Quality control in PC gaming?

[alpine]

Do computer gaming companies even care about quality in their products? I seem to have bad luck. I always seem to play games with poor quality control and take long after release to get "fixed."

Star Wars Galaxies
Battlefield 2
Age of Empires 3
Company of Heroes
COH- OF

If any of you played those games after release, you know what I'm talking about.

Why do companies feel the need to put their users through prolonged beta's rather than releasing products that are substandard?

Shouldn't they care? After all, it is their reputation, and in the business world, that should mean everything.

Maybe console gaming is the future.

[TheDeadlyShoe]

heh

battlefield 2 and SWG's release bugs are about an order of magnitude worse than AOE3, COH, or OF.

But whatever.

[Von Smeed]

If everyone bought the same PC with the same video cards, sound cards, operating system, drivers, amount of RAM, processors, processing speed, etc, etc, etc,...well you wouldn't have many patches if any.

Most developers/publishers test the games on the most common hardware and software, but because this changes with the release of tons of new video cards, sound cards, drivers...you get the picture, it's impossible to release a PC game that runs on every system configuration right out of the box.

You may be having problems with CoH/OF and I just finished the 2 new campaigns with no problems.

[Karius]

The truth of the matter is that game developers have done quite a few things that are considered 'unforgivable' in other industry sectors, yet they still get away with it. To be honest technical issues are understandable and expected up to a point due to PC's open architecture. What I'm mostly concerned with is half-baked, half-finished products with respect to content.

[MuttleyGrouch]

Von Smeed

"If everyone bought the same PC with the same video cards, sound cards, operating system, drivers, amount of RAM, processors, processing speed, etc, etc, etc,...well you wouldn't have many patches if any."


- Im sorry thats just not true. Most of the patches are to do with bugs and quality control. I write software for a different industry sector (not gaming) and if we produced sofware of such appalling standards we would go bankrupt - but we have a different customer who will not buy rubbish, gamers are prepared to put up with it - in fact they force developers to produce shoddy goods as they will only buy the newest/glossiest/flashiest products - if you are late to market you can have fantastic quality - but no-one will buy your software.

We get what we deserve.

[alpine]

You may be having problems with CoH/OF and I just finished the 2 new campaigns with no problems.

Right. I don't play any games offline, as it bores me to tears. I'm speaking of multiplayer gaming.

heh

battlefield 2 and SWG's release bugs are about an order of magnitude worse than AOE3, COH, or OF.

But whatever.

Actually all the games I listed had terrible starts, I would know, I was there for all of them. Anyway, it wasn't my point to rank them. My point was about quality control, of which there seems to be none.

Apparently you missed my point.

[Von Smeed]

Von Smeed

"If everyone bought the same PC with the same video cards, sound cards, operating system, drivers, amount of RAM, processors, processing speed, etc, etc, etc,...well you wouldn't have many patches if any."


- Im sorry thats just not true. Most of the patches are to do with bugs and quality control. I write software for a different industry sector (not gaming) and if we produced sofware of such appalling standards we would go bankrupt - but we have a different customer who will not buy rubbish, gamers are prepared to put up with it - in fact they force developers to produce shoddy goods as they will only buy the newest/glossiest/flashiest products - if you are late to market you can have fantastic quality - but no-one will buy your software.

We get what we deserve.

I do work for a game publisher ( CDV Entertainment USA) and because we publish mostly European titles we wait long after the initial release, see what needs to be adressed and patch it before we release the product in North America, yet we still see problems with system configurations, after new video cards come out...or recently all the compatibility problems with Vista.

Not every publisher/developer does this, but please don't group all people in the game industry into one ball.

I have never seen the perfect game in over 19 years of PC gaming.

[MuttleyGrouch]

I'm not attacking games developers - but I think you would admit that you wouldnt want to produce mission critical software (say financial, medical, military etc) in the same way as you produce games??

How many CMMI level 5 companies are there in the games software business? Very few that make any money I would guess!

I still stand by my assertion that the nature of the sector is detrimental to the quality of the product. If you hold on to a game for six months you greatly increase the risk of another product beating it to the market and making it look old fashioned. The target market is mainly young male single copy purchasers, with no / very short procurement times and influenced heavily by advertising and graphical quality.

[Philman]

Unfortunatly for the avid MP player, COH/OF is directed at the SP community, its a known fact. The SP campaigns and the skirmish work great......I feel bad for people who are having trouble, but I must say that when I go online, I never have trouble finding a game.....

[DoctorLee]

PC games tend to be less polished than console games, since they can make an excuse like "Patch is coming", "No games perfect at release" and bla bla.

Well great. Patch the damn thing then!

It's all just an excuse to start earning money faster. After all, games are "commercial" products, not charity work. (Sigh)

[Rankles]

^ That's not true, otherwise console versions of PC games would have all the same bugs.

It's just a hardware issue, conflicting hardware causes bugs that companies can't possibly anticipate.

[DoctorLee]

Rankles/ True, I understand that, but I see a lot more crappy games in PC than various consoles.

[scoiatollo]

First off: Relic has a QA (at least they used it as an excuse for the 6month waiting for the DC 1.2 patch)

Second: Lately console games are being patched too. Some issues may resolve of different hardware, but a lot of issues are just human errors...

[DoctorLee]

First : Relic's(or THQ) QA is not really that good. Please recall all those horrible bugs/screw-ups that some patches introduced.

Second : That's only for consoles with hard-drive or memory sticks.

[scoiatollo]

Didn't say that the QA was good, just said it is existing. I know why I didn't bought OF on release day^_-

[weegee101]

QA is actually usually one of the worst jobs in the software industry guys. I've had to do it before, and it is straight up near impossible to find all of the bugs, especially when it comes to networking. I don't think Relic realized how many people would be hitting their authentication servers. Its a lot easier to fall into that pit than you think, and if you work anywhere in the Software or Information Technology field you know just how easy it is.

One of the biggest problems with doing QA for PC is the multitude of hardware configurations. Thats on top of all the other QA problems including being rushed by bosses, programmers, and publishers. Chances are, THQ is partially to blame if OF was prematurely released, as usually publishers flip out if they have to wait too long. Every minute the publisher waits for a developer to finish they lose more money. Thats why Valve and iD, two companies who are infamous for delayed releases, almost always try to self publish and instead do a deal with a publisher for distribution rights only. Its kind of a fine line between being published (they pay for your development costs and take a bigger cut) and being distributed (they pay for your distribution, and you get a bigger cut, but you have to pay for EVERYTHING in the development) , but there is a major difference in the end.

[Karius]

OF aiming at the single player market? I'm sorry but with such a short campaign -i.e. 15 missions in total- and such a weak A.I. coding it's not much content in my opinion. I would take Blitzkrieg's campaign structure over CoH or OF any given day. If BK 2 was polished a bit more then it would be an all-time classic. Proper units, full-blown single player campaigns for most major nations stretching throughout WWII.

Too bad BK2's game engine wasn't up to scratch, not to mention a few pathfinding issues, no repair/supply trucks etc etc.

Content-wise BK beats CoH hands down. Polish-wise, BK2 and OF are on the same level. They both needed more 'babysitting' by their respective developers...

[nuttyjawa]

if Relic were aiming at SP market why would we have Relic online..

some people need to get facts right before posting, and this thread seems to be full of such people

personally ive done every campaign and played multiple games and ive only had one crash.... yet others cant play, its just bad luck and happens with most games these days, and well its a fact of life, so many different configurations dont help at all..

as for comparing this to the release of SWG... just dont thats not only comparing apples and pears its also just wrong

[ceejayoz]

I'm not attacking games developers - but I think you would admit that you wouldnt want to produce mission critical software (say financial, medical, military etc) in the same way as you produce games??

Well, I work in IT for a newspaper owned by a publicly traded Fortune 500 company, and I can tell you that much of the software we use to meet each night's 12:00 AM production deadline is buggy as hell - far more so than COH.

Game devs are hardly the only offenders in bad software.

[Sle]

I think that PC games having a problem with "Multiple hardware configurations" is a fallacy. I believe the real problem lies in software configuration, i.e. how to make sure the game runs smoothly while iTunes, MSN Messenger, Acme virus scanner, various "Start centres", Steam, Acme firewall (Usually in addition to the perfectly adequate Windows one) and numerous instances of whatever web browser they're using hum along in the background.

I run nothing whatsoever in the background, and NEVER crash with ANY game, unless that isn't the only thing running. I rarely see other people's PC's running without seeing a systray full of crap, and wonder how they keep their sanity. I think people are under the illusion that these widgets need to be running. They don't - try it.

[Muad'Dib]

^^
Though logical and true in most cases, its not with COH. I too know that background running software has an effect on your PC's performance and I don't have a single software in my system tray running when I play. The crashes still occur...its definitely a patch worthy problem.

[MuttleyGrouch]

Ceejayoz - I'm a director of a European software division of one of the top five US defence companies, an ex software architect and an SEI CMMI assessor. (And yes I am not in the first flush of youth!)

My point was, as I said, not that software engineers were in anyway negligent, but that with the behaviour of the customer base, games companies cannot afford to invest the time and effort needed to produce a quality of product that will be a robust enough to avoid the reaction of disappointment that is being expressed for example at the server issue.

Hopefully as the customer base matures, then the sales will start to follow quality, but for many businesses fast is far more important than fixed. Gaming is one of those businesses.

No great philosophical point - but just commentating on what is reasonable and practical for a game developer, and that the original point - that different platforms are the major cause for the need for patches, was in my view probably wrong.

[Yazilliclick]

The main problem, at least for myself and that I've readon here, with COH & OF is the multiplayer networking and relic online service. Neither of which are terribly affected by vast differences in user hardware. This is a problem on relic's servers and potentially with how the game code communicates with them.

The fact that they've apparently had such issues now since the release of CoH (I stopped playing a few months after it's release and there were still problems then, not sure if they finally got them sorted before OF or if they just cleared up as less people played). An online gaming service is certainly a complex bit of coding however when so many other games have managed it just fine with much larger player bases it's a really bad display when they can't manage it after all this time.

[MuttleyGrouch]

Yaz - I think you are probably right. There is probably a (in hindsight) poor architectural decision in there from day one, and then to try an attempt to create an onlin service has been over ambitious.

However, someone in Relic is making the decision that the long term gain outweighs the short term pain. They may well be right, a year from now, who will remember a few server outages??

They would do well to try and get it fixed reasonably quickly...

[Mackle]

If everyone bought the same PC with the same video cards, sound cards, operating system, drivers, amount of RAM, processors, processing speed, etc, etc, etc,...well you wouldn't have many patches if any.

Most developers/publishers test the games on the most common hardware and software, but because this changes with the release of tons of new video cards, sound cards, drivers...you get the picture, it's impossible to release a PC game that runs on every system configuration right out of the box.

There are console games now that require patches to fix bugs, and they are titles that are designed for one set of hardware! I think the point of the original poster was that the games industry as a whole seems to just release games that are full of bugs and don't appear to of been properly QA'd.

Star Wars - Knights of the Old Republic II is one of the worst examples of this, since the game that Lucasarts released wasn't even finished, and on the Lucasarts forum they went through a phase of denying there were any bugs in the game.

[natrapsmai]

I hear you on the Quality Control aspects of PC Gaming, and unfortunately for gamers everywhere, it's going to get a lot worse before it gets any better. Even console games now are shipped incomplete. Anyone else want to tell me how smoothly Bioshock plays out on a 360?

However, someone in Relic is making the decision that the long term gain outweighs the short term pain. They may well be right, a year from now, who will remember a few server outages??

They would do well to try and get it fixed reasonably quickly...

I've said that before back in the days of Valve releasing HL2 on the then-untested Steam platform. That gave tens of thousands of gamers a huge headache for about a month before they got their servers in order. Only now have people alienated by that experience began to seep back into the Steam community, thanks in part to the many improvements made since. I don't doubt Relic means well, but Company of Heroes, while I believe it to be a fantastic game, doesn't have the same cout the Half Life 2 franchise does. I can live through a month or two of relative downtime, but will more casual users care to come back?

As for fixing broken stuff soon... I think this clip from Family Guy on the Death Star sums it up best.

[Killerratte]

... atleast this is not an EA game ...

[Xeator]

What about ArmA? Biggest joke of the year.

CoH:OF is mostly playable atleast.

[philidor18x]

are we talking about the current issues with not being able to connect to relic online at all?

it doesn't seem likely that database corruption on relic online is connected to the open PC architecture, windows vista OR background applications.

i like this game a lot, and i don't mind waiting for the problem to get fixed, but it is still disappointing not to be able to play. i can play single player if i want to, and i don't. i want to play multiplayer and i payed for it.

[APpolo69]

Same for me i payed just for that and not be able to play ....Very Very Very frustrated !!

Always "Cannot connect to player" All time , same thing ...Again Again and Again!!!

[weegee101]

What about ArmA? Biggest joke of the year.

CoH:OF is mostly playable atleast.

True that. Besides having absolutely horrid framerates for even 8800 users, having absolutely no Windows Vista support, and having strange mouse & animation lag issues that the ONLY fix anyone has found is to reformat your computer, you can't even play online anymore. If you try a public server, usually its playing the very boring Evolution map, or its infested with Hackers. Now most servers require you to log onto their Teamspeak and join their community before you can play. To top it off the mouse & animation lag issues are completely ignored by the developer.

People really don't get how well Relic treats us. They actually communicate with their community. Suma and Maruk (of BIS) just go on and either report patches or say "we don't have the bug so it must not be there".

[Quercus]

Since the issue has been raised - PC game stability Vs console game stability, I would be interested to know if this is true.
I don't have a console and don't know whether games are released with bugs for them, but the perception is that PC games have more bugs than console ones.

The excuse relating to different hardware configurations is raised every time a buggy game appears and I think we need to clarify something for once and for all.
As far as I am concerned, bugs fall into two categories:
Compatibility (mostly Hardware) Issues: These only affect a relatively small number of people and as stated earlier, are often specific to certain less common configurations that the developers and QA people cannot reasonably be expected to test.
While frustrating for those affected, these issues can only realistically be addressed after the game has shipped.

Flawed Code: These are the true "bugs" within a game, whether affecting performance, mission scripting, net code or unbalanced weapons/units/maps that render certain aspects of the game useless.
These are the things that gamers have little patience for and that the developers have the least amount of justification in missing when a game is released.

[Moe]

I'm not attacking games developers - but I think you would admit that you wouldnt want to produce mission critical software (say financial, medical, military etc) in the same way as you produce games??

Yeah I'm going to go ahead and guess that CoH is shitloads more complex than a lot of military software. Look at the kind of computer hardware that's put into military vessels, take the AEGIS system for instance. That thing is getting close to 30 years old now, what kind of CPUs did they have back then?

As far as other products are concerned, let's look at the amount of security fixes Windows has had over the years. The OS is arguably the most critical piece of software running on your PC, yet it still needs massive amounts of patching to deal with bugs and security holes many years after its release.

[ChienAboyeur]

Just the same here: two categories. Falling all reasons for patches into the first one seem unrealistic. Most patches I used corrected flawed code, undiscovered issues through alphas, betas, balance etc...

I think that the patch stuff is more or less a way of cutting down costs: it allows to release games which are functional but not operational. Patches can come or not, it depends on the firm being willing to invest new money.
It is also a self generating reason for going with a sequel (or like) of a game. The first one was too bugged to be played, the second one will be much less.

The issue I have with this policy: consumers are more or less expected to have an internet connection. The product never comes as a real stand alone and always needs fixes.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

So far, I always have had a console and a PC to game on.
I am rather inclined to draw the conclusion that it is also a firm policy.
General trends:
-console games are more polished than PC games, even though the trend is declining (console games tend to become less polished)
-Japanese firms are (were?) used to delivering more polished games than their european/US counterparts.

Actually, some japanese console games (like wonderboy in monsterland II) which are bugged are now more or less collectors.

[Orao]

Quote:
I'm not attacking games developers - but I think you would admit that you wouldnt want to produce mission critical software (say financial, medical, military etc) in the same way as you produce games??


Yeah I'm going to go ahead and guess that CoH is shitloads more complex than a lot of military software. Look at the kind of computer hardware that's put into military vessels, take the AEGIS system for instance. That thing is getting close to 30 years old now, what kind of CPUs did they have back then?

As far as other products are concerned, let's look at the amount of security fixes Windows has had over the years. The OS is arguably the most critical piece of software running on your PC, yet it still needs massive amounts of patching to deal with bugs and security holes many years after its release.

Well military and civilain hardwares are not playing in same category either. Military NATO standard say that the system must run for a x amount of hours and operate in different meterological conditions without crashing.

Now take your PC and try to boot it in Amazonian forest and tehn try running the software on it. You will crash almost instantly because of air temperatuer and humidity in the air.

Military hardware is really fast enough for what it has to do (mostly mathematical calculation and not realtime 3d representation) and it is reliable.

[MuttleyGrouch]

Moe

Yeah I'm going to go ahead and guess that CoH is shitloads more complex than a lot of military software

This is probably true but an unfair comparison, line for line contemporary military code is far more difficult to write, you only need a few uber-progs to produce complex code, you need a whole heap of time, dsicipline, money and effort to write code that is safe (ironic eh?) to be used in military applications.

Its very easy to get complex, its very hard to get 'bug free'.

CoH is a great game, but it is not and could never afford to be produced to the level that I guess most users (non software folks) would consider 'bug-free'.

Where I think Relic are shooting themselves in the foot is by potentially damaging sales by trying to messing up the introduction of architectiral changes that probably don't do much to the critical sales factors in the first place.

I think its a shame.

But not as much as if I owned shares....

[Xylakant]

What about ArmA? Biggest joke of the year.

CoH:OF is mostly playable atleast.

Well, in a manner of speaking yes. ArmA is certainly worse, but CoH:OF is not shining at all. The installer died for me three times, without any message. The window just disappeared. I solved that problem by uninstalling my patched version of CoH (the 'vanilla' 2.xxx patch no mod) and then it all of a sudden worked. Failing for a patched CoH - bad enough. No response to the user - underground. Add the messy copyright protection... but that's another can of worms.

regards

xyl

[Moe]

This is probably true but an unfair comparison,

That's what I was trying to point out. Claiming that because other software vendors manage to write software that can guide missiles and which doesn't suffer from serious bugs while Relic releases games with bugs is an unfair comparison. If you want to compare CoH with something, compare it to other games of similar complexity.

[Texture]

In the particular case of the state of the online servers, and the online stats tracking, it really doesn't matter what caused them to break, or what pressures on game developers led to the problem.

What matters is that it's broken. Still. For weeks now. And this comes at a time when the game has just been released and is hitting many buyers for the first time who never picked up vCoH. And it's bullshit.

I would be firing people left and right as the result of something like this if it were my organization. It's a shameful embarrassment, and for it to have gone on as long as it has w/o more effort on the part of Relic to assure us that it will be fixed is basically a disaster.

Am I being over-dramatic? I see things in the chat channels all the time like "why is this so laggy right now, I was just playing WiC w/o any problems so it isn't me." I don't want this to turn into a discussion about the relative merits of WiC vs CoH, because in truth the game they are comparing it too can be any number of RTS's or FPS's they can play without any problems.

People are busy, people are impatient, and people want what they want, especially when they can get it someplace else. If you want to respond to me about how they need to configure their computer better, or they need to make sure they have the network setup properly, etc, that's totally missing the point. They can play other games without the same problems, without broken stat tracking, without constant lag, random game freezes, slow-ass matchmaking, incredibly laggy chat channels, etc. etc.

If they CAN, they WILL, and those of us who love playing this game will be stuck with a community even smaller than what things dwindled too just before the OF release. Never mind the laughable prospect of selling another expansion, when so many people have already been burned.

So the online issues need to be fixed, no excuses. And not eventually, now. As in this week. Or a lengthy apology and explanation are due to address why a game that was actually working is now in this state after we paid $40.00 to get an expansion.

[natrapsmai]

Since the issue has been raised - PC game stability Vs console game stability, I would be interested to know if this is true.
I don't have a console and don't know whether games are released with bugs for them, but the perception is that PC games have more bugs than console ones.

It isn't anywhere near as bad for console games as most people that own consoles don't patch them or go online with them in the first place. Plus, when you develop a console title, you have to have it passed off by that console's owner. Want a make a 360 game, you have to have Microsoft approve it before it goes to press. That helps QA. But recently with each console's online features built in, more bugs slip by the process that get patched in the long run. Bioshock has a particularly annoying bug that causes the 360 version of the game to stutter every few seconds once you get to a particular point in the game. Is it game breaking? No. Has it been fixed yet? No. Would I have bought the game had I seen it beforehand? No way.

[scoiatollo]

Wanna have a gamebreaking bug on a console game?

The German (maybe other versions as well) version of Super Paper Mario for the Wiihas a problem in chapter 2.2 where the game freezes and you have to restart it unless you take a certain item before you are having a needed conversation.
On the bright side you can contact Nintendo and get a working copy.

On the whole you may be right, console games are not as buggy as PC games, but it seems getting worse.

[vfdarkcipher]

lol arma the biggest joke of the year.....

why is that game so slow anyway the frame rate per second on that game is so slow even on the lowest level and i have a good comp. i dont play it anymore.

lol i have dark crusade and i got fed up of waiting for relic to patch the game its been about 8 months since we had a patch. and the game is so imbalanced poeple can just spam one unit with most races and hit the i win button (flayed one spam anyone?) relic led the dc community on for months via a comms silence startagy even tho they no that no patch will come. i gave up in the end and have bought coh op, and now im reading u lot want patchs aswell lmao.

im looking forward to playing as the british and actually playing a more balanced game than that mess (alltho fun) dc game.

[FOTHERINGILL]

Von Smeed-

I have played and enjoyed the entire Cossacks series. Compared to COH and OF, it was relatively bug free.