Hey, I work in QA (not in the video game field though.) However, I can tell you there is a difference between “QA missed” and “deadlines required prioritizing other fixes.”
One implies that the employees are bad at their job. Which is almost certainly not the case. I haven’t played Starfield (or even clicked through to your link lol) but presumably this is something blatantly obvious. And I’m sure the QA team was frustrated letting a glaring known issue through.
QA finds issues but it’s up to development teams to fix them, and strict deadlines will always hamper delivering a flawless product. But deadlines are driven by management and until the industry changes (i.e. don’t preorder games) we’re going to keep seeing these problems.
But as a QA professional, please don’t blame us ✌️
This. You don’t know what’s sitting on a jira somewhere with “won’t fix” tagged to it. As an ex-QA who’s now a dev, we want to fix everything and we get told what we will and will not be fixing. When you see bugs in the final product that are relatively easy to reproduce, the story there is almost certainly that we found it and then the money told us not to bother with it because they think you’ll buy the product anyway.
Yeah I don’t buy it. This is not a new engine they just developed, or some obscure complicated feature. This is one of the core functionalities of the game engine: render the game world onto the screen. And it’s an engine they developed in-house. They have been working on this game for years and years, and all that time no one noticed that output of the rendering engine is incorrect and everything looks washed out?
In the current state, the game should not have been released at all. If this is something that was fundamentally unfixable they should have pulled the plug and cancelled the game.
Yes I did. I’m not saying they should have pushed the release date but cancelled the release entirely. As in: never release it and refund everyone who preordered it.
Apparently with all that QA they still missed massive picture quality problems
Hey, I work in QA (not in the video game field though.) However, I can tell you there is a difference between “QA missed” and “deadlines required prioritizing other fixes.”
One implies that the employees are bad at their job. Which is almost certainly not the case. I haven’t played Starfield (or even clicked through to your link lol) but presumably this is something blatantly obvious. And I’m sure the QA team was frustrated letting a glaring known issue through.
QA finds issues but it’s up to development teams to fix them, and strict deadlines will always hamper delivering a flawless product. But deadlines are driven by management and until the industry changes (i.e. don’t preorder games) we’re going to keep seeing these problems.
But as a QA professional, please don’t blame us ✌️
This. You don’t know what’s sitting on a jira somewhere with “won’t fix” tagged to it. As an ex-QA who’s now a dev, we want to fix everything and we get told what we will and will not be fixing. When you see bugs in the final product that are relatively easy to reproduce, the story there is almost certainly that we found it and then the money told us not to bother with it because they think you’ll buy the product anyway.
It’s blatantly obvious and makes the game look like shit. This should not a low-prio bug, this should be a showstopper.
If you’ve got 8 minutes to spare, this video explains why it’s not that easy: Why Do We Ship Buggy Games? - A Look Behind the Scenes - Extra Credits
Yeah I don’t buy it. This is not a new engine they just developed, or some obscure complicated feature. This is one of the core functionalities of the game engine: render the game world onto the screen. And it’s an engine they developed in-house. They have been working on this game for years and years, and all that time no one noticed that output of the rendering engine is incorrect and everything looks washed out?
In the current state, the game should not have been released at all. If this is something that was fundamentally unfixable they should have pulled the plug and cancelled the game.
Is it possible you only watched the first half? From 3:30 onwards the video digs into why it’s hard to push a release date.
Yes I did. I’m not saying they should have pushed the release date but cancelled the release entirely. As in: never release it and refund everyone who preordered it.
tl;dw
HDR is broken (or all colour grading)
SDR is broken as well.