Q

Anonymous asked:

I've been playing Borderlands 3 and reading all the patch/hotfix notes as they come out, and it seems like there are a lot of bugs that should have been caught before being released, not just in the base game but also in some of the actual hotfixes and patches. Things like "can't mark as junk on ps4" or "guardian ranks don't work". In your experience, is this amount of bugs pretty common or more of an anomaly? I don't generally play games in the first few months so hard for me to judge. Thanks!

A

Here’s the dirty secret - it is almost certain that these bugs were caught before release. Most games have QA teams that are very good at their jobs. Experienced QA teams have found, identified, and written up detailed bug reports on thousands of bugs in each game they work on. Finding the bugs isn’t the problem. We know what they are. Getting enough development time to fix them all is, because we only have so many hours in the day. Just because we know the bug exists doesn’t mean that the fix is going to be easy, quick, or high priority.

The most important element of this is called triage. Not all bugs are created equal. Bugs that block the rest of the team from working must be fixed before bugs that are small inconveniences like not being able to mark X as junk on PS4. Bugs that crash the game are more important than “this vfx does not play under these specific circumstances”. Triage is the process by which we rank the importance of bugs. High priority bugs are fixed before lower priority bugs. For more info on how we go about actually fixing the bugs, [click here].

As you may have guessed, we can only fix bugs so quickly. Sometimes the person who is best suited to fix the bug is slammed with other bugs, sometimes that person is no longer on the team or with the company, sometimes another super high priority bug appears and cuts in line because it absolutely must be fixed right now. Any bugs on the list that fall below a certain cutoff (like “cosmetic bug that is an inconvenience but won’t stop players from being able to complete the game’s critical path” or “fix requires us to rewrite the entire system”) will remain dormant in the database while the higher priority bugs get fixed. Even with additional patches and such, we still have to balance deploying people to fix bugs with deploying those same people to make new stuff for the game. Do you want me to fix this batch of bugs or do you want me to build that sweet new combat subsystem? I don’t have time for both.

Whenever you see a lot of small but obvious and annoying bugs in a game at release, it generally means that the project probably had a lot of other, more important bugs that they had to fix first. Games that are more polished usually have fewer bugs to fix. We all wish we had the time to fix everything, but any launched game has thousands of unaddressed low-priority bugs in the backlog that we swear we’ll get to someday. We don’t have infinite time or budget and those of us doing the work need to be paid for our work. The game budget has to justify us spending resources to do things and that means making hard decisions on what gets fixed and what gets set aside for later (or ever) so we can spend on building something new and cool instead.

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