tester should have discovered this.
- The restricted zones were critical because I lost so many covert missions to them. When you are suddenly in a restricted zone in the middle of nowhere and you cover is blown that is a gamebreaking bug.
And even if wasn't critical the testers should have picked it up by simply playing the game and focusing on the fundamentals.
That is the only point I'm trying to make.
But just like said @Factabulous, there's the problem of 'limited resources' and 'prioritization'. Developers and testers cost a crazy amount of money.
Edit : and they are hard to hire as well.
But most of those require you to do specific things, repeatedly, and to specifically look for that issue. Do you realize how big the game has become? To check every feature in every situation is impossible. And no, most of what you listed is not fundamental.
Granted, the broken biology scanner should have been caught, what with bioexology being one of the new features that Frontier sould be focusing on, but the rest?
I didn't notice the broken fire groups, the (one) firegroup for my beluga's turrets worked just fine. You would have to specifically look for a problem with multiple firegroups.
I had a look at the scorpion, took it out for a ride, did some pew pew, didn't notice anything bugged with it. In fact I still don't even know what you're referring to there, it seemed fine.
The backtrails I ended up noticing only after several instances of dropping into normal space and realizing, there's nobody else here to make that trail (I just didn't see it before), and most importantly after witnessing firsthand how the trail appeared at the same time as my ship after I recalled it.
Stations (and other assets) popping in seconds after exiting SC is something you will often encounter when your network is slow, or you're on a slow hard drive and is probably not a bug per se. The recent instance of it taking this long might have been due to a bug, or down to the performance issues EDO suffers from, but it's not hard to see how only complaints from the players would have prompted Frontier to have a second look at it and to conclude that the lag is beyond what they consider acceptable. Or it's also likely that since it was hardly game-breaking, they decided to address it in the slew of performance-related fixes they would push out anyway.
As for the "borked restricted zone".. they're not obvious until you play at a bugged settlement, and the consequences are pretty mild since you can simply step away as soon as an NPC tells you to back off (and if you're sneaking around, it hardly matters).
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Hence my post from 7:56.
I really don't believe starting up the game by 3-4 people for a few minutes requires that many resources.
And the most obvious bugs could be caught before the patch is released and the whole credibility of FDev would increase.
It's the usual forum thing of 'people should not make mistakes, and not have priorities that are not mine'. If they can't accept that is a subjective view and not some objective standard then you will be here a while - probably another 7 years at least
I think you really underestimate the workflow of testing / report / fix.
I'd rather have a postponed patch (like we did many times) than a broken game.
That's a fair and puzzling point.
But then come marketing and business departments.
Yeah, that could explain some things...
However, their reputation should not be sacrificed and should be something to look after.