Microsoft Game Studios head Matt Booty has said Starfield, at present, has fewer bugs than any other Bethesda game at l…
  • Goronmon@beehaw.orgEnglish
    6·
    2 years ago

    Yeah how can they say it has the “fewest bugs any Bethesda game has shipped with” when the game hasn’t shipped yet??

    Issue tracking has been a part of software development since the beginning. They know and have always known roughly how many bugs they have shipped games with. Just like any company that releases a product knows roughly how many bugs they are shipping with. I pretty much guarantee you that any software that has ever been released has had a huge backlog of bugs of varying levels of importance sitting on some form of backlog.

    So, it’s pretty straightforward for them to know how this game is comparing against their previous releases. Not to say that there won’t be plenty of bugs that have been missed, but that’s not really the point.

    • LadyAutumn@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      1·
      2 years ago

      But it hasn’t been shipped yet? Plenty of developers have shipped out a game they believed to be bug free only for the players to discover hundreds of missed bugs on launch day.

      • Goronmon@beehaw.orgEnglish
        7·
        2 years ago

        Plenty of developers have shipped out a game they believed to be bug free only for the players to discover hundreds of missed bugs on launch day.

        You are mistaken if you believe that developers believe the games they ship are “bug free”, and I would bet that many of the bugs you think are “missed” are actually already known on an internal issue tracker somewhere. But those bugs were determined to be shippable. And again, that’s not specific to games, but software in general.

        • LadyAutumn@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
          1·
          2 years ago

          I speedrun games as a hobby :P we exploit a lot of bugs developers are unaware of lol. A lot of speed games are older though, so we’ve also had a long time to find some of the more obscure ones. Bug fixing is an ongoing process in modern games. I dont think it’s possible to have considered every single possible situation in a game engine, at least not for an average developer. But you sound more in the now about their internal processes, so you’re probably right and I misinterpreted what they meant by that quote.

          • Goronmon@beehaw.orgEnglish
            1·
            2 years ago

            But you sound more in the now about their internal processes, so you’re probably right and I misinterpreted what they meant by that quote.

            The general summary of how “bugs” work in software development is simple at a high level.

            1. Someone reports the bug (developer, qa, player, user, etc)
            2. Someone prioritizes the bug
            3. Lower priority issues are put on a backlog to potentially be worked on later
            4. Higher priority issues get fixed (most of the time)

            The product releases when an acceptable level of bugs from steps 3 and 4 are reached, and “acceptable” never means zero or even close to it.

        • saucyloggins@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          2 years ago

          They’ve probably never heard of a Sprint either. For those that don’t know they call it that because it’s the process where the project lead runs from all the bugs by shoving them all away from everyone’s purview.