Hey, I work in QA (not in the video game field though.) However, I can tell you there is a difference between “QA missed” and “deadlines required prioritizing other fixes.”
One implies that the employees are bad at their job. Which is almost certainly not the case. I haven’t played Starfield (or even clicked through to your link lol) but presumably this is something blatantly obvious. And I’m sure the QA team was frustrated letting a glaring known issue through.
QA finds issues but it’s up to development teams to fix them, and strict deadlines will always hamper delivering a flawless product. But deadlines are driven by management and until the industry changes (i.e. don’t preorder games) we’re going to keep seeing these problems.
But as a QA professional, please don’t blame us ✌️
This. You don’t know what’s sitting on a jira somewhere with “won’t fix” tagged to it. As an ex-QA who’s now a dev, we want to fix everything and we get told what we will and will not be fixing. When you see bugs in the final product that are relatively easy to reproduce, the story there is almost certainly that we found it and then the money told us not to bother with it because they think you’ll buy the product anyway.
My favorite interaction ever, as a QA:
me: Our integration testing environment is constantly broken due to bad practices among all the teams that share it. They need to be aware of the contract they expose and how they’re changing it before they deploy their code to any shared space.
management: Given the recent complaints about the instability of the QA environment, we’ve decided to shut it down and eliminate all QA positions.
Our managers did that shit, too, back when I was in the durable medical equipment industry. They said some shit like “QA as an org is dysfunctional, as evidence by all the complaints. We’re gonna streamline the process by eliminating them and having dev teams do their own QA according to this checklist we’ve developed. We think that we can get the same quality for less money and less bureaucratic overhead communicating between the dev teams and the QA team.” They cut about $2 million in annual salary right then and there. A lot of our QA engineers and even a couple of their managers found out about the restructuring at the all-hands where they announced this.
Fast forward a year, they’re getting the shit sued out of them and have to do a multi-billion dollar recall because of…let’s just call it an “emergent use case” among our customers that no one foresaw and therefore no one tested. That emergent use case was sending people to the hospital. I’ll go to my grave confident that someone whose only job was QA would have absolutely been able to catch that.
Hell yea brother. Lazy Dev / Lazy QA talk is shit that’s gotta stop. Dev here. No one likes to ship buggy code, it’s just gonna come back to bite us. Sometimes all you can do is ship good enough code because there are 20 more Jira tickets coming down the pipe.
The teams behind a single AAA game are often as big or bigger than your average tech startup. It’s competing priorities all the way up and down the ladder and devs and QA often have very little influence over this.
It’s blatantly obvious and makes the game look like shit. This should not a low-prio bug, this should be a showstopper.
If you’ve got 8 minutes to spare, this video explains why it’s not that easy: Why Do We Ship Buggy Games? - A Look Behind the Scenes - Extra Credits
Yeah I don’t buy it. This is not a new engine they just developed, or some obscure complicated feature. This is one of the core functionalities of the game engine: render the game world onto the screen. And it’s an engine they developed in-house. They have been working on this game for years and years, and all that time no one noticed that output of the rendering engine is incorrect and everything looks washed out?
In the current state, the game should not have been released at all. If this is something that was fundamentally unfixable they should have pulled the plug and cancelled the game.
