QA does stuff

this just in: actually spending money on QA allows you to put out a higher quality product
- It's truly amazing what can happen when they don't cut quite so many corners and release the minimal viable product.
  
  I'm not sure that using the entire QA staff of the world's largest agglomeration of Dev studios on a single game only qualifies as "not cutting corners". That's surely going above and beyond.
  
  If Agile consultant could read they'd be very upset
- Also helps to come out with a game so popular you can bank on it for the next decade

Spoiler: It's still really buggy.
- I'm only a few hours in, but aside from the usual weird NPC behaviour this engine is known for I haven't encountered any actual bugs so far.
  
  yeah, the game stinks of gamebryo, but.. I've only had one crash so far.. Who would have that that all it would take to make a less buggy bethesda game was the entire QA department of one of the biggest companies on the planet.
- that's just a reality of software development and hard set deadlines.
  
  That's a fine excuse if you're a developer, but not if you're the one who chooses the deadlines
- Strange, I'm about 12 hours in and apart from minor glitches like odd character movement every now and then it's been pretty smooth sailing. What are you guys running into?
  
  I walk by a shelf and it randomly explodes from some physics glitch.
  Things forever rolling that should not be rolling, like books.
  NPCs just keep sprinting into a wall.
  NPCs stuck halfway through the floor, both alive and dead.
  Enemies teleporting into mountain, and can shoot me from there.
  Creatures not attacking when they should.
  Ships clipping into stations.
  My character stuck in a pose.
  Guns floating.
  Nothing game breaking though!
  Just immersion-breaking.
  Im more concerned about other stuff. Performance. Design choices.
  I get 37fps in towns with an "UFO rated" computer on userbenchmark.
  The menus are horrible.
  And what good does the spaceship do? I just fast travel everywhere. I think I've seen the inside of my ship twice i 10hrs.
  Story is the most lazily written, generic scifi tropey stuff I've seen.
  No maps. No clue where shops are.
  The game is marketed as huge and open, but in reality it's all just setpieces with empty planet surfaces. You cannot get into your ship and fly 500m east to your mission marker. If you do that, a new map is loaded and none of your missions are there.
  
  Same, it's been exceptionally smooth considering the scale and scope of this game

Sounds impressive until you learn there's like 5 qa employees.

So you mean they actually QA'd the game.
- Yeah the Microsoft QA team is probably the only one that's ever touched the game.

I've watched multiple reviews though that have said some variation of "yup, it's a Bethesda game, bugs and all"
- Watched twitch streams out if curiosity. This is a bathesda game in every way. Which is fine, but it feels like we’re being told it’s not. And it is.
- But it IS still the least buggy Bethesda game yet, that I believe. If all people got to complain about is lack of some HDR shit, theres not much to complain about.
  I've only found a few bugs so far: One enemy floating in air, and followers who aren't good at following.
  
  I've had some of the usual physics glitching out and exploding stuff all over the place, and one guy phased through a bar counter... other than that, pretty smooth sailing.
  
  As an old fart that started playing TES on DOS I have to disagree.

And they'll still find a way to release it undercooked
- "it just works"
- Game is great. You people just want to bitch.
  
  Oh boy, I’m sure an account with a username like yours is definitely here to make good faith arguments and have productive discussions.
  
  If you don't mind the puppet faces, the Bethesda jank and playing from loading screen to loading screen, the game is great. I wouldn't even pirate that crap.
  
  I don't doubt a Bethesda game is great. I just doubt the launch will go smoothly

Apparently with all that QA they still missed massive picture quality problems
- 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 ✌️
  
  As someone who works in software dev, QA is a godsend to developers. Thank you for your sacrifice lol
  
  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.
  
  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.
- As a developer who works with great QA people. I can guarantee you that the QA team were not the issue here. Where the developer's time was prioritized and what fixes where even allowed to be patched would have been a direct result of leadership decisions
  
  Yep. A lot of people don't realize that games are not bad because of the developers but rather because of leadership. They incorrectly attribute the blame to developers and think developers want to build shitty games or something.
- Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/xi-C3PzKdsI
  Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
  I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
  
  cool bot.
- tl;dw
  HDR is broken (or all colour grading)
  
  SDR is broken as well.
- I've been in the SpecialK discord all of yesterday messing with stuff and went to bed.
  Now I wake up and find that not only did they (SpecialK devs) fix the 8bit pipeline problem, but it paves the way for real HDR in all Direct3D12 games.
  You have until launch day to return pre-orders and I was considering it, but we might have fixed HDR/black levels now.

"We assembled our best team of Creed Brattons."
- Holy shit is that the job title he held on that show? He was part of Dunder Miflin's QA?

Ayo what's starfield and why is it suddenly everywhere?
- Most recent RPG game from Bethesda. This studio got very famous for their Elder Scrolls and Fallout games, hence the widespread hype.
  
  Hey that's the game with all the bugs!
  I wanted to look at Starfield on Bethesda's website, but the site bugged out loll
  
  I’d say Bethesda got famous for building games around a shit ton of bugs.
- Welcome to earf
- Big corporate's latest data miner/spyware diguised as a game.
  
  Source: trust me bro
  
  While I wouldn't put it past Microsoft: do you have proof of this?
  
  Big if true.

And it's exclusive to Xbox so ps4/5 is screwed.
- PC?
  
  Yes PC too but I'm running an Intel NUC with Linux for utility and compact space.

I live under a rock. How does this game compare to NMS?
- It's not an exploration game really at all. Think RPG with space theme.
  
  It's not even really an rpg with how few skills/abilities there were to select from. And how little the environment changes to allow you to solve problems differently
- Apples to oranges i hear
- Starfield is Fallout 4 set in space. No man's sky is exploration in space. I prefer the latter.
- It doesn't.
  Basically the space flight mechanic is somewhere between Mass Effect: Andromeda and CoD: Infinite Warfare.
  You use your galaxy map fast travel to go anywhere and can only fly the ship around each small "instance."
  Planetary landings are restricted to POI's or you can land on some random spot, but the planets are broken up into chunks so you can only walk around so much before having to go back to your ship for another fast travel moment.
- Consider it as fallout 4 in space and you’re more than halfway there.
  
  I thought that was "The Outer Worlds"?
  Edit: a word.
  
  "fallout without the wacky/fun stuff" in space.
- Its fallout 4 in space. It doesnt compare to NMS. Or Elite, or Star Citizen.
- The NMS like gameplay is like a tiny part of it. It's a story heavy RPG first and foremost. Sure, you can do a lot of NMS style stuff, like gathering resources and scanning wildlife on a thousand planets, but that's really not why you should get the game. You should get it if you want a massive space RPG in the style of Bethesda. And yes, this time Bethesda actually made a proper RPG.

You gotta do, what you gotta do.

Shocking. These days, normally, GA is QA.
- It's been that way for a while now.
  When online patching became a thing most games studios quickly figured out they could push the game to press in whatever state, then work on fixing the bugs in between code complete and GA, and simply push those fixes as a launch day patch.
  And commercially, it makes sense. The greatest the game is on the shelves, the earlier the investors see ROI. It's just a shame if this calculated gamble backfires and the degree find way too many bugs to fix in the window between code complete and release. That's when you get Cyberpunk 2077...
  
  To be fair, I haven’t played 2077 on launch day but like 3 months later, on a medium-high gaming laptop. I‘ve had zero crashes, no T-poses and generally nearly no bugs.
  The real problem was them releasing the game on last gen consoles which were (like low tier pcs) unable to handle the game. I would even go as far as to say that they made a game that was only playable on high tier hardware.
  And interestingly enough now 2.5 yrs after release, the game has more bugs for me than it had 3 months in.
  I‘m not a game dev so I can’t say why that is but as a dev I can say that fixing one bug might introduce another which becomes a lot harder to fix.

Anyone else seen the fallout 76 song it just works by the Chalkeaters?

Downvote for litchally.

Are you guys getting paid to advertise this game?
Nothing but endless posts in the past 24 hours on something I've previously never heard about.
Edit: the down voted form gamers with hurt feelings. I was half joking. All these over sensitive comments. I hope the game is trash. I'm sure you all fork over cash anyway. It's meme group not a gamer sub.
- It can't be that people are organically wanting to talk about a recently released triple A game by an old and relatively beloved game studio. They must be paid actors.
  
  In the grimdark future there can be no grass roots, only astroturf.
  
  I wish they were payed actors, I wanna get payed to spread misinformation about a video game. Seems like easy money to me.
- Nah it's just common to post memes about the same thing when things occur.
  I actually don't like the game that much.
- I mean, just because you don't follow gaming news doesn't mean nothing happens in the gaming industry. And if you somehow didn't hear about this game that folks have been talking about for months as an extremely anticipated game, you clearly don't follow gaming news that closely.
- The game's exclusive early access period for purchasers of the premium edition just released. Big name streamers are playing and streaming the game. Reviews are pouring out of every game review site. On top of all that, the general release is days away. Obviously, people are gonna be talking about it.
  
  With all these down votes.
  This is a meme group, I ask a question but because I didn't add an /s, all the gamer bros jump all over me.
  Same as it ever was.
- You might never heard of it but this game has been hyped for years. We got no Skyrim successor for 12 years because Bethesda was busy with starfield, so naturally people want to see if the wait is worth it.
- Then get out from under your rock? Starfield has been on the hype train for ages.
  
  Wow. You are an asshole about me not paying attention to your hype train.
- Idk how you've managed to not hear about it. Or see it. Shit I don't even watch the videos and it's all over my YouTube.
  
  Not everyone watches the same YouTube.