6 réponses à ce sujet

[Beerfish]

How this got by BioWare testing is totally beyond me.  There will always be issues and bugs when a game comes out but how testers did not walk up to the designers after 1 hour of play and tell them flat out that this was pure idiocy is beyond me.  Either just leave treasure laying around to be picked up or if you want the player to do something give them small chests to open or even if you want to be real sneaky and go one step further and make players use their class to open a container like the doors fine.  but to have clay pots that some fighters and rogues have a terrible time hitting, having pots regenerate after being destroyed, etc is looney tunes.  As it is it is tough in half the games to loot the pots just because invariably you have one player who runs off to the next encounter well before things are looted.

 

This is one thing that just must be addressed in a patch.  It hurts the fun factor and anything that does that for no good reason is a poor design or implementation decision.

[BWEAmelia]

When I see posts like these it perplexes me. I understand the frustration, as a gamer, that there are bugs that can affect my experience in a title I'm really enjoying playing.  What I don't understand is the consistent bad behavior of BSN users who assume that game companies are out to get them, or trick them. I can guarantee you that no one spends years of their life on a project in order to pull one over on anyone, especially their fans. To assert otherwise, whether out of anger or misunderstanding, is naive. I think maybe ( very likely ) that the difference is in understanding of the industry, and development as an art. Allow me to drop some Realtalk in an attempt to shorten this gap between us  :

 

How this got by BioWare testing is totally beyond me.  There will always be issues and bugs when a game comes out but how testers did not walk up to the designers after 1 hour of play and tell them flat out that this was pure idiocy is beyond me.  Either just leave treasure laying around to be picked up or if you want the player to do something give them small chests to open or even if you want to be real sneaky and go one step further and make players use their class to open a container like the doors fine.  but to have clay pots that some fighters and rogues have a terrible time hitting, having pots regenerate after being destroyed, etc is looney tunes.  As it is it is tough in half the games to loot the pots just because invariably you have one player who runs off to the next encounter well before things are looted.

 

This is one thing that just must be addressed in a patch.  It hurts the fun factor and anything that does that for no good reason is a poor design or implementation decision.

 

"How this got by BioWare testing is totally beyond me." - It didn't. We have one of the best QA departments in the industry. 

 

"... but how testers did not walk up to the designers after 1 hour of play and tell them flat out that this was pure idiocy is beyond me." - I would agree with you if that had actually happened, but this situation never occurred. In fact that's not even how our bug reporting process works.

 

"This is one thing that just must be addressed in a patch.  It hurts the fun factor and anything that does that for no good reason is a poor design or implementation decision." - Ahh, here is the meat of your issue! Throw away the strawman of the company you've built and this should have been the content of your post. No one chose to introduce a bug into pot destruction. It was not a design choice, nor an implementation decision by engineers. I agree that it does have an impact on fun factor and that's why we're actively working to solve it!

 

I'm sure bioware knew about it, but the way game releases are working nowadays, (especially under "certain" publishers, EA being one of them) they only fix absolutely 100% game breaking bugs and glitches and push the game out asap to start making money asap and then get to work fixing the problems later (if at all, because they already have your money at this point).  The problem is there are no standards or regulations when it comes to games still, so companies are trying to get away with as much as they can.  Nice to see bioware isn't above that kind of stuff.  Honestly, I'd be happy if they at least put out a statement saying what they are fixing and when it will be released, just ANY sort of communication.  Instead all I see if one or two bioware staff members posting here in response to obscure bugs or questions, suspiciously ignoring the big ones that most people are talking about.

 

"... they only fix absolutely 100% game breaking bugs and glitches and push the game out asap to start making money asap and then get to work fixing the problems later (if at all, because they already have your money at this point). " -  This is an extremely cynical and poisonous view of the industry that I see from time to time. The last thing I would want to do after sacrificing so much to ship a title is for someone to be tricked into purchasing it. Its not entirely your fault, there are a number of personalities who would like you to believe this is true because it gets them views and page clicks but I can tell you its unequivocally untrue. I love our fans and I love to see them happy and I am hardly alone in that view. If you buy into this ridiculous conspiracy theory your entire view of the industry will be colored by it, and probably you should find a new hobby until you can get out from under it.

 

"The problem is there are no standards or regulations when it comes to games still, so companies are trying to get away with as much as they can." - There have been standards in games ever since Nintendo's gold seal in the 80's. We go through stringent and expensive certification processes for the launch of the title and every change we make to it afterward with first party and internally. This is also why patches don't happen at the drop of a hat. They need to be certified so that the game gets better, not worse. If no one truly cared about quality or standards your games would look much different. There are plenty of examples from the NES days that serve as fine examples of this.

 

 

It's not "certain publishers", it's a standard practice in game development for a very good reason.  Fixing bugs very frequently leads to other bugs.  Fixing a pot that refuses to stay broken could very well create a bug that causes people to crash.  At a certain point in development, you stop fixing non-critical bugs so that you aren't taking the chance of creating worse bugs.  A lot of money goes into prepping for a launch, once the ball gets rolling it's just not worth it to delay launch so you can fix minor bugs that could just as easily be patched after release.  It's just the nature of the beast.  The issue isn't the practice, it's when deadlines are being set.  Ideally, it'd be great if games only released when they were 100% ready, but that's just not how it works.  I like devs that make good games to stay in business, and there's a big difference in game sales if a game is released in Nov/December vs if it's released in January.  Besides, Bioware's got an excellent track record of patching their games, and at least as far as MP is concerned, providing great DLC completely free.

 

On a more relevant note, abilities don't deduct their cost or initiate their cooldown unless it hits an enemy (or in some cases, the recently deceased corpse of an enemy).  The important part of that is that when playing a mage, you can drop an AoE on top of a pot to destroy it, though I don't believe it works with AoEs that derive their damage from status effects or non-targettable AoEs.  Archers can also break pots by shooting at them, as arrows fly where you're aiming.  Staves don't work that way because they have a sort of tracking element to their shots which keeps you from firing them up or down.

 

Also, I'm certain I've seen a dev acknowledge the issue with the pots and that it's being fixed.  I just don't care enough to link it for you.

 

This one gets it. Thank you Azrus. The most important point - Development is an exercise of compromises. If we didn't ship with some bugs we would never ship a product and you would never get to play it. The hard part is balancing which bugs get fixed, and which ones you can live with. We prioritize crashes above broken pots, for instance, and I'm sure you can appreciate that!

 

This is all well and good but does not address my point that it should have been apparent a LONG time ago that the pots were an issue.  I doubt if this just suddenly popped up as a problem. At some point in time they do test the game for how fun it is and how functional is long before any kind of lockdown.   Getting really close to ship and not correcting a bug that pops up fine but I refuse to believe this was not in place a long time ago or at least the idea of how to dispense loot was not initiated a long time ago.

 

Yeah I know how bugs work, I am fully aware that they can come out of nowhere after a minor change elsewhere in a product.  The respawning pots are not as much of the issue as having to destroy them with some weapons you have to line up perfectly to hit them with in the 1st place.  I find it hard to believe that just popped up in the last moment.

 

Well, that's exactly how this issue was introduced. It was a very new bug that popped up while we were entering the final days of the project. Don't refuse to believe, come into the light : ) It takes some humility to accept the fact that you don't have a lot of knowledge about how game development works. I would implore you to try, and grow into a better community member. If you have frustrations feel free to post them, but remember that we're human beings and that you should act like a human being while you're here. This goes for a lot of the BSN'ers I've run into in the past weeks. Be excellent to eachother and expect excellence back.

[BWEAmelia]

Holy crap.  Can we make that a thing?  Have golden nugs randomly pop out of pots when they break?  That'd be fantastic.

 

Haha, that's actually a really good idea. Gotta have some risk there though... maybe the pot should roll to spawn 50/40/10 Nug/Bear/Druffalo?

[BWEAmelia]

1) you sound a bit defensive. its understandable that you feel like the game is your baby but a thicker skin will serve you well in areas of customer service.

2)This doesn't explain the utter lack of mic options (push to talk for example) in multiplier. I realize that this may be the fault of one sole manager who made a poor decision that reflects poorly on the rest of the BW team, but it would be nice to hear a "we're so sorry about this, and we will fix this asap"

3) Speaking of bugs, there ARE plenty of game crashes and other game breaking bugs (example: the gender bug) that did manage to get by QA. I'm not expecting y'all to be perfect. but a good man/woman owns up to their mistakes then works to fix them.

So maybe take on a more apologetic tone rather than a defensive one, if you don't want to ****** off your customers. 

 

My comments are meant to be informative and set the tone of better community interaction by heading off similar posts.

 

There are way more variables in the game than a single manager when it comes to features that don't make it into the game like push to talk. A lot. Very many. A google of them. You've created a false model of how our studio operates, and it angers you. I understand that. There's no way you could know how we operate, but by the same token you should give us the benefit of the doubt because of that lack of insight. Ask politely and someone ( like me! ) might be so kind as to fill you in.

 

There are bugs still present in the game at launch. A lot of players think that if a QA finds a bug that this bug is fixed prior to the game launching. I think that is at the core of a lot of misunderstanding and frustration between developers ( of any product ) and their player/customer base. When bugs are found they are entered into a database of outstanding issues and weighted ( and triaged regularly to make sure their weights are correct ). Then, those bugs are assigned to feature developers and based on their weight and severity we close as many as possible before we hit deadlines. The fact that bugs exist in the wild is not an indictment of our QA team. The fact that there are so FEW bugs in the wild is a huge testament to how well they've done keeping us wiley folk in line, and the hundreds of hours of personal time we've sacrificed to close these bugs ( and QA spent to verify we closed them ) We wouldn't ship games without a fantastic QA team.

[BWEAmelia]

I've mentioned before here Amelia, I've worked in the industry before (specifically in the department of assistant community manager, so I'll talk about that area rather than why these bugs and glitches got "through" your QA beyond release) and your defense is all well and good, but like I said, this is an extremely small group of people here.  While its true that Dragon Age is mainly played for its single player that doesn't excuse the fact that you do have a multiplayer component now and it VERY MUCH feels like it was on the backburner and not really payed attention to during development.  Regardless of whatever "checks and balances" your QA team went through with this, the fact remains that the multiplayer is rife with problems.  To compare, Ubisoft just issued a statement (not sure if it went public yet or not, if not it will be soon) announcing that they are aware and apologize for the insane amount of problems present in AC: Unity and are re-imbursing players who bought the season pass before a certain date.  Regardless of who is at fault for letting that trainwreck out of the gates and why, it happened and they finally came out, accepted it, said sorry, offered compensation and released yet ANOTHER patch (their third one, lets see if it works, probably won't).

 

Even if the multiplayer broke down and was completely unplayable I'm sure the audience at large would hardly bat an eyelash simply because that isn't the main selling point here (and it seems like thats how it was certainly handled with QA) but it would be nice for Bioware to be a bit more forthcoming with stuff like this.  The rare, periodic post in an obscure forum is nice and appreciated, but there are far more problems that are being talked about here (and elsewhere) that are going unaddressed (at least to the public eye).  A more visible discussion/announcement would certainly do wonders.  I know (I think?) that this is all Bioware has for community outreach, a forum, so you couldn't really do a blogpost.  Something like a stickied topic with a summary of the common and known bugs that are going to be addressed with a GENERAL timeframe would most likely appease the vast majority of people who are running into these problems here.  Bioware is a pretty big company, one of the "AAA", and one who seems to really cherish its fans, but I've seen small developers who can barely scrape by living paycheck to paycheck offer MUCH more hands on and detailed interaction with its fanbase, whilst still creating and sticking to their own deadlines.  Transparency is nothing but a good thing.

 

Regardless, your involvement here is appreciated.

 

Whether or not you're enjoying our Multiplayer mode, or how you feel about its perceived priority during development is a subjective matter. As the Dude would say, thats just like... you're opinion, man.

 

We have thousands of active players, players that have 100 hours already clocked in MP, and have only played MP since the game launched. The reality here that we need to take into account is that this forum is a small echochamber of individuals and certain topics and concerns are magnified to seem larger than they really are. If MP was in as bad as shape as you seem to imply it wouldn't be possible for these individuals and streamers to play so many consecutive hours, or to enjoy the mode at all. There are issues, they are not blocking issues, most of our userbase doesn't encounter them or the frequency of their encounter is so low ( and the workaround so easy ) that it hardly registers as a blip on their radar. That doesn't mean they're not issues, or that we won't address them, or that we don't care. I care, which should be apparent from my foray into these forums. The quality of our week one launch is in fact higher than most similar products in our industry.

 

I wouldn't say my posts are rare. I've been fairly active in this forum since I decided to engage the community. This is hardly an obscure forum. It is the BioWare studio hosted and sponsored official forums for the Multiplayer mode. I think we've been very transparent with engaging players about issues. I think its possible you haven't been looking in the right places. We're using http://answers.ea.co...p/DAInquisition as a central place for players to post questions and technical problems. This way users can see that others may be having the same problems, see the workaround, or a potential fix posted. If you head over to reddit there is a fantastic technical problems megathread here http://www.reddit.co...ems_megathread/ and I would also advise following Mike Laidlaw or Mark Darrah on twitter. They've been tweeting about high priority community issues and workarounds.

 

I wholly agree, transparency is awesome. Yelling into what feels like an abyss when you're having trouble is extremely frustrating. I'm hoping that with our first patch and following patches I can have an official set of patch notes for MP approved so that I ( or the community team ) can post them in the appropriate places.

[BWEAmelia]

Ok enlighten me oh wise one, how does a team who were totally capable of making a decent working mic system (in mass effect 3 multiplayer) suddenly become incapable of replicating that exact same system in another game they worked on?

I'm guessing they were totally capable but a manager thought it would be a bad idea. That would make sense

 

We're absolutely capable, but as I've been trying to say everything comes down to priority and time during development. There are improvements for VOIP on PC bouncing around the studio. I can't say when, or if they will ever get into a patch but we're definitely listening and working on that particular feature.

[BWEAmelia]

Have you consider the fact that people are simply putting up with them while the frustration builds? Because I am one of those players who has put hundreds of hours into the MP, and almost exclusively the MP and I hear the same thing across the board from both the friends I frequently play with and the people I run into in Public games. When getting game-halting bugs and crashes has become a norm for the players, there's definitely something wrong with quality of the game in question. However, I do appreciate the effort to keep us informed and I look forward to that patch note.

 

EDIT: I Just like to add that this is on PC which seems to be the least stable platform for DA:I so far.

 

Absolutely! We're playing the game every day as well and you can be sure that when we keep hitting the same annoying issue it gets bumped on someone's radar whether its already tracked or not. I appreciate your patience, we'll get all this smoothed out soon enough.

 

...The respawning pot (420blazeit).

 

....

(unrelated note, but any word on public events, if and when they are happening?  The first weekend was understandble since the game JUST launched but I'm sort of surprised that there isn't one for this weekend, a holiday weekend, when everybody has off and time to play the game.  I guess developers need time off too   Maybe next weekend...?)

...

 

PS.  Hope you guys have a great holiday tomorrow

 

lol! I never even thought of that. On one hand legal should probably be notified about our respawning pots... on the other hand there's a lucrative business here..

 

No word on public events! It will be messaged through twitter and other official channels when we get on up.

 

Thanks! We had Canadian thanksgiving already though we still get black friday sales? Win win? 

 

Great game, given the complexity of the game.  It is surprisingly bug free in my opinion.  Multiplayer wasn't the top priority of the game, but it also doesn't feel broken.  There are some minor bugs and they need to do some enhancements, but I think the multiplayer is a good starting point for the series going forward.  I just wanted to post to support BioWare.  I'm a SR. IT Director at a large Oil and Gas company.  We do a ton of software development and we have to make decisions all the time regarding release vs. bug fixing.  You get to a point, that no matter what you do before release, there will be bugs.  It doesn't matter what kind of QA you have.  You need to program to hit the masses and start being used. 

 

I give this game a solid A for stability and lack of bugs for release.  Tell your QA good job from me.  Could the game of been better?  Sure, but any game could come out better.  Overall well done.

 

Thank you! Glad you're enjoying the mode. 

 

If a single latte got it done I would be so down to do that.

 

There's a coffee shop across the street from the studio. I'll slip the barista our bug list and see what she can do ; )

 

I for one appreciate the honestly, and clarity. What frustrates me most is PR political double-talk from customer service departments. It's refreshing to have a spokesperson be so blunt (and provide such clear answers!) Bioware has always been my favorite developer, and I was a little dismayed to see it bought up by EA. I was worried that the quality of their games or stories might change. So far, It seems like I haven't had anything to worry about. Even though the most vocal persons of the community are usually negative, there are a lot more who really enjoy the game, Speaking for my friends and myself, we really appreciate all the hard work you folks at Bioware do to deliver a great experience. Keep up the good work! 

 

Thank you!