During his presentation at the University of California Riverside, Roby Atadero – Senior Programmer at Obsidian – shared some really interesting details about the bugs that players encounter in most modern-day games. Atadero basically confirmed what most of us already know by now; that most developers do not have enough time to address the majority of bugs as publisher want to meet their deadlines.
“Bugs are normally ranked. Like A bugs are “No, no, no, we shouldn’t ship this.” “Hey I talked to this guy and he tried to do a quest and he disappeared.” Yeah those are bad. Or a game crashes or I lost all my items. Then there are B bugs which are we should fix these by launch they may not be game breaking. Then we have our C bugs which they are mostly cosmetic or annoying like “Hey I went into my inventory and didn’t see my sword for half a sec.” Like if that ships no one is going to cry. You still want to fix them but when you have a limited amount of time you categorize them and the goal is to get through all the A bugs and as many as B bugs but if you don’t which generally you won’t because you’ll find more bugs with the product than you can fix.
This basically explains why we’re seeing a lot of games with minor bugs or ‘niche‘ glitches even with the day-1 patches on most games. Atadero then continued and said that by fixing the already reported bugs, developers sometimes end up with even more bugs.
“So then you’ll put it out and work on a day one patch where you keep fixing bugs. They’ll test, you’ll work on another patch and then you’ll make new bugs so even though you were fixing bugs you’re making new ones. You didn’t know that making this model pop up half a second faster will actually pop in the wrong model.”
Atadero concluded that developers do not have enough time to fix all of the bugs, even with the day-1 patches, as they have to meet their deadlines. And since publishers aren’t delaying their games – well, apart from some publishers – their games are filled with bugs that could have been fixed if the development team had more time.
“Generally you’re going to have a lot of bugs. Not all bugs are detrimental. For example you can have a lot of C bugs and you waive them if they are something like, if you alt tab and open up another program while the game is running the music stops. We don’t have the time to fix this so we are going to have to waive it. Every game I’ve shipped on has had a lot of bugs on ship. It’s not something like 10 it’s always like hundreds. I mean you see with Fallout 76 as an example.”
Article has been updated per Roby Atadero’s request
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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I’m fairly positive that for all the work that Obsidian put into New Vegas only for Bethesda to hold their bonuses because they were 1 score point off, probably makes the vast majority if not all of the people who worked for Bethesda hate them.
This makes me happy. The more sh*t Bethesda gets from EX-Employees is probably for the betterment of them realizing they can no longer get away from being such a lazy, horrible, and completely unoriginal game studio now.
I still don’t know how their Publishing can be so good, but BGS is so downright terrible. Never in a million years did I think the studio that brought me Daggerfall and Morrowind would sink to this level, but here we are.
Obsidian is bought by MS now what you think ms is gonna make them work on?
Not fallout obviously.
Fable would be an obvious choice but I would prefer they create a new IP.
casual games really
does it matter?they’re all going to be on windows 10 store and they’re going to be optimized and made with controllers and consoles in mind. it’s all downhill for obsidian from now.
Pretty funny. It’s refreshing for anyone nowadays to speak so candidly rather than the canned PR speech we hear from so many fake, double-faced people in the media.
“their lack of good news makes me happy”,
A typically bitter, spiteful and self-centred attitude common to SJWs. No surprise to hear it coming from a senior employee at Obsidian in 2018, then.
“Like…”
“Hey I talked to this guy…”
“like “Hey…”
“Like if…”
“something like”
Hey it’s like hard to like believe he’s like a grown adult, like. Like hey, good like luck with your like new like acquisition, Microsoft. Like.
‘…presentation at the University of California’,
Ah, so he was preaching to the converted within the ‘safe space’ that is the socialist republic of California. How courageous! How very predictable.
lower the price on games. fallout 76 is a perfect example..
Now that they’re owned by Microsoft I would expect a lot more bugs.
Well, developers could give a longer developing period and have the majority of the bugs addressed instead of releasing games like Assassin’s Creed Unity’s glitch-fest and Batman: Arkham Knight’s withdrawal from the market until the bugs were fixed.
This attitude is like trying to justify their inability to be professionals…
I think the major problem is with publisher. They have fix deadline and that deadline did not change since years ago but the game scope are getting bigger. Too long they afraid if the game will lose it’s “steam”. Imagine if one game being develop for four or even five years. By the time they release the game it’s graphic looks very dated for it’s time. And we will hear endless complaint for PCMR did not take advantage of the available hardware hahaha. And for game that striking for triple A looks the game engine end up supporting a lot of “fake effect” to make stunning visual. All this fake effect also increase the in game bug. “This effect was supposed to look like this” and when dev try to fix the problem it create another problem from another angle or perspective.
Honestly i don’t think we can blame all of it to game developer but most often i think their hand are tied by the one that give them the job in the first place.
I think that if developers wanted to have a different timeframe, they could force the publishers. As for software meeting hardware support, new hardware based effects are even less than what was done in the past. And a gigantic example is DX12. DX12 was announced almost half a decade ago but there’s only a handful of games supporting it. The majority of the games released support DX11.
My point is, if game developers had amazing ideas and the will to execute properly and professionally, the situation probably would have been different. But all they think of is money…
Man, I’d like to live in this idealistic world you paint but the sad truth is the ones who have the cash call the shots. Look at movie producers, for example, even Ridley Scott had to comply once producers had decided that he spent more than enough money on Blade Runner so they stopped the money stream. Which is why he then released like a hundred of different cuts of the movie.
The same with game publishers. No matter how creative the developers are in the end decisions are made by those in power.
Obsidian has hired a programmer?!
Fallout 76 is a bad example.
Fallout 76 doesn’t have hundreds of bugs, it has 10k+ bugs . Hundreds of them are game breaking. The game wasn’t ready and didn’t even receive a day 1 patch at all. Having bugs in a singleplayer game is also more forgivable since you could just return to a previous save. While in an online game if your character is broken after 100+ hours. You will just have to make a new one. This is all currently the case in Fallout 76.
well said.
“Generally you’re going to have a lot of bugs.”
Yeah, because that’s the norm today. Companies get away with it because people buy and praise the load of cr*p anyways. Look at Zelda Breath of the wild. I played hundreds of hours and didn’t experience even one bug. It’s all down to how dedicated a development team is.