While I understand your point, I still tend to disagree. I’ve had ten years of experience working in QA, both on games and on misc. software, and the amount of bugs with which games are shipped as of late shifts the discussion from severity and prioritisation to volume - it isn’t a question of what should have been fixed first when basically everything is busted. As such, it becomes a business problem entirely.
Another aspect which underlines this is the fact that, taking Baldur’s Gate 3 as an example since we started with it, it’s usually the latter half which is most affected. These trends taken together indicate a front-loading with QA in order to sell, then (hopefully) stealth-fixing the latter half before people get to it. Which doesn’t work, because you get maniacs like me who spend 200 hours in-game during the first two weeks after launch. Same goes for Rogue Trader, for example. Game’s all there, technically, first two Chapters are pretty much sterling, but how is one supposed to appreciate the creativity behind it considering half of the game may be inaccessible due to bugs (talking about soft-locking quests, busted progression triggers, busted scripting, and even more mechanical aspects which require trial-and-error with repeated reloads in the hopes that you stumble upon the right combination of actions which bypasses the bug).
In my perspective, creativity, while it is to be appreciated, becomes sort of moot in this case - it’d be like ignoring the fact that half of the painting is drafted on napkins with a big TODO stapled to it, or being sold a partly assembled phone with the promise that they’ll send you the rest of the components later on down the line.
I agree that when the game doesn’t work it doesn’t matter how creative it is, what I’m saying is that when it’s fixed and it does work that doesn’t make it indefinitely worse.
The late-game thing you’re talking about is a good example of why I think prioritization habits are a bit busted. I do think it makes sense to say that hey, this part of the game is only going to get seen by a small portion of players, so it’s a lower priority than the parts that are going to get seen by everybody…
…but if a bug is a major showstopper that prevents any amount of players from going through the game, then it’s a major showstopper, you can’t just push it to a patch and call the game shippable.
I’d even make a big distinction about minor bugs… and minor bugs that do something peristent. You’d be struggling to convince the average producer to do a late fix for a minor visual glitch, but if the inor visual glitch stays there forever it makes the whole thing look unacceptably broken (which is where some of those BG3 glitched quests would fall for me, btw).
We’re getting into the weeds now. The point is that yes, revenue and money are a factor, but I think the current issues with reliability and technical polish in games are coming from more places than that. There’s a culture of prioritization that is looking at things that will block shipping externally or that are software-end dealbreakers where the whole game crashes. This has to do with both applying only software development logic to game creation and from having historically relied on first parties to draw the line of shippable quality and a period there in the early 2000s where people were getting very mad at eternal delays and vaporware. That culture needs to change and producers and QA need to start being rated on how clean the game ships, not just on whether it ships on time. Again, the weeds… but it’s relevant that it’s not as simple as “greedy publishers”.
Oh, also to be clear, when I say “prioritization” that also means what gets shipped versus not fixed. That’s also a prioritization choice, not just which bugs get fixed first or later. Especially if the dev cycle doesn’t end at ship and instead ends five patches and several years down the line.
While I understand your point, I still tend to disagree. I’ve had ten years of experience working in QA, both on games and on misc. software, and the amount of bugs with which games are shipped as of late shifts the discussion from severity and prioritisation to volume - it isn’t a question of what should have been fixed first when basically everything is busted. As such, it becomes a business problem entirely.
Another aspect which underlines this is the fact that, taking Baldur’s Gate 3 as an example since we started with it, it’s usually the latter half which is most affected. These trends taken together indicate a front-loading with QA in order to sell, then (hopefully) stealth-fixing the latter half before people get to it. Which doesn’t work, because you get maniacs like me who spend 200 hours in-game during the first two weeks after launch. Same goes for Rogue Trader, for example. Game’s all there, technically, first two Chapters are pretty much sterling, but how is one supposed to appreciate the creativity behind it considering half of the game may be inaccessible due to bugs (talking about soft-locking quests, busted progression triggers, busted scripting, and even more mechanical aspects which require trial-and-error with repeated reloads in the hopes that you stumble upon the right combination of actions which bypasses the bug).
In my perspective, creativity, while it is to be appreciated, becomes sort of moot in this case - it’d be like ignoring the fact that half of the painting is drafted on napkins with a big TODO stapled to it, or being sold a partly assembled phone with the promise that they’ll send you the rest of the components later on down the line.
I agree that when the game doesn’t work it doesn’t matter how creative it is, what I’m saying is that when it’s fixed and it does work that doesn’t make it indefinitely worse.
The late-game thing you’re talking about is a good example of why I think prioritization habits are a bit busted. I do think it makes sense to say that hey, this part of the game is only going to get seen by a small portion of players, so it’s a lower priority than the parts that are going to get seen by everybody…
…but if a bug is a major showstopper that prevents any amount of players from going through the game, then it’s a major showstopper, you can’t just push it to a patch and call the game shippable.
I’d even make a big distinction about minor bugs… and minor bugs that do something peristent. You’d be struggling to convince the average producer to do a late fix for a minor visual glitch, but if the inor visual glitch stays there forever it makes the whole thing look unacceptably broken (which is where some of those BG3 glitched quests would fall for me, btw).
We’re getting into the weeds now. The point is that yes, revenue and money are a factor, but I think the current issues with reliability and technical polish in games are coming from more places than that. There’s a culture of prioritization that is looking at things that will block shipping externally or that are software-end dealbreakers where the whole game crashes. This has to do with both applying only software development logic to game creation and from having historically relied on first parties to draw the line of shippable quality and a period there in the early 2000s where people were getting very mad at eternal delays and vaporware. That culture needs to change and producers and QA need to start being rated on how clean the game ships, not just on whether it ships on time. Again, the weeds… but it’s relevant that it’s not as simple as “greedy publishers”.
Oh, also to be clear, when I say “prioritization” that also means what gets shipped versus not fixed. That’s also a prioritization choice, not just which bugs get fixed first or later. Especially if the dev cycle doesn’t end at ship and instead ends five patches and several years down the line.