- Sep 6, 2015
- 28,197
- 23,338
- AFL Club
- West Coast
- Other Teams
- Pelicans, Perf Wildcats
I'd absolutely LOVE to know the full story, we're never going to hear it and will only ever get the one sided arguments from that Schreier who clearly has far too much of an agenda to truly be believed.
But one thing I noted from the new story out about the development, is that they seemed to try and scale up too quickly. This is something I'd been theorising with my co-workers over the past month or so. Thus they've effectively lost the processes and pipelines that they had in place. My guess is they've brought on a ton of juniors or just completely overwhelmed and under-experienced programmers as way too much of what I've seen is just bafflingly poor from a programmers perspective.
I have no doubt plenty of stuff was "known" and decided it was too small or not reproducible enough to fix prior to the game coming out. But some of these issues are just things that seem poorly implemented. As you said, the items that are constantly floating in world space, or not interactable. That stuff, to me, isn't a "testing" issue, it's a programmer issue and the way it was put in. It's stuff that from a top down level hasn't had the time and love it needed, it almost seems like it was a "throw it in and see how it goes" more than "this is the way it's meant to operate".
There's definitely room for QA not to find things though, which is where this theory of only or heavily external QA has me very interested. Because if that's true, I can see why a lot of issues made it's way through.
Dealing with external QA vs Internal QA is literally as worlds apart as you could want. Internal follows the game every day, generally knows the ins and outs, knows a lot of the code that's attached (whether they "know" the coding is irrelevant they get decent insight on what's going on and what's going wrong) and can often have far more of an impact day to day as well.
External QA, basically is there to make sure a game passes through certification. You may get the odd "balancing" issue or genuine bugs. But put simply, the focus and knowledge isn't there.
I would place the blame more so on the programmers end...but programmers are gonna probably blame QA.
I've had a QA role before (not in the games industry) and I feel like the game suffered massively from scope creep