Quality Assurance

Did Obsidian/Bethesda really put force the effort needed for Fallout New Vegas? Seeing that the Game was released with a downright host of Bugs (I would even go so far as to say a plague) I find it hard to believe that the game (And no less at a cost of a premium game $50.00+ US) was thoroughly cleaned of issues before release. Considering that fallout New vegas has more bugs/issues than fallout 3 did (Anyone remember the no support for Quad processors - which by the way - as I remember, never got official fixed) I have to wonder where release dates and the big dollar sign fit into all of this.

What I would really like to see is the official list of issues/bugs reported during beta testing and how many of them where properly addressed before release. Add to this the number of beta tester employed.

Now we all know that it is easier for Obsidian/Bethesda to side-step and come up with some excuse why Fallout New Vegas was released in this state - But the fact is, somebody is responsible, and its not the consumer.

Lets take a look at just a few of the issues:

Currupt file download (Steam)
Currupt save issues (Steam)
Massive game scripting issues
Poor game performance
Objects falling through ground

This is just a few of the more well known problems. While the steam issues and some scripting issues have already been fixed ( And quickly I might add ) I find it hard to handle that sufficient testing and Quality Assurance was applied from the beginning.

And what of the massive stuttering issue for Nvidia users? Is some Offical Representive going to tell me that Obsidian/Bethesda did not have access to the Nvidia drivers during testing?

Thankfully the d3d9.dll which was discovered by the gaming community made the game playable for most with the Nvidia stutter syndrome. If not for this .dll work around - the game would have been unplayable for a large portion of Nvidia users.


Quality Assurance - Fact or Fiction?

It's really starting to piss me off now to be honest.

The scripting errors should not have passed testing. They are pretty blatant and clear as day most of the time. Clearly they should have had more beta testers, or did they have any at all I am wondering?

What's really pissing me off super bigtime though is despite the scripting issues and the horrible lag I got past those issues with user-fixes.

But now... well...

Now I'm finding a lot of these missions in the game that are freaking fubar man. They leaving you guessing and wondering what you are supposed to do. Game was released to soon. I am 85% certain that we are playing a beta right now and that bethesda never actually tested everything to top quality assurance.

70+ according to the credits. (And a dev that mentioned in a post somewhere.)

Considering some guy released a dll that fixed most peoples performance problems within an hour while here we are rolling on to Monday and there's still no 'official' fix to the performance issues, it shows you how much they care about pc gamers - I will be really surprised if the next patch fixes any of the major issues or even has an actual change log for that matter.

A nice example would be the weathered pistol missing models when it is upgraded, that was reported on the American launch day, yet here we are, 2 patches later and it's still not fixed spite sticking out like a sore thumb.

...anyway that's the end of my ranting today....

It's late beta quality, early beta's are MUCH MUCH worse. Personal experience, did allot of PC game testing when I was younger (it's not really like gaming, it's more like work... run here and try "quest id" with "armor id" on and "weapon" and see if "npc id" doesn't run off the map now.... 63 tries later... OK, we think we got it, try it now... lol. Good if you like to be part of the solution though and don't need money bad.). Got a life and a couple gf's and moved on to other things But I do agree it wasn't tested accurately enough before launch. As I said... they don't talk about how they do their testing that I have seen in detail other than "we do it" but whatever it is... it OBVIOUSLY isn't working.

I never really experienced that many bugs with Fallout 3.

But, I did play Alpha Protocol - and it was an epic failure of a game. Rather than an hi-tech espionage thriller, it seemed more like an episode of The Man From UNCLE mixed with Chuck Norris or something. And the game design wasn't that much better. It started of with your basic cover-and-shoot, and various lockpicking and "hacking" minigames. Which isn't such a bad idea, if it's executed properly. And then came the mediocre boss fights. I mean, who enjoys boss fights any more? Only developers without vision make boss fights to wrap up their leprous creativity. Oh, and it was buggy too.

But it would be wrong to blame it all on Obsidian. They are a brand new team, and it was Bethesda's responsibility. It's the Publisher who usually provides the infrastructure for QA, is it not?

I do QA for a living and at least in my experience staffing and funding for QA tasks has taken a backseat with the recession. With that said, the amount of bugs in this game is absolutely ridiculous. Many games push back the release date and the only downside of that is that anxious gamers have to wait a few more months. But, pushing back the release date means you have to pay all the developers and QA extra months of work that was not previously expected.

Either they really didn't care that the game was buggy - they knew how successful FO3 was with all those bugs so they thought they could just ride its coattails. Or, they simply did not have enough funding to sufficiently QA their product. If the latter is the case, that blame goes on the directors and managers for poor planning. The amount of game blocking issues, like crashing before you can finish a quest or game save corruption or just crashing randomly is ridiculous. It is almost unplayable!

well the problems that this game has seems pretty similar with the ones Fo3 had...looks a little weird...i mean they already know the games problems.i really cant find a logical explanation for the state of the game.the only explanation would be that the suits decided they wanna see money earlier.

cause if you ask me ill tell you that its not the developers fault.if the developers were given enough and realistic time im sure the game would be almost perfect!my opinion is that the "suits" pressed the game to be realised earlier than the developers have planned.

its the only logical explanation cause most of the developers are players just like you and me.and when it comes to a saga like that of fallout i believe that they are extra carefull with what they do.i dont blame them.i blame the money people.the "suits".

to think that this uncertainty that exists in all other industries have reached the gaming industry and have become so obvious is at least alarming ... money managed to corrupt gaming.

anyway hopefully there are "special" indivisuals that will make sure that the game becomes what it was meant to be...unfortunatelly that will take time.modders will save us.

This is a pretty good assumption, but i think i'm on point. Bethesda rushed to get FNV out before COD Black Ops, in order to have good sales figures. However, in my personal opinion, rushing this game out before BO was unnecessary. I feel that Fallout has a rather large fan base, and would not have suffered if it were released after COD.

I did not experience too many bugs in FO3, and was able to enjoy it. Yes, occasionally something unexpected would happen, but it was never as aggravating as FNV.
Right now I just mill around in game, explore towns, collect items, but don't even try to complete any main quests. I guess I'm waiting for another patch, hoping it'll fix some issues.
I agree with earlier posts that FNV doesn't feel like a finished game, but what is amazing is the level of community support, probably due to the fact that FO3 was such a great game.
If the issues are not resolved soon, even at a slow pace via multiple patches, I think Devs/Publishers are risking loosing players' trust for any future titles in FO series.
I most likely won't buy any game by "them" on day 1, and will wait until issues are ironed out.

Yeah I guess they reminded me why I've been sticking to the rule of thumb for many years now, "leech first, buy later", but F:NV simply had to be a blind purchase because I wanted the collector's edition (which is totally worth it, btw). But I got put in my place... again

The DLL fix was created in August of 2009 for Fallout 3 as noted in it's original debut http://www.oldblivion.com/sm/index.php?PHPSESSID=8f9479cf925711b61f80bdaac82699f9&action=profile;u=1068;sa=showPosts

A number of bugs that have not only carried over from Fo3 but have gotten worse and are effecting more people.

I expect the the patch will only fix the issues that can currently be fixed using the geck.

It is not necessarily the fault of a QA dept.

In the software industry (gaming or otherwise) it is not uncommon for QA to work their butts off only to have some guy in a fancy suit go through a list of bugs and decide whether to release for shipping or not.

More often than not, QA does their job. But ultimately, a street date has to be met (unless you are Blizzard of course).

I bet a lot of these issues people are finding were "known" to the dev teams, but they did not have to time/resources to fix before launch.