@@lrinfi gotta remember - this isn't the first time it happened, and it won't be the last. It's cyclical, and this time has only been worse than the others because the gaming industry is still growing. I reckon it'll get better because there's only so many people in the world and so much money to spend - It can't grow forever.
@@lrinfi And it only gets better, because said megacorporations can be shockingly clueless. I was reading a statement earlier today from WB Games, re: SS:KtJL's middling launch. Their conclusion to the success of single-player-only title Hogwarts Legacy and failure of their most recent live service game was that pursuing big game projects was too costly and too unreliable, and they need to double down on live service content for the forseeable future. Which... uh. What? There's a lot of carelessness in the architecture that the designers and developers are fully aware is unsustainable. But someone higher up fails to see that, so it doesn't really matter.
@@mattc7420 it's pretty much spot on though. We saw a wave of games chasing the trends because higher ups saw dollar signs from Destiny, Warframe, Payday 2, and waves of other properties that were made to profit over the long haul despite sneaking their way into the premium game market (as opposed to subscription based). Then we got a slew of mismanaged attempts to capitalize on that like Triad Wars, LawBreakers, Battleborn, Outriders, Redfall, SS:KtJL... so many good studios with newly tarnished reputations from bad ventures. And it didn't lead to new direction. It led to mass layoffs and closures at said studios that KNEW the direction was a mistake and couldn't really do much about it. When that market proved to be unsustainable, all the studios working on titles actively got stuck shipping what they had before the 2023 market dictated the entire studio be laid to rest.
Unless someone shows videos of gameplay form like alfa/beta. Devs of Hogwarts Legacy did exactly that few weeks ago, some of the phisics glitches are quite a horror show :P
I wish that was true. I've seen let's plays that have found many bugs from my game that I know I had fixed and no one in the team could reproduce anymore.
I always say, there's no single thing in software (i.e. the programming) that's all that difficult; it's when you start combining things that the complexity takes off. Sometimes you don't even realize it's not possible, and it's impossible to anticipate everything.
In-house QA is so important. I don't know what the situation is for games, but over in enterprise-land it's basically unheard of these days, and it's a real pain for us devs. Devs are expected to do their own QA now, but they're very different skill sets and we're just not as good at it as dedicated QAers.
My old work used to pull the IT helpdesk people up for testing duty on rotation because we interacted with the users all day and ran into all the issues that they got (double clicking the print button printed twice for instance) We were alright at it but to save on desk resources, and also to be new and hip they moved to agile and everything went to shit
It would help if QA were given the most basic respect instead of being paid the minimum and being first on the chopping block come layoffs. I was looking at job listings recently and Blizzard is hiring QA for less than I made in food service. It's pathetic to see such a profitable massive studio treat their employees so poorly.
@@anchorlightforgeGame tester is a lot of people's dream jobs so they know that they can get away with anything they want because there's always millions of people who are wanting the spot it's pure evil
Yeah, I used to be the only in-house QA tester at a firm and you could really tell how much the programmers loved being able to go through issues with me instead of just having to read reports
True. I am kinda of an old new gamer, and I started by buying an Xbox series S and installing fo4. I was shocked by how many times the game crashes on an always-online console. Really!? No bug fixes for a popular game that has been in the market for so many years?
I actually found some of the bugs in CP2077 enjoyable 😁 Or funny. Like the time I lost my head and was riding a motorcycle without my head haha. But yeah that game is so complex there would always be some bugs. Still I love Cyberpunk. From day 1.
What is your opinion of dev leads or creative directors being transparent or addressing their community about the project. I appreciate how you get on youtube and share you opinions, and experiences with game dev from different stages of your career. I have always found that just having someone address the player base in a sort of devlog or something goes a long way. I know it's not as relevant but something like DE with warframe or how Jeff from the ow team used to do. I just feel like it humanizes us and the team behind the game.
I think it’s great when devs address the community directly, but there are a lot of reasons why they don’t. In fact, that’s the subject of tomorrow’s video.
Miss Jeff too, overwatch is not the same without his devlogs. Though i think the issue is when Dev's are not able to talk freely due to internal issues like it happened with Jeff and Bobby not giving them budget and also making them waste time on stuff he would cancel. In those situations the dev can't speak freely but also at the same time people will get frustrated and start getting toxic. Also Jeff and Tim are like rare exceptions most Dev's won't even want to be in public domain, it's stressful if you are not built for it.
The reality is that only a tiny fraction of players ever actually watch/read/care about that kind of thing. Most players don't obsessively follow games on Reddit, Twitter, Discord, blog articles, etc., they just play casually and don't interact with those external/meta elements of games. :/
@@arcan762 Obsessively seems like the incorrect word to use. It's still a significant enough amount of players to have some studios do it or consider it. I could only speak for myself; as I am not sure what most gamers do or don't do but I play warframe extremely casually and still watch a recap of their dev streams.
I was making a prototype for a turn based JRPG with menu based combat a couple years ago, and because of the nature of how those games work and how I was basically teaching myself how to make it, I had bugs with literally every step of the way. Speed and turn order brackets, using skills and items, arrows indicating buffs and debuffs, and most particularly the unique mechanics involving starting a combo with one party member, and passing your attack phase to the next party member to have them continue the combo. I had left the prototype working as intended minus a couple visual bugs after about a year of working on it. And the cars in the overworld still kept spawning in the wrong direction and drove through sidewalks and buildings.
I've coded for years. Thought I'd planned out my game's design just fine last month. Coding was going so well. Today I introduced quickload aaaaaand it all broke. Like, everything. I forgot to design a way to reset world state w/o reloading the entire map. Cue lots of hacks and fiddly bits. I tend to prototype with "known bugs" to be smoothed over later as the jank becomes noticable. This was not one of those cases. I just... forgot that a load without reloading everything needs a reset. The entire save/load system was misdesigned. And that's the thing: you can know what you are doing and still miss really obvious states for no other reason than we humans are fallible. Design & code is seriously hard. The fact you got a thing running is saying a lot. My first (and only released) game was written the same way. In the 6 years since I finished that project I learned a lot. And yet, every time I think I have a design thought out, reality rears it's head and I spend hours trying to figure out which of the bazillion interconnected bits and pieces I messed up on. And 9 times out of 10 the solution is less than elegant, designed more to be robust and harder to mess up later than fancy, mostly cause over the last 10 years I've come to learn that predicting every possible interaction just turns into whack-a-mole while crude but functional tends to work... well, until it doesn't and you need to redesign with better information but that's just design in a nutshell.
I have no desire to make games but your videos make me appreciate games so much more because of all the things that go into them that I didn’t know or think about.
On the subject of bugs, as I was going through my first Outer Worlds playthrough, there was word of a crazy powerful Science build using a sledgehammer that could destroy bosses in two charged swings. It turns out there was a bug in the damage calculation of that weapon, and by the time I was done with my playthrough and ready to test that on a second run, it had already been fixed. 😢
@Wierie_ nah I like doing that too it builds up the excitement to play the game and makes it better for me. Don't hate on how others play games, that's dumb and bitchy asf bro. But if u wanna act like that... then I guess thats your loss.
Another good video, Tim. I'm playing Prey (2017), and now I'm wondering if you've ever considered making a game in another genre. Since player agency and emergent gameplay are very important to you, what do you think about immersive sims? How much does the development process change compared to traditional RPG's?
Damn I thought this was going to be a place for me to post about my arachnophobia and how I've always hated how RPG devs throw a ton of spiders in their games!
In another video you mentioned the future of gaming lies in dynamic emergent gameplay where various scenarios aren't programmed in. I think HellDivers 2 owes a lot of it's success to this. Between the day night cycle, weather, players having different builds and experience, mission parameters, it leads to endless extremely cinematic moments. The missions themselves are often boring. But the way the mission plays out is endlessly dynamic and leads to things like glorious last stands, or escaping with no bullets left and multiple broken bones, being surrounded, saved at the last moment by napalm strikes as you dive for cover, getting stuck behind enemy lines, a major battle through the night and dawn breaks right as you're being saved. None of this is programmed in, it's just how the mission played out. A different team could have went faster and never saw day break. And then if you have music going in the background it's amazing. Amazing grace bagpipes hit right as extraction comes, you're covered in blood and battered. It's incredible. And again, not programmed, not predetermined. But shout out for the programmers who were smart enough to implement these free flowing mechanics and who did great things like adding in diving, the prone mechanics, stratagems, a decent amount of varied missions, fun enemies. Everything they added feels like it was made with the explicit function of being cinematic and dynamic.
@@Steak514 did you never play Cod:black ops? Looks very funny in 3rd person, but it doesn't work too good in first person because you hit your face on the floor. Which makes this game more of a running joke slapstick. Like a Jackie Chan film but unlike Jackie Chan Stuntmaster.
I love bugs in RPG's. They are always one of the easiest mobs to kill which brings a lot of fun during early leves when you grind for XP. For example radroaches in Fallouts. Best bugs ever. Badum-tss.
Thank you for touching on this. I doubt one can release any sizeable piece of software without bugs, let alone an RPG game which can get absurdly complex. I believe there is a common expectation in the tech industry that there is ~10 bugs per 1000 lines of code. What is immensely frustrating is that you had fixes for many of your bugs in Troika's games and you were not allowed to release them.. that's just an unfair hit to the team's reputation. :( Anyhow great stuff. I would love to hear more about interesting debugging techniques you have used in your games (like the barriers in the fallout crash bug). Also bug prevention strategies (unit tests, automated game agents, etc). Thank you again for the video! Have a great weekend!
Question for some future video: What are some of the challenges for fixing game issues post release, or close to the release, when there is no translation budget available at all. For text, as well as voice overs. The same question as above, but if there is no art budget available.
Thanks tim for taking your time to give a detailed insight on it, it makes so much sense now, haha money certainly would help fix many stuff, esp i feel rpgs dont get the budget nowadays like other titles whose budget seems to be increasing rapidly often, also ya certainly the way you said about priority of bugs stuff we often dont think about what bug before that was clouding the one present now, though devs may have been busy fixing the bigger one, Always a delight to hear the detailed explanations from you😊
Opt-in mechanics that arise out of bugs are some of my favorite features in any game. Quake strafe jumping and bunny hopping are opt-in, most can't even do it, but it lets people like me enjoy your game where I probably wouldn't have otherwise. I really wish that opt-in traversal mechanics such as strafe jumping and the like were a feature in every game, particularly open-world RPG's, because the "immersion" players who value their time in the world won't have their experience be affected because they likely don't even know such a thing exists, and if they do, will choose not to do it because it requires a conscious decision to do so... but let me play the game how I want, and let me bhop and jump around like a madman because that's how I want to play.
2:32 That its in theory, add to that a competitive community and its development difficulty as a game service exponentially grows. Woshige, the battle balancer from SF6, for sure will have to examine a LOT of data (competitive) and be fair with every character balance in the next patch, and thats very complicated, you can measure his success by the amount of death threats that he will personally receive after the patch launches.
2:35, that’s interesting that you bring up Street Fighter cause I’ve heard that the *combo system* was initially a bug. I’ve heard conflicting accounts where it was supposed to be intentional but I still find that fascinating.
Lock-picking into the Brotherhood bunker in Fallout causes everyone inside to assume you retrieved the holotape (or whatever it was) from the Glow. You have to get the electronic lock-pick from Loxley first.
I searched around your channel if you ever commented on JRPGs or Japanese developed games and it appears you've haven't. What is your opinion on JRPGs? Have you taken any inspiration from JRPGs that have made it into your RPGs?
Part of the fun with the old rpgs, like during SNES/PS1/Ps2 era because they can't be updated is that, as gamers we find workarounds, exploits and strategies to work with the bugs. (Like how even tho RNG is seeded, some games it's completely broken or we figured out all the values)
Thinking about how the events, conditions, to unlock Law/Amane's route in Devil Survivor had to be heavily simplified late in development because it was literally impossible to get that ending... even in the final game, it's the toughest to get.
I can attest to that. Crashes are my most hated of all bugs. Close second is being stuck in or falling through the geometry. Third but definitely not last is items disappearing from my inventory. Sometimes however bugs can be fun, like bunnyhopping in Source and GoldSource games, also propelling off of moving objects, explosion boosting, prop surfing etc.
I do think some types of bugs can be worse than crashes. For example, a Deus Ex style game with a sloppy physics engine prone to objects falling out of the world means you could brick your save for daring to experiment with the mechanics. But it's true, once you're dealing with instability there's an unsettling feeling that makes you rush through sections playing as "safely" as possible instead of enjoying the experience. Maybe you'll skip cutscenes you've never seen and rush your way past major encounters just to see a bad level through. It's a real dealbreaker.
I hate bugs that lead to a save that you can't continue. You've put hours of playing time into it and you can't continue the game. That happened to me once with Total War: Rome. Even though I always create multiple saves and rotate them so that I have at least one working save, this bug crept into all of the saves and later led to a reproducible crash of the game. I was therefore unable to finish the campaign. I think a big cause for such bugs is the serialization of game data directly from memory into savegame files. When saving savegames in this way, bit errors in the RAM can lead to savegames no longer working. That's why I prefer savegame functions that store the data in a structured way in the save state. This makes it easier to avoid errors when saving.
Hi Tim, I know from your previous statements that new/original IP is always your preference when making a game, but I was wondering what if any pre existing IP you would like to see as a game whether it be from film, books etc. ? If so why would you like to see it and if its not already a video game why do you think it would translate well into one ? Thanks so much, love your videos.
I have an experience with playtesting and bugs I'd like to share. TL;DR: Be sure to check for typos when bug hunting. I once ran into a bug while playtesting a mod that so disruptive that we had to stop using shotguns altogether because of what I like to call "the shrapnel wave". Any shotgun type weapon with "pellet" modifiers would lag the server and everyone's game. To give you an idea, one of my weapons fired around 7 pellets normally, add pellet+9 and add pellet+6. What should have been *22 pellets* turned into *378 pellets.* And we're talking about an Unreal1 Engine game here, so it strained the game and server pretty bad. The bug *multiplied* the pellets as many times as the trait was applied to the guns because the modder made a typo.
Hi, Tim. Can you please talk about video games containing gameplay tutorials and when video games hold, or choose not to hold, the player's hand? I couldn't find a video of you talking about it and I wanted to know your thoughts on it.
Hi Tim, Do you have any advice regarding giving feedback from the player perspective? I have seen your video "Giving Good Feedback" but I felt a lot of the video focused on giving feedback as a developer rather than player. Usually when I play early access game (from RPGs: Pillars of Eternity2, BG3) I struggle with figuring out what feedback might me relevant. I feel a lot of time is being wasted talking about things that aren't finalized (balance, story), rather than focusing on things that actually might be helpful to devs. On a flip side, occasionally I have been too optimistic about a feature (*cough* PoE2 ship combat *cough*) assuming what I see is an early draft of a system, rather than its almost final version. Do you have any feedback to us, playerbase, from your time working on PoE? Have you heard other devs saying what they wish playerbase would/wouldn't focus on when playing early access builds of their titles?
I think something of interest is if bugs can be a good thing, ie the system isn't working as intended but for some reason or another the player is enjoying the way it has resulted in game
Maybe not far into the future AI will be commonly used to not only play the game, but describe the gameplay it just did with natural language and then analyze the gameplay and be able to plan new ways of play-testing and writing reports on all that it did. That would be worth a few millions worth of work-time I presume in big projects. (not to mention performing deep linting right on the code with each push).
I absolutely love Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty and Cyberpunk 2077, but it annoyed me to no end how both the base game and the DLC had a few boss fights that forced my sneaky neturnner corpo assassin to fight them headfirst with guns blazing: the spider thingy in Phantom Liberty, Adam Smasher and Oda. Now, all of these allow netrunning to help you a bit (Oda a bit less), but you can't rely ONLY on sneaking and netrunning, like you can almost everywhere else during the game. Since I like to play on the hardest difficulty, I personally had no choice but to bring down the difficulty for these fights, and that really irked me...
No poisoning? No manipulation? No killing in the night/darkness? A stealth fighter is supposed to be as strong as a vampire. The stealth is only there because the stealth character desires to relax and be away from the crowd.
This was a gigantic issue for Deus Ex: Human Revolution as well. The boss fights are so badly implemented that they can be showstoppers for certain nonlethal builds, even if they're not necessarily stealth builds.
Did your QS build their own test levels, for example to pick every available container, run along a parkour to test movement, shoot every gun, have every class at a certain level fight a specific predefined encounter with an enemy group (balancing) etc. ? I guess a lot of issues can be found quickly by structured testing, that is not necessarily possible in actual game levels.
Hi Tim, I'm months from shipping and we'll be going for a third party QA team. You think you could go more in-depth when it comes to what to look out for in that relationship? Perhaps things that raises green or red flags or just whatever experience you can share. Thanks!
Alright, Tim. First off, thank you for the explanation! Secondly, based on this explanation, I feel like i need to ask: how do you personally determine the difference between a bug and a "design" flaw? I feel like *a couple* of the bugs you described were issues with feature implementation rather than bugs (in my layman opinion).
The recent bug is when the game that the consumer expected was going to be on their hard earned paid for hardware investment, is no longer available on said hardware but on the rival hardware.
certification process really clashed with certain studios (looking at relic and dawn of war 2 here). I understand why MS would want to do it (largely reputation management) but as an end user it was excruciating to sit there waiting weeks for a hotfix after a patch came out
Xenoblade 2 once had an update that made a late-game special move involving some of the main characters(!!) always crash the game... it took like a month to get patched
Hey Tim, you briefly mentioned the game rating in this video and im curious of your experience with the ESRB and their foreign counterparts. In your limited experience, have you noticed that T rated games sell better than M rated games? I know you talked about the trials of getting Fallout approved for M but im curious of your experiences beyond.
Hi Tim, Regarding the Bard/ Nosferatu problem, isnt it in some sense reasonable that the least popular classes/races gets tested less? Or do you think that all classes should have the same polish, even if you know in advance that some will be more popular than the others?
They weren’t just tested less, they were barely tested at all. One of the bugs for the Nosferatu was that they could not transition between two maps on the main quest line, which means that no one even played them through the game one time.
@CainOnGames that is of course unacceptable. Not being able to complete the game as on of the clans offered to you must have felt pretty bad for those who tried. You ranked you bugs by severity, but shouldn't frequency and possibility to avoid be some sort of factor too? If lets say in fallout 1 the game crashes if you put 1024 objects on the ground in the same map (rare and avoidable behavior) be aless serious bug than the rats behaving weird when you start the game.
@@jontofteskov4897 As someonew who works in QA, they are indeed factors, but they are usually less important than severity. A minor bug with 100% repro rate is much less important in the grand scope of things than a big bug like "being unable to finish a questline" with 5% repro rate, because 5% repro rate bug becomes a MUCH bigger issue once your game ships and is being played by potentially hundreds of thousands of people.
IMHO not all things Tim mentioned are “bugs”, such as adhering to platform certification, age ratings or things not being FUN. For our team, this Q&A thing is simple - as I am both game designer AND Q&A lead 😹
Isn't it a case that some time ago a publisher or a developer firm made business decision to cut the QA, so that the players do it? Other developers/publishers saw this and copied because it worked from business standpoint
Tim mentioned in some video, he plays some Action, Adventure and RTS games every now and then, but mostly it's RPGs. And even with those, he hates getting shoe-horned into pre-defined characters, so things like The Witcher, Cyberpunk, Rockstar stuff or most JRPGs probably aren't his cup of tea.
Do you play indie games? And given your own background, does it affect how you view them? Either in a curious way given the (usually) much smaller team, nostalgic if they reminds of the earlier days or is it a whole other world?
Not sure Tim has had to work under such conditions but I wanted to ask about the recent thousands of layoffs in the gaming industry. People were layed off not only from studios that had issues or a bad release but also from studios that consistently create successful games that make profit. If you're doing good and the studio does good but that does not guarantee that you keep your job, how can people work under such conditions and do their best?
I think non of your titles ever did something remotly close to Early Access or pre-release access but do you see it as an opportunity to get 'free' QA and some funds or a good way to ruin the first impression you leave on the market? Or phrased differently , do you think EA is a benefit , a gamble or even a bad move for a developer? Does it change with size? Like obviously an indie company could use the free labour and additional funds while it might look bad if a big company releases a title as Early Access when people expect full ready titles from them.
approach if taken by many would lead to worse quality worse games and overall decline but hey, you do you, if any bugs trigger you that much that you have to wait 2 years (lol, wut, that's a proper OCD right there), then hey, wait 2 years, wait 10 years even, it would be almost for free lmao (inb4 "well well, they shouldn't release buggy messes" -> yeah yeah, sure, waiters gonna wait)
@@nickrubin7312 that's your delusion so you can feel better triggered? huh? you're triggered, clearly, and projecting if no one bought games when they released because they were bugger, publishers would have to give developers more time&money to make better products but you are part of a culture of 'now now now!' and that is what leads to decrease in quality I CHOOSE to wait, do you not understand that? I have a life, full - I haven't played Pillars of Eternity or Numenera or UnderRail beyond ~20 hours each (less for Numenera) I backed Numenera at a high tier, btw and backed Pillars and Wasteland 2, and 3, and more yet I still waited to play them but you just want to create stories that make you feel better
Hey, Tim. What's your opinion on automated testing, which is very prevalent in software development in general. What are the good proportions between automated tests and play-testing, or are there any? Do automated tests and play-testing cover completely different tested functions/systems and do not intersect?
I think he has been avoiding the automated testing topic tbh lol. I've noticed it is such a contentious topic in games that devolves into a lot of tribalism compared to mainstream software dev.
@@arcan762 > I've noticed it is such a contentious topic in games that devolves into a lot of tribalism rly? Why? I would be actually interested to hear from experienced gamedev, especially with experience as programmer, and not just designer/director/manager in software dev it is almost mandatory these days, at least unit testing, and even outside of coding, project managers/analysts/engineers that don't code use all sorts of tools like Selenium and such
@@nickrubin7312 I just find there are attitudes like "testing is the holy grail and will solve all of our problems" through to "testing is a waste of time as the feature being tested may just get completely changed/the requirements are too volatile right now for tests to be worth the effort of writing". I've worked in healthcare software where testing is a must, but do some game stuff too where everything is about getting maximum features out the door ASAP, as long as it works (mostly) then it is good enough. Automated tests are nice if you have the time, but you never have the time. TBF I find writing tests can easily take several times as long to do than implementing the actual thing being tested.
@@arcan762 interesting, I've never dubbed into gamedev, so I don't know. >maximum features out the door ASAP, Yeah, that's probably it, I usually (not always), worked in the process of creating MVP and then adding features while iterating. Or not MVP necessarily, but to implement requirements needed most to the customer. >I've worked in healthcare software where testing is a must I think would've been strange otherwise Personally, for a long time working in custom software dev, and right now, in the current company, it is TDD (Test Driven Development). Yes resource/time heavy indeed. Was just wondering, especially with the topic of "bugs", and play-testing and QA were brought up, how is it in games, since I rarely see it being brought up (and for the past 4-5 years with TDD my head is a bit warped around automated testing). Thanks for providing at least some insight, with the approach of "getting maximum features out the door ASAP" and how resource (time) heavy writing tests is, kind of makes sense if it was not so popular in gamedev.
The Outer Worlds shipped with a consistent crash bug very near the end of the game. Not for 100% of players, but for many. Luckily you could avoid it by walking on a ledge or something past the room where it triggered. Yeah very not buggy.
Ive had very very very few gamebreaking bugs in any game over 30+ years of gaming. Feel a lot of games get a bad rap when it comes to bugs that isnt fair. Bethesda for example. Yeah there are some bugs but really the games have worked very well (some i dont like but that is something else). New Vegas is also claimed to have been so buggy on release (not really, yeah there are bugs but how bad are they really in so far that they ruin the experience?) Bloodlines had a crash bug but i played full runs on release fine (may have gotten a patch or fix). And again it didnt ruin the fun in the game. Fallout 1 has some issues with the end slides but worked very well. Ive had a few corrupted games in Arcanum (but ive played it maybe 50 times? 100?). And ive modded it and use the uap. Anyway my point is that some of my favorite games have had these "yeah but they got a lot of bugs thing" following them and compared to most other games it isnt fair. They have no more bugs than them. And most importantly none of the bugs have ruined these games. However the current idea of release game fix later is just awful.
Constant crashing has ruined so many great games for me on console. Wasteland 3, Pillars of Eternity 2, Path Finder King maker all on PlayStation. I just want to enjoy some amazing Isometric Rpg's without major issues. :'( I'm curious as to why games are allowed to be sold with major problems like this.
The worst kind of bug is one that destroys your OS installation. See: The Boot ini file being destroyed by EVE in a fatal bug from a few years back. Horrendous.
"on my lowest Tier are things that people say arent fun: maybe theres a skill that noone ever takes" me checking the Fallout 1 wiki: "Out of the 53 perks only a dozen are implemented in a fashion that gives a functional benefit." hmmmm yeah i can see that, it all makes sense now 🤣
Hi, Tim, do you have a collection of the funniest bugs that appeared in your games during production? I know some devs like to keep the funniest bug videos for entertainment purposes, although they're rarely shown to the public.
Please, if you're a developer, leave fun bugs in your game. Bugs in games, and RPGS especially, are some of my favorite moments in gaming history. Take Morrowind for instance, and how you can launch yourself, or stack to infinite damage, or get infinite money. Morrowind as a base game is an incredible experience for people who want to play an immersive RPG, but these additional aspects of the game create infinite replayability potential. I enjoyed Skyrim, but far less because of how sandboxed all of the mechanics are, and how they can't interact with one another, making the game less attractive for me to replay, whereas I still keep Morrowind installed to mess with the over-the-top unintended system interactions.
The consumer of games is not getting an honest representation of a game from a large studio. That is one of the reasons people get really angry when a game has bugs. When a large multi-million dollar game is marketed and hyped for a long time with out of this world advertising, the consumer expects a Rolls Royce. They instead get a Ford that needs a tune up.
Hello Mr. Tim Cain , In your video you said " RPG's are really complicated pieces of software , they are extraordinarily complex and made of many interlocking pieces " Soo kinda technically speaking RPG's main infrastructure is most likely based on calculations , mathematical equations and other stuff related with CPU and RAM usage rather than graphical usages . To prevent at least for crutial bugs isn't it possible to make a simulation to interact with almost every possible combinations that this game is using for soo try to figure it out that , if this game with some situations might be crash or not ? At least for fundamental testing . Or could it be too time and money consuming that , the companies ain't use these things for testing like that ? I'm asking this because recently released on In one particular game i wouldn't like to give it's name , this thing happened . The game itself not have crutial bug on , it can be playable and no critical bug that crashes the game . But the problem in this RPG game is , while you playing with a some certain characters with some combinations you spend on your skills and with some items you weared it in this particular RPG game , you become invincible . It's like character A can become invincible with some sort of combinations but if you choose character B you become way too less effective than character A . The developers said these things that , to shortened version is : " Ok you players are going to play with your characters and when we realize that some unbalancing things occured in this game we will balance it " Wouldn't at least this situation is possible to test with ?
Imo, it is more of a philosophical question. "Imba" isn't that big of a priority when you have a location where the key NPCs get stuck underground or a memory leak that eats up gigs of ram and crashes the game. Besides - it's kind of your own fault that you drain fun from your game by playing either A or B. Play C that is balanced, the other two are for kind of hardcore gamers or "cheese lovers". Balance issues stem from the core of the design. You could simulate everything and adjust rules until nobody is overpowered, but that would probably be the most boring game ever. Also, I think graphics and physics are still the most complex part of games. Gameplay rules are usually simple math (I mean, if kids play DND or whatever - it sure is less complicated than vectors and matrices, forces etc and most CRPGs have a similar level of complexity to them). They often get complicated when you start introducing if/elseif's, aka scripts or unplanned rules. You always deal (str*skill-(def+ac))/difficulty damage… unless you have a Piercing Pike of Penetration that turns it into (str*skill-(def-bonus+(ac-bonus2*lvl/difficulty)+0.5)/difficulty or something like that.
@@zhulikkulik Hello Thanks for your thoughts and some of the facts you point about that . I'm a software developer myself since 2011 ish but with completely different era than gaming industry but still i'm handling with huge chunk of data some certain times and in my free time over the years i try to find out some behind the scene things the games i played it or try to learn something new to develop myself time to time . Recently i saw some reversed engineered Fallout source code some Russian friend make it , i'm not 100% sure on all the things accurately collected but sure on some of the things in that particular source code seems to be legit and in there as you mentioned there are some kind of calculations but not soo hardcore as Action Role Playing or the games like mostly based on combat related things but have some meaningfull data in it , since the game itself has some things you can do in a limit so these calculations won't get your attention soo much because in some descent hours you can able to finish the game most likely . But as for some other games mostly related with combat based features , esspecially in recent years the developers adding soo much new variables or let's say new combat mechanics or old combat mechanics but implementing into their games so in result there are huge features in the game itself that the developers i believe struggle on balancing it . I think either they might considering it to shortened those features ? or maybe if they still would like to implement these things into their game there should be some basic math behind it that either classes have some sitautional advantage and making the game itself more interesting that way ? or maybe for each calculations of classes would result almost same damage output as possible depends on their class proffeciency type like all damage based on classes i believe should do some same damage not exactly same but like close to each other in result , so making each classes enjoyable for the playing :) Those are my opinion of course it might be wrong or not exactly right .
I have a small question - what game engine Arcanum uses ? Someting bought or home (as in - in company) made ? Also, is it really the same engine used in both Arcanum and ToEE ?
I think they are both built upon proprietary engines. They most probably used some of the code from the fallout engine. It would make sense that they are different as well, at least looking at the features of both games. But the info on this is scarce, it is merely my speculation :)
As a customer, I understand that there will be bugs. But it frustrates me when devs/publishers quickly abandon a game and won't fix bugs. I've started to wonder if "Right to Repair" laws might eventually get extended to software and how that might change software publishing.
I remember the Dos game, Mines of Titan, my friend discovered that if you went to the casino and played a few games, recorded the outcome of those games, reload before playing and bet on those same numbers, he won every time. Fun times.
"We'll patch it after we release it" reminds me of a film industry phrase that leads often to disaster. "We'll fix it in post" Which means rather than do another take, or attempt to compensate for the problem we are having while shooting, we are just going to move on and hope the editors can fix it.
@@nickrubin7312 If Implied that they were I'm sorry for the confusion. I was comparing what I saw as similar attitudes towards creation of media. I'm say that the attitude of putting off the work of repairing or improving problems is detrimental to the integrity of what you are making. I work in the film industry so I can relate more easily to "We'll fix it in post."
do you use AI for coding? GPT, Copilot or something else? if not why not? also for testing? i think AI can be absolutely used for elimination bugs even today, but probably a framework needed for general purpose bugfixing in games the more complex RPGs (but programs in general) will be the more AI needed for testing, i have been using copilot for 6 months i dont know how could i have lived without it
@@coldwarpgates622it depends how you use it, there is a learning curve for that alone, im getting better and better every month in it and i absolutely love it what i really hate is google bard/gemini i tried it for the same purpose and i think it is trash
I think the newer Zelda games proved you can make a mass scale game without significant bugs. Granted it isn't an RPG, but it easily could have been one if Nintendo wanted it to be.
@@arcan762 Any game with polish takes a lot of money, I think that's a given lol, I'm just saying Nintendo proved it can happen on that scale. Bethesda & Xbox have a lot of money too, but their games are arguably more broken now than ever
@@evanorodd Starfield is the most polished title, that's why people look on other stuff about Starfield There is money and time, and then there are MONEY + TIME. Nintendo for Zelda has all the MONEY AND TIME in the world.
@@nickrubin7312 Starfield isn't really open world like Skyrim or BotW are. It's more like a series of randomly populated zones that take place on procedurally generated terrain. If anything, it's more comparable to sandbox games like Minecraft or No Man's Sky (in terms of the technology behind them) Starfield is polished on a technical level, but the design of the game doesn't even approach Nintendo's level of polish in BotW's design
I'm waiting for Tim to sneak in a question no one asked but he wishes someone had
A viewer asks “Tim, how are you so awesome?”. That’s a good question! Let me answer in excruciating detail…
@@CainOnGames I *knew* it!
@@CainOnGamessounds fake
it's real, I want to know the answer to that question@@fredrik3880
@@lrinfi yeah mate just having fun
"Hi everyone, it's me Tim."
Your humble presentation style and consistency are treasures. Thank you for your games and your words Tim. 😄
I was genuinely expecting a discussion on things like Thri-kreen and Radscorpions, but this was also good
99 little bugs in the code,
99 little bugs,
Track one down,
Patch it around,
117 bugs in the code.
This little ditty has the air of lived experience.
What they sing at Bethesda... 🤣
I love Tim gets away with saying things that any other dev would get grilled endlessly for.
@@lrinfi gotta remember - this isn't the first time it happened, and it won't be the last. It's cyclical, and this time has only been worse than the others because the gaming industry is still growing. I reckon it'll get better because there's only so many people in the world and so much money to spend - It can't grow forever.
@@lrinfi And it only gets better, because said megacorporations can be shockingly clueless. I was reading a statement earlier today from WB Games, re: SS:KtJL's middling launch. Their conclusion to the success of single-player-only title Hogwarts Legacy and failure of their most recent live service game was that pursuing big game projects was too costly and too unreliable, and they need to double down on live service content for the forseeable future. Which... uh. What?
There's a lot of carelessness in the architecture that the designers and developers are fully aware is unsustainable. But someone higher up fails to see that, so it doesn't really matter.
@@lrinfi??????? What the absolute fuck are you waffling about??
@@mattc7420 it's pretty much spot on though. We saw a wave of games chasing the trends because higher ups saw dollar signs from Destiny, Warframe, Payday 2, and waves of other properties that were made to profit over the long haul despite sneaking their way into the premium game market (as opposed to subscription based). Then we got a slew of mismanaged attempts to capitalize on that like Triad Wars, LawBreakers, Battleborn, Outriders, Redfall, SS:KtJL... so many good studios with newly tarnished reputations from bad ventures. And it didn't lead to new direction. It led to mass layoffs and closures at said studios that KNEW the direction was a mistake and couldn't really do much about it.
When that market proved to be unsustainable, all the studios working on titles actively got stuck shipping what they had before the 2023 market dictated the entire studio be laid to rest.
Remember: You never see the bugs that were fixed.
Unless someone shows videos of gameplay form like alfa/beta. Devs of Hogwarts Legacy did exactly that few weeks ago, some of the phisics glitches are quite a horror show :P
I wish that was true. I've seen let's plays that have found many bugs from my game that I know I had fixed and no one in the team could reproduce anymore.
This video warms the dark recesses of my QA heart. 😊
I always say, there's no single thing in software (i.e. the programming) that's all that difficult; it's when you start combining things that the complexity takes off. Sometimes you don't even realize it's not possible, and it's impossible to anticipate everything.
Hey Tim I'm currently making my first game and these videos has been really helpful so I just wanted to say thank you. great videos.
What kind of game are you working on?
In-house QA is so important. I don't know what the situation is for games, but over in enterprise-land it's basically unheard of these days, and it's a real pain for us devs. Devs are expected to do their own QA now, but they're very different skill sets and we're just not as good at it as dedicated QAers.
My old work used to pull the IT helpdesk people up for testing duty on rotation because we interacted with the users all day and ran into all the issues that they got (double clicking the print button printed twice for instance)
We were alright at it but to save on desk resources, and also to be new and hip they moved to agile and everything went to shit
It would help if QA were given the most basic respect instead of being paid the minimum and being first on the chopping block come layoffs. I was looking at job listings recently and Blizzard is hiring QA for less than I made in food service. It's pathetic to see such a profitable massive studio treat their employees so poorly.
@@anchorlightforgeGame tester is a lot of people's dream jobs so they know that they can get away with anything they want because there's always millions of people who are wanting the spot
it's pure evil
Yeah, I used to be the only in-house QA tester at a firm and you could really tell how much the programmers loved being able to go through issues with me instead of just having to read reports
My friend asked me how I was enjoying Cyberpunk when it first came out. I told him after playing Bethesda games I barely noticed the bugs.
True. I am kinda of an old new gamer, and I started by buying an Xbox series S and installing fo4. I was shocked by how many times the game crashes on an always-online console. Really!? No bug fixes for a popular game that has been in the market for so many years?
I actually found some of the bugs in CP2077 enjoyable 😁 Or funny. Like the time I lost my head and was riding a motorcycle without my head haha. But yeah that game is so complex there would always be some bugs. Still I love Cyberpunk. From day 1.
What is your opinion of dev leads or creative directors being transparent or addressing their community about the project. I appreciate how you get on youtube and share you opinions, and experiences with game dev from different stages of your career. I have always found that just having someone address the player base in a sort of devlog or something goes a long way. I know it's not as relevant but something like DE with warframe or how Jeff from the ow team used to do. I just feel like it humanizes us and the team behind the game.
I think it’s great when devs address the community directly, but there are a lot of reasons why they don’t. In fact, that’s the subject of tomorrow’s video.
@@CainOnGames Awesome, can't wait to watch it.
Miss Jeff too, overwatch is not the same without his devlogs.
Though i think the issue is when Dev's are not able to talk freely due to internal issues like it happened with Jeff and Bobby not giving them budget and also making them waste time on stuff he would cancel.
In those situations the dev can't speak freely but also at the same time people will get frustrated and start getting toxic.
Also Jeff and Tim are like rare exceptions most Dev's won't even want to be in public domain, it's stressful if you are not built for it.
The reality is that only a tiny fraction of players ever actually watch/read/care about that kind of thing. Most players don't obsessively follow games on Reddit, Twitter, Discord, blog articles, etc., they just play casually and don't interact with those external/meta elements of games. :/
@@arcan762 Obsessively seems like the incorrect word to use. It's still a significant enough amount of players to have some studios do it or consider it. I could only speak for myself; as I am not sure what most gamers do or don't do but I play warframe extremely casually and still watch a recap of their dev streams.
I was making a prototype for a turn based JRPG with menu based combat a couple years ago, and because of the nature of how those games work and how I was basically teaching myself how to make it, I had bugs with literally every step of the way. Speed and turn order brackets, using skills and items, arrows indicating buffs and debuffs, and most particularly the unique mechanics involving starting a combo with one party member, and passing your attack phase to the next party member to have them continue the combo. I had left the prototype working as intended minus a couple visual bugs after about a year of working on it. And the cars in the overworld still kept spawning in the wrong direction and drove through sidewalks and buildings.
I've coded for years. Thought I'd planned out my game's design just fine last month. Coding was going so well. Today I introduced quickload aaaaaand it all broke. Like, everything. I forgot to design a way to reset world state w/o reloading the entire map. Cue lots of hacks and fiddly bits. I tend to prototype with "known bugs" to be smoothed over later as the jank becomes noticable. This was not one of those cases. I just... forgot that a load without reloading everything needs a reset. The entire save/load system was misdesigned. And that's the thing: you can know what you are doing and still miss really obvious states for no other reason than we humans are fallible. Design & code is seriously hard. The fact you got a thing running is saying a lot. My first (and only released) game was written the same way. In the 6 years since I finished that project I learned a lot. And yet, every time I think I have a design thought out, reality rears it's head and I spend hours trying to figure out which of the bazillion interconnected bits and pieces I messed up on. And 9 times out of 10 the solution is less than elegant, designed more to be robust and harder to mess up later than fancy, mostly cause over the last 10 years I've come to learn that predicting every possible interaction just turns into whack-a-mole while crude but functional tends to work... well, until it doesn't and you need to redesign with better information but that's just design in a nutshell.
I have no desire to make games but your videos make me appreciate games so much more because of all the things that go into them that I didn’t know or think about.
On the subject of bugs, as I was going through my first Outer Worlds playthrough, there was word of a crazy powerful Science build using a sledgehammer that could destroy bosses in two charged swings. It turns out there was a bug in the damage calculation of that weapon, and by the time I was done with my playthrough and ready to test that on a second run, it had already been fixed. 😢
already looking up guides for a first play trough? your loss
@@Wierie_ I don't even know if there were guides. It was right at launch, but I was active on the subreddit.
@@rubinelli7404a lot of TOW info is really still lacking to this day.
@Wierie_ nah I like doing that too it builds up the excitement to play the game and makes it better for me. Don't hate on how others play games, that's dumb and bitchy asf bro. But if u wanna act like that... then I guess thats your loss.
Just wanna say that I love your channel. All of it is precious. Thanks for everything =]
Save file corruption is probably even worse than crashing.
Another good video, Tim. I'm playing Prey (2017), and now I'm wondering if you've ever considered making a game in another genre. Since player agency and emergent gameplay are very important to you, what do you think about immersive sims? How much does the development process change compared to traditional RPG's?
thank you Tim. I'm still really enjoying this channel. Just keep it up, please, and thank you for all the amazing games :)
Damn I thought this was going to be a place for me to post about my arachnophobia and how I've always hated how RPG devs throw a ton of spiders in their games!
Thats because Ratphobia is sooooo 1991 dude, Arachnos have a better taste in the early levels of an RPG.
I got sewerphobia over the years, can't play any games anymore.
Lol
Warlockocracy has a very funny "high brow CRPG professor" analysis of Fallout 1 vs Fallout 2, featuring lots of great bugs. 😊
I fucking loved his videos on those 2 games. Vengeance for modoc!
Greetings fellow Warlockracy enjoyer.
He has great content and very interesting tangents, particularly on the eastern-made games & mods
@@koalabrownie agreed!!
In another video you mentioned the future of gaming lies in dynamic emergent gameplay where various scenarios aren't programmed in. I think HellDivers 2 owes a lot of it's success to this. Between the day night cycle, weather, players having different builds and experience, mission parameters, it leads to endless extremely cinematic moments. The missions themselves are often boring. But the way the mission plays out is endlessly dynamic and leads to things like glorious last stands, or escaping with no bullets left and multiple broken bones, being surrounded, saved at the last moment by napalm strikes as you dive for cover, getting stuck behind enemy lines, a major battle through the night and dawn breaks right as you're being saved. None of this is programmed in, it's just how the mission played out. A different team could have went faster and never saw day break. And then if you have music going in the background it's amazing. Amazing grace bagpipes hit right as extraction comes, you're covered in blood and battered. It's incredible. And again, not programmed, not predetermined. But shout out for the programmers who were smart enough to implement these free flowing mechanics and who did great things like adding in diving, the prone mechanics, stratagems, a decent amount of varied missions, fun enemies. Everything they added feels like it was made with the explicit function of being cinematic and dynamic.
One game and it's like you've forgotten 100 years of gaming
@@UmmerFarooq-wx4yo On what level?
@@Steak514 did you never play Cod:black ops? Looks very funny in 3rd person, but it doesn't work too good in first person because you hit your face on the floor. Which makes this game more of a running joke slapstick. Like a Jackie Chan film but unlike Jackie Chan Stuntmaster.
I love bugs in RPG's.
They are always one of the easiest mobs to kill which brings a lot of fun during early leves when you grind for XP. For example radroaches in Fallouts. Best bugs ever.
Badum-tss.
Well said. No idea why tim doesnt like them.
Thank you for touching on this. I doubt one can release any sizeable piece of software without bugs, let alone an RPG game which can get absurdly complex.
I believe there is a common expectation in the tech industry that there is ~10 bugs per 1000 lines of code.
What is immensely frustrating is that you had fixes for many of your bugs in Troika's games and you were not allowed to release them.. that's just an unfair hit to the team's reputation. :(
Anyhow great stuff. I would love to hear more about interesting debugging techniques you have used in your games (like the barriers in the fallout crash bug). Also bug prevention strategies (unit tests, automated game agents, etc).
Thank you again for the video! Have a great weekend!
Thanks Tim for your work on fallout. It was a huge part of my childhood
bro tim caine is a real one
Tim tappped into his MR Krabs today 'Money Money Money' lol
Question for some future video:
What are some of the challenges for fixing game issues post release, or close to the release, when there is no translation budget available at all. For text, as well as voice overs.
The same question as above, but if there is no art budget available.
Thanks tim for taking your time to give a detailed insight on it, it makes so much sense now, haha money certainly would help fix many stuff, esp i feel rpgs dont get the budget nowadays like other titles whose budget seems to be increasing rapidly often, also ya certainly the way you said about priority of bugs stuff we often dont think about what bug before that was clouding the one present now, though devs may have been busy fixing the bigger one, Always a delight to hear the detailed explanations from you😊
Earliest I’ve ever been for one of these, pog
Opt-in mechanics that arise out of bugs are some of my favorite features in any game. Quake strafe jumping and bunny hopping are opt-in, most can't even do it, but it lets people like me enjoy your game where I probably wouldn't have otherwise. I really wish that opt-in traversal mechanics such as strafe jumping and the like were a feature in every game, particularly open-world RPG's, because the "immersion" players who value their time in the world won't have their experience be affected because they likely don't even know such a thing exists, and if they do, will choose not to do it because it requires a conscious decision to do so... but let me play the game how I want, and let me bhop and jump around like a madman because that's how I want to play.
2:32 That its in theory, add to that a competitive community and its development difficulty as a game service exponentially grows. Woshige, the battle balancer from SF6, for sure will have to examine a LOT of data (competitive) and be fair with every character balance in the next patch, and thats very complicated, you can measure his success by the amount of death threats that he will personally receive after the patch launches.
2:35, that’s interesting that you bring up Street Fighter cause I’ve heard that the *combo system* was initially a bug. I’ve heard conflicting accounts where it was supposed to be intentional but I still find that fascinating.
Lock-picking into the Brotherhood bunker in Fallout causes everyone inside to assume you retrieved the holotape (or whatever it was) from the Glow. You have to get the electronic lock-pick from Loxley first.
I searched around your channel if you ever commented on JRPGs or Japanese developed games and it appears you've haven't. What is your opinion on JRPGs? Have you taken any inspiration from JRPGs that have made it into your RPGs?
Always informative! Would love to see a video on replayability
Hi Tim, it's us, everyone.
Part of the fun with the old rpgs, like during SNES/PS1/Ps2 era because they can't be updated is that, as gamers we find workarounds, exploits and strategies to work with the bugs. (Like how even tho RNG is seeded, some games it's completely broken or we figured out all the values)
Gta SA hole in the ground bug near the docks destroyed my ps2.
Thinking about how the events, conditions, to unlock Law/Amane's route in Devil Survivor had to be heavily simplified late in development because it was literally impossible to get that ending... even in the final game, it's the toughest to get.
Tim needs to discover the infinite money glitch.
I can attest to that. Crashes are my most hated of all bugs. Close second is being stuck in or falling through the geometry.
Third but definitely not last is items disappearing from my inventory.
Sometimes however bugs can be fun, like bunnyhopping in Source and GoldSource games, also propelling off of moving objects, explosion boosting, prop surfing etc.
I do think some types of bugs can be worse than crashes. For example, a Deus Ex style game with a sloppy physics engine prone to objects falling out of the world means you could brick your save for daring to experiment with the mechanics.
But it's true, once you're dealing with instability there's an unsettling feeling that makes you rush through sections playing as "safely" as possible instead of enjoying the experience. Maybe you'll skip cutscenes you've never seen and rush your way past major encounters just to see a bad level through. It's a real dealbreaker.
I hate bugs that lead to a save that you can't continue. You've put hours of playing time into it and you can't continue the game. That happened to me once with Total War: Rome. Even though I always create multiple saves and rotate them so that I have at least one working save, this bug crept into all of the saves and later led to a reproducible crash of the game. I was therefore unable to finish the campaign.
I think a big cause for such bugs is the serialization of game data directly from memory into savegame files. When saving savegames in this way, bit errors in the RAM can lead to savegames no longer working. That's why I prefer savegame functions that store the data in a structured way in the save state. This makes it easier to avoid errors when saving.
Hi Tim, I know from your previous statements that new/original IP is always your preference when making a game, but I was wondering what if any pre existing IP you would like to see as a game whether it be from film, books etc. ? If so why would you like to see it and if its not already a video game why do you think it would translate well into one ? Thanks so much, love your videos.
I have an experience with playtesting and bugs I'd like to share.
TL;DR: Be sure to check for typos when bug hunting.
I once ran into a bug while playtesting a mod that so disruptive that we had to stop using shotguns altogether because of what I like to call "the shrapnel wave". Any shotgun type weapon with "pellet" modifiers would lag the server and everyone's game. To give you an idea, one of my weapons fired around 7 pellets normally, add pellet+9 and add pellet+6. What should have been *22 pellets* turned into *378 pellets.* And we're talking about an Unreal1 Engine game here, so it strained the game and server pretty bad. The bug *multiplied* the pellets as many times as the trait was applied to the guns because the modder made a typo.
Hi, Tim. Can you please talk about video games containing gameplay tutorials and when video games hold, or choose not to hold, the player's hand? I couldn't find a video of you talking about it and I wanted to know your thoughts on it.
Hi Tim,
Do you have any advice regarding giving feedback from the player perspective? I have seen your video "Giving Good Feedback" but I felt a lot of the video focused on giving feedback as a developer rather than player.
Usually when I play early access game (from RPGs: Pillars of Eternity2, BG3) I struggle with figuring out what feedback might me relevant. I feel a lot of time is being wasted talking about things that aren't finalized (balance, story), rather than focusing on things that actually might be helpful to devs. On a flip side, occasionally I have been too optimistic about a feature (*cough* PoE2 ship combat *cough*) assuming what I see is an early draft of a system, rather than its almost final version.
Do you have any feedback to us, playerbase, from your time working on PoE? Have you heard other devs saying what they wish playerbase would/wouldn't focus on when playing early access builds of their titles?
I think something of interest is if bugs can be a good thing, ie the system isn't working as intended but for some reason or another the player is enjoying the way it has resulted in game
I can’t imagine how many emergent bugs super stimpaks introduced back in original fallout. I can heal someone… to death? without aggro?
17:36 As Butch from Far Go Traders says: Time is money, chit chat is not money.
Haha. Voiced by non other than the ron man war never changes!
Abandonware games lost to time would be a *great* topic to elaborate on :0
Maybe not far into the future AI will be commonly used to not only play the game, but describe the gameplay it just did with natural language and then analyze the gameplay and be able to plan new ways of play-testing and writing reports on all that it did. That would be worth a few millions worth of work-time I presume in big projects. (not to mention performing deep linting right on the code with each push).
I absolutely love Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty and Cyberpunk 2077, but it annoyed me to no end how both the base game and the DLC had a few boss fights that forced my sneaky neturnner corpo assassin to fight them headfirst with guns blazing: the spider thingy in Phantom Liberty, Adam Smasher and Oda. Now, all of these allow netrunning to help you a bit (Oda a bit less), but you can't rely ONLY on sneaking and netrunning, like you can almost everywhere else during the game. Since I like to play on the hardest difficulty, I personally had no choice but to bring down the difficulty for these fights, and that really irked me...
No poisoning? No manipulation? No killing in the night/darkness?
A stealth fighter is supposed to be as strong as a vampire. The stealth is only there because the stealth character desires to relax and be away from the crowd.
This was a gigantic issue for Deus Ex: Human Revolution as well. The boss fights are so badly implemented that they can be showstoppers for certain nonlethal builds, even if they're not necessarily stealth builds.
Did your QS build their own test levels, for example to pick every available container, run along a parkour to test movement, shoot every gun, have every class at a certain level fight a specific predefined encounter with an enemy group (balancing) etc. ? I guess a lot of issues can be found quickly by structured testing, that is not necessarily possible in actual game levels.
Hi Tim, I'm months from shipping and we'll be going for a third party QA team. You think you could go more in-depth when it comes to what to look out for in that relationship? Perhaps things that raises green or red flags or just whatever experience you can share. Thanks!
Alright, Tim. First off, thank you for the explanation! Secondly, based on this explanation, I feel like i need to ask: how do you personally determine the difference between a bug and a "design" flaw? I feel like *a couple* of the bugs you described were issues with feature implementation rather than bugs (in my layman opinion).
Tim has become my favorite you tuber
The recent bug is when the game that the consumer expected was going to be on their hard earned paid for hardware investment, is no longer available on said hardware but on the rival hardware.
certification process really clashed with certain studios (looking at relic and dawn of war 2 here). I understand why MS would want to do it (largely reputation management) but as an end user it was excruciating to sit there waiting weeks for a hotfix after a patch came out
Xenoblade 2 once had an update that made a late-game special move involving some of the main characters(!!) always crash the game... it took like a month to get patched
Has Tim done a video on the pros and cons, and more cons of microtransactions?
Pros:
None
Cons:
There are no pros
@@SimplyPhoenix Pros: The game doesn't get shut down
So step 1 of game development: rob a bank
Got it, brb
Not sure if they allow prisoners to develop games. :)
Hey Tim, you briefly mentioned the game rating in this video and im curious of your experience with the ESRB and their foreign counterparts. In your limited experience, have you noticed that T rated games sell better than M rated games? I know you talked about the trials of getting Fallout approved for M but im curious of your experiences beyond.
Hi Tim, Regarding the Bard/ Nosferatu problem, isnt it in some sense reasonable that the least popular classes/races gets tested less? Or do you think that all classes should have the same polish, even if you know in advance that some will be more popular than the others?
They weren’t just tested less, they were barely tested at all. One of the bugs for the Nosferatu was that they could not transition between two maps on the main quest line, which means that no one even played them through the game one time.
@CainOnGames that is of course unacceptable. Not being able to complete the game as on of the clans offered to you must have felt pretty bad for those who tried.
You ranked you bugs by severity, but shouldn't frequency and possibility to avoid be some sort of factor too?
If lets say in fallout 1 the game crashes if you put 1024 objects on the ground in the same map (rare and avoidable behavior) be aless serious bug than the rats behaving weird when you start the game.
@@jontofteskov4897 As someonew who works in QA, they are indeed factors, but they are usually less important than severity. A minor bug with 100% repro rate is much less important in the grand scope of things than a big bug like "being unable to finish a questline" with 5% repro rate, because 5% repro rate bug becomes a MUCH bigger issue once your game ships and is being played by potentially hundreds of thousands of people.
@@KingSizeUGP Ok, thanks for the answer 🙂
IMHO not all things Tim mentioned are “bugs”, such as adhering to platform certification, age ratings or things not being FUN.
For our team, this Q&A thing is simple - as I am both game designer AND Q&A lead 😹
Isn't it a case that some time ago a publisher or a developer firm made business decision to cut the QA, so that the players do it? Other developers/publishers saw this and copied because it worked from business standpoint
Hey Tim, you mostly talk about RPGs but im curious what other genres do you like/are your favorite and what do you like about those genres?
Tim mentioned in some video, he plays some Action, Adventure and RTS games every now and then, but mostly it's RPGs. And even with those, he hates getting shoe-horned into pre-defined characters, so things like The Witcher, Cyberpunk, Rockstar stuff or most JRPGs probably aren't his cup of tea.
@@JanTGTX thanks!
I would rate anything that leads to save game corruption as severe as crashing bugs.
I was hoping you'd be talking about *bugs* in CRPGs, but alas!
Bugs, in my RPG??? Sounds like these games need an orbital strike in the name of DEMOCRACY!
I had to buy another copy of xenosaga 3 because of a bug, the other disc would not load up.
The second copy had the bug fixed...
Do you play indie games? And given your own background, does it affect how you view them? Either in a curious way given the (usually) much smaller team, nostalgic if they reminds of the earlier days or is it a whole other world?
Not sure Tim has had to work under such conditions but I wanted to ask about the recent thousands of layoffs in the gaming industry. People were layed off not only from studios that had issues or a bad release but also from studios that consistently create successful games that make profit. If you're doing good and the studio does good but that does not guarantee that you keep your job, how can people work under such conditions and do their best?
I wonder if one day generative language models will know enough to remove all bugs from a game.
I would love to hear your thoughts on the dumb rivalry that is bethesda vs obsidian.
@@lrinfi There is no war in Ba Sing Se
@@lrinfi yes, referring to the fan war between them.
What impact do you think Early Access has on finding bugs Tim?
I think non of your titles ever did something remotly close to Early Access or pre-release access but do you see it as an opportunity to get 'free' QA and some funds or a good way to ruin the first impression you leave on the market?
Or phrased differently , do you think EA is a benefit , a gamble or even a bad move for a developer?
Does it change with size? Like obviously an indie company could use the free labour and additional funds while it might look bad if a big company releases a title as Early Access when people expect full ready titles from them.
wait at least 2 years after RPG being released until playing
learned since original Fallout, hasn't gone wrong for me since
also allows the price to go wayyyy down and to be gotten in a sale
winwin
approach if taken by many would lead to worse quality worse games and overall decline
but hey, you do you, if any bugs trigger you that much that you have to wait 2 years (lol, wut, that's a proper OCD right there), then hey, wait 2 years, wait 10 years even, it would be almost for free lmao (inb4 "well well, they shouldn't release buggy messes" -> yeah yeah, sure, waiters gonna wait)
@@nickrubin7312 that's your delusion so you can feel better
triggered? huh? you're triggered, clearly, and projecting
if no one bought games when they released because they were bugger, publishers would have to give developers more time&money to make better products
but you are part of a culture of 'now now now!' and that is what leads to decrease in quality
I CHOOSE to wait, do you not understand that?
I have a life, full - I haven't played Pillars of Eternity or Numenera or UnderRail beyond ~20 hours each (less for Numenera)
I backed Numenera at a high tier, btw
and backed Pillars
and Wasteland 2, and 3, and more
yet I still waited to play them
but you just want to create stories that make you feel better
Hey, Tim. What's your opinion on automated testing, which is very prevalent in software development in general. What are the good proportions between automated tests and play-testing, or are there any? Do automated tests and play-testing cover completely different tested functions/systems and do not intersect?
I think he has been avoiding the automated testing topic tbh lol. I've noticed it is such a contentious topic in games that devolves into a lot of tribalism compared to mainstream software dev.
@@arcan762 > I've noticed it is such a contentious topic in games that devolves into a lot of tribalism
rly? Why? I would be actually interested to hear from experienced gamedev, especially with experience as programmer, and not just designer/director/manager
in software dev it is almost mandatory these days, at least unit testing,
and even outside of coding, project managers/analysts/engineers that don't code use all sorts of tools like Selenium and such
@@nickrubin7312 I just find there are attitudes like "testing is the holy grail and will solve all of our problems" through to "testing is a waste of time as the feature being tested may just get completely changed/the requirements are too volatile right now for tests to be worth the effort of writing". I've worked in healthcare software where testing is a must, but do some game stuff too where everything is about getting maximum features out the door ASAP, as long as it works (mostly) then it is good enough. Automated tests are nice if you have the time, but you never have the time. TBF I find writing tests can easily take several times as long to do than implementing the actual thing being tested.
@@arcan762 interesting, I've never dubbed into gamedev, so I don't know.
>maximum features out the door ASAP,
Yeah, that's probably it, I usually (not always), worked in the process of creating MVP and then adding features while iterating. Or not MVP necessarily, but to implement requirements needed most to the customer.
>I've worked in healthcare software where testing is a must
I think would've been strange otherwise
Personally, for a long time working in custom software dev, and right now, in the current company, it is TDD (Test Driven Development). Yes resource/time heavy indeed.
Was just wondering, especially with the topic of "bugs", and play-testing and QA were brought up, how is it in games, since I rarely see it being brought up (and for the past 4-5 years with TDD my head is a bit warped around automated testing). Thanks for providing at least some insight, with the approach of "getting maximum features out the door ASAP" and how resource (time) heavy writing tests is, kind of makes sense if it was not so popular in gamedev.
The Outer Worlds shipped with a consistent crash bug very near the end of the game. Not for 100% of players, but for many. Luckily you could avoid it by walking on a ledge or something past the room where it triggered. Yeah very not buggy.
I’m loving my dozens of TOW runs. Incredible RPG. Plenty of Character are viable because of the system.
What are your thoughts on Non-RPGs using stat-based progression?
Ive had very very very few gamebreaking bugs in any game over 30+ years of gaming.
Feel a lot of games get a bad rap when it comes to bugs that isnt fair. Bethesda for example. Yeah there are some bugs but really the games have worked very well (some i dont like but that is something else).
New Vegas is also claimed to have been so buggy on release (not really, yeah there are bugs but how bad are they really in so far that they ruin the experience?)
Bloodlines had a crash bug but i played full runs on release fine (may have gotten a patch or fix). And again it didnt ruin the fun in the game.
Fallout 1 has some issues with the end slides but worked very well.
Ive had a few corrupted games in Arcanum (but ive played it maybe 50 times? 100?). And ive modded it and use the uap.
Anyway my point is that some of my favorite games have had these "yeah but they got a lot of bugs thing" following them and compared to most other games it isnt fair. They have no more bugs than them. And most importantly none of the bugs have ruined these games.
However the current idea of release game fix later is just awful.
I wonder how much money and time Nintendo spent on Zelda: TotK quality assurance. It shipped nearly flawless (in my humble opinion).
Was that game a technical marvel?
@@UmmerFarooq-wx4yo Yep, exactly that
Not my dumb ass thinking this was about literal insects
Constant crashing has ruined so many great games for me on console. Wasteland 3, Pillars of Eternity 2, Path Finder King maker all on PlayStation. I just want to enjoy some amazing Isometric Rpg's without major issues. :'( I'm curious as to why games are allowed to be sold with major problems like this.
The worst kind of bug is one that destroys your OS installation. See: The Boot ini file being destroyed by EVE in a fatal bug from a few years back. Horrendous.
"on my lowest Tier are things that people say arent fun: maybe theres a skill that noone ever takes"
me checking the Fallout 1 wiki:
"Out of the 53 perks only a dozen are implemented in a fashion that gives a functional benefit."
hmmmm yeah i can see that, it all makes sense now 🤣
Hi, Tim, do you have a collection of the funniest bugs that appeared in your games during production? I know some devs like to keep the funniest bug videos for entertainment purposes, although they're rarely shown to the public.
Please, if you're a developer, leave fun bugs in your game.
Bugs in games, and RPGS especially, are some of my favorite moments in gaming history. Take Morrowind for instance, and how you can launch yourself, or stack to infinite damage, or get infinite money. Morrowind as a base game is an incredible experience for people who want to play an immersive RPG, but these additional aspects of the game create infinite replayability potential. I enjoyed Skyrim, but far less because of how sandboxed all of the mechanics are, and how they can't interact with one another, making the game less attractive for me to replay, whereas I still keep Morrowind installed to mess with the over-the-top unintended system interactions.
The consumer of games is not getting an honest representation of a game from a large studio. That is one of the reasons people get really angry when a game has bugs. When a large multi-million dollar game is marketed and hyped for a long time with out of this world advertising, the consumer expects a Rolls Royce. They instead get a Ford that needs a tune up.
Hello Mr. Tim Cain ,
In your video you said " RPG's are really complicated pieces of software , they are extraordinarily complex and made of many interlocking pieces "
Soo kinda technically speaking RPG's main infrastructure is most likely based on calculations , mathematical equations and other stuff related with CPU and RAM usage rather than graphical usages . To prevent at least for crutial bugs isn't it possible to make a simulation to interact with almost every possible combinations that this game is using for soo try to figure it out that , if this game with some situations might be crash or not ? At least for fundamental testing . Or could it be too time and money consuming that , the companies ain't use these things for testing like that ?
I'm asking this because recently released on In one particular game i wouldn't like to give it's name , this thing happened . The game itself not have crutial bug on , it can be playable and no critical bug that crashes the game . But the problem in this RPG game is , while you playing with a some certain characters with some combinations you spend on your skills and with some items you weared it in this particular RPG game , you become invincible . It's like character A can become invincible with some sort of combinations but if you choose character B you become way too less effective than character A . The developers said these things that , to shortened version is : " Ok you players are going to play with your characters and when we realize that some unbalancing things occured in this game we will balance it "
Wouldn't at least this situation is possible to test with ?
Imo, it is more of a philosophical question.
"Imba" isn't that big of a priority when you have a location where the key NPCs get stuck underground or a memory leak that eats up gigs of ram and crashes the game.
Besides - it's kind of your own fault that you drain fun from your game by playing either A or B. Play C that is balanced, the other two are for kind of hardcore gamers or "cheese lovers".
Balance issues stem from the core of the design. You could simulate everything and adjust rules until nobody is overpowered, but that would probably be the most boring game ever.
Also, I think graphics and physics are still the most complex part of games. Gameplay rules are usually simple math (I mean, if kids play DND or whatever - it sure is less complicated than vectors and matrices, forces etc and most CRPGs have a similar level of complexity to them).
They often get complicated when you start introducing if/elseif's, aka scripts or unplanned rules. You always deal (str*skill-(def+ac))/difficulty damage… unless you have a Piercing Pike of Penetration that turns it into (str*skill-(def-bonus+(ac-bonus2*lvl/difficulty)+0.5)/difficulty or something like that.
@@zhulikkulik Hello Thanks for your thoughts and some of the facts you point about that .
I'm a software developer myself since 2011 ish but with completely different era than gaming industry but still i'm handling with huge chunk of data some certain times and in my free time over the years i try to find out some behind the scene things the games i played it or try to learn something new to develop myself time to time .
Recently i saw some reversed engineered Fallout source code some Russian friend make it , i'm not 100% sure on all the things accurately collected but sure on some of the things in that particular source code seems to be legit and in there as you mentioned there are some kind of calculations but not soo hardcore as Action Role Playing or the games like mostly based on combat related things but have some meaningfull data in it , since the game itself has some things you can do in a limit so these calculations won't get your attention soo much because in some descent hours you can able to finish the game most likely .
But as for some other games mostly related with combat based features , esspecially in recent years the developers adding soo much new variables or let's say new combat mechanics or old combat mechanics but implementing into their games so in result there are huge features in the game itself that the developers i believe struggle on balancing it .
I think either they might considering it to shortened those features ? or maybe if they still would like to implement these things into their game there should be some basic math behind it that either classes have some sitautional advantage and making the game itself more interesting that way ? or maybe for each calculations of classes would result almost same damage output as possible depends on their class proffeciency type like all damage based on classes i believe should do some same damage not exactly same but like close to each other in result , so making each classes enjoyable for the playing :)
Those are my opinion of course it might be wrong or not exactly right .
I have a small question - what game engine Arcanum uses ? Someting bought or home (as in - in company) made ? Also, is it really the same engine used in both Arcanum and ToEE ?
I think they are both built upon proprietary engines. They most probably used some of the code from the fallout engine. It would make sense that they are different as well, at least looking at the features of both games. But the info on this is scarce, it is merely my speculation :)
As a customer, I understand that there will be bugs. But it frustrates me when devs/publishers quickly abandon a game and won't fix bugs. I've started to wonder if "Right to Repair" laws might eventually get extended to software and how that might change software publishing.
Oh thooose bugs...
I remember the Dos game, Mines of Titan, my friend discovered that if you went to the casino and played a few games, recorded the outcome of those games, reload before playing and bet on those same numbers, he won every time. Fun times.
If I made a game it wouldn't have any bugs. How? Simple; it wouldn't be able to be compiled. Cut the source of bugs off at the source I always say.
Don't worry Tim. Circle of 8 fixed your Troika games lol
11:15 Nazeem
"We'll patch it after we release it" reminds me of a film industry phrase that leads often to disaster.
"We'll fix it in post"
Which means rather than do another take, or attempt to compensate for the problem we are having while shooting, we are just going to move on and hope the editors can fix it.
movie/film and software/game are completely different
QA and editing are not the same
@@nickrubin7312 If Implied that they were I'm sorry for the confusion. I was comparing what I saw as similar attitudes towards creation of media. I'm say that the attitude of putting off the work of repairing or improving problems is detrimental to the integrity of what you are making. I work in the film industry so I can relate more easily to "We'll fix it in post."
do you use AI for coding? GPT, Copilot or something else? if not why not? also for testing? i think AI can be absolutely used for elimination bugs even today, but probably a framework needed for general purpose bugfixing in games
the more complex RPGs (but programs in general) will be the more AI needed for testing, i have been using copilot for 6 months i dont know how could i have lived without it
I think copilot increases the amount of bugs lol
@@coldwarpgates622it depends how you use it, there is a learning curve for that alone, im getting better and better every month in it and i absolutely love it
what i really hate is google bard/gemini i tried it for the same purpose and i think it is trash
I think the newer Zelda games proved you can make a mass scale game without significant bugs. Granted it isn't an RPG, but it easily could have been one if Nintendo wanted it to be.
Listen to the end point about money. Nintendo have basically infinite money.
@@arcan762 Any game with polish takes a lot of money, I think that's a given lol, I'm just saying Nintendo proved it can happen on that scale.
Bethesda & Xbox have a lot of money too, but their games are arguably more broken now than ever
@@evanorodd Starfield is the most polished title, that's why people look on other stuff about Starfield
There is money and time, and then there are MONEY + TIME. Nintendo for Zelda has all the MONEY AND TIME in the world.
@@nickrubin7312 Starfield isn't really open world like Skyrim or BotW are. It's more like a series of randomly populated zones that take place on procedurally generated terrain.
If anything, it's more comparable to sandbox games like Minecraft or No Man's Sky (in terms of the technology behind them)
Starfield is polished on a technical level, but the design of the game doesn't even approach Nintendo's level of polish in BotW's design