I was busy browsing around, reading random gaming articles as I’m prone to do when I’m supposed to be working, when I stumbled upon the official known issues list of Borderlands. This list is quite extensive and I was actually shocked to see how many bugs there are on all 3 platforms. This got me thinking…
Way back when, when computers still occupied whole building blocks and the concept of a PC or consoles wasn’t even in an engineer’s wet dream yet, the first bug was found. I’m sure quite a few of you already know but the first bug found was an actual moth. And debugging and fixing said issue was as easy as finding the sinful moth and removing it. If only today’s more complicated bugs were found and fixed as easily and quickly as that… we wouldn’t be having this problem.
More and more games are being released to the public with bugs. It’s quite understandable that some bugs can slip through, not every scenario or environment can be tested (or at least that’s what I tell my boss) but the amount of bugs that’s missed by the developers et al are quite disconcerting. This has always been an issue with PC games but with the consoles now allowing patches it seems to me as if it’s becoming the norm. Then above all of this it seems as if the pricing of games is on the increase… it feels like every year we have to cough up more of our hard earned cash. Is this fair? Surely developers & publisher can ensure that we get a quality product each time… is that really too much to ask? Or am I being to harsh when it comes to this?
Last Updated: October 28, 2009
DieFrikkenator
October 28, 2009 at 11:57
With a couple of million lines of code there will always be bugs. As long as the “normal” and probable scenarios are catered for its quite acceptable.
Also remember that games today are A LOT more complicated than they were a couple of years ago, the fact that they made console games patchable and actually spend the money fixing [mostly] rare issues is a good sign at least. Remember that every single hour of stabilization costs a lot of money (testers, devs, project managers).
I have never run into a bug that kept me from playing the game, so I can’t really complain.
Werner
October 28, 2009 at 12:10
I’m a developer myself, so I understand exactly how complicated things can get, and like I said it’s totally understandable if some “lesser” bugs slips through.
But if you have something like: “Weapon proficiency progress is lost upon leaving a multiplayer game” & “Claptrap gets stuck during the introduction (~ within first 10 minutes of game) and will not progress”… then it’s worrying.
Also, on a side note… I’ve actually played a AAA title where a bug stopped me from continuing. Was in Bioshock and after loading my saved game, when I tried to pick anything up the game would freeze. This issue was only resolved a few months after release.
eXp
October 28, 2009 at 12:06
I have no gripe with tiny bugs, but sometimes you wonder how game-crippling bugs work their way through without no one noticing (such as FIFA 10’s “I loaned my player to another team, and they sold him!” bug)
Shodan
October 28, 2009 at 13:00
Im sorry but there is just no excuse for a game to come out and the sound is buggy when you fire your shotgun and the company say to fix this you should turn of the surround sound feature of the game and play it in steroe to fix it… How did the dev’s or testers not pick that up. Thats something that you will pickup when you play the game??? Sure it wont make me not want to play it anymore but I do feel a bit robbed that we still have to pay a full retail price but the game is not 100% working. Then yes there are patches that we can download to fix this but sometimes these downloads are not just 10mb and then we spend more cash on our bandwith to get the patches… Just my opininion
GoldenSilver
October 29, 2009 at 00:29
That’s why I respect Bethesda. Look at Oblivion and Fall Out 3. Huge game worlds where the player can do just about any thing he wants and the bugs you encounter are kept to the bare minimum. 🙂 On the rare times you do encounter them it’s usually because the player was doing that he/she shouldn’t have done or was some thing that no one really thought the player would do. But then you get normal shooters like Crysis where the last level you would fall through the floor, fire turns invisible but still does damage or the boss doesn’t open it’s hatch so that you can defeat it. I mean really… did none of the testers finish the game or noticed that they couldn’t defeat it? I can’t understand that one company can test a massive game world to such an extent that you sometimes have to go out your way to find a bug and another company lets the most important event in the game be unplayable. :angry: