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The Urban Legend of Quality AssuranceJan 21 '03 Write an essay on this topic.
Popular Products in PlayStation 2 Games
The Bottom Line Don't buy products that are bugged or require a patch, and if you review these products, lower their marks according to their need for a patch at release.
It’s the process that plagues almost every gamer who dares to use their computer to play a game, be it an Apple or a Windows machine. One goes and buys what looks like a decent game, brings it home, only to find a world of problems. Sometimes the game won’t install due to a bad installer, sometimes it will install wrong and hours are spent to correct this through notepad, and sometimes the game installs fine but will not play for love or money. The gamer is then forced to spend every waking hour browsing almost every technical support web site for the game they can find (which is probably sparse if the game is brand new), just to correct the problems or find out when a patch is coming out to fix the problems. If it sounds familiar, it’s because it really should. It’s a process that happens whenever a new game is releases, and it’s ridiculous. ‘Quality Assurance’ is the name of the group of people whose sole purpose in life at a developer and/or a publisher is to review the product for hours and days on end to accomplish their job. That job is to find defects, bugs, and mistakes that have slipped into the product before it ships out to the public. Obviously, this is no easy task as literally thousands of different system types, configurations, and play styles have to be tested, each feature needs to be used in millions of ways (half of which the coders probably did not intend), and games need to be crashed so they can find out why it happened and how to prevent it. However, things rarely work as they should, for multiple reasons. One of those reasons is budget. Usually, in the making of a game, a developer is given only so many dollars to make the game and to make it work. That means deadlines have to be met very strictly and every corner needs to be cut if possible. One big corner is Quality Assurance, a department whose purpose is almost parallel to increasing how much time and money it takes to develop a game. Early on, cutting this corner was not a possibility as cutting it would mean the end product sent to users would be a bug-filled nightmare that no one would buy. However, during the 1990’s, a new medium was delivered into main stream, and with its introduction came a solution to the corner. The internet, born of geek dreams and military skepticism, was a medium that allowed almost everybody to access the same resources and download files, be those pictures, stories, or even patches. Patches existed before the internet was entirely popular, however, they were limited. Games were large affairs, often requiring multiple floppy disks, sometimes even CD’s, and their patches would be a few hundred kilobytes in size. This was unacceptable to a public that accessed the internet at a speed a mere fraction of what a dial-up user is capable of today and were billed for their online time by the hour. To ask them to download a patch for a game that was flawed or improperly tested was an outrage, for in essence they were paying to fix a game they already bought and had been supposedly tested and worked. But things changed, as things always do, and the internet became larger as connection speeds grew faster, cheaper, and more common. Suddenly, it was no big deal to download a patch. And while early on this was not abused, in the past two or three years, it has become an outrage of epidemic proportions. Developers and publishers have found they don’t have to delay a product forever to get it right. They had the biggest QA department ever available to them, the public. The public buys the game, then either report via a tool, their bulletin boards, or through a web form what is wrong and their system configuration. Using that data, a development team that was once shackled by a tight production budget can easily slam out a patch within a week, using the money garnered from sales, and hence is the final corner cut. It’d be lying to say every developer/publisher does this, but it would also be lying to say it is a rare occurrence. The rare occurrence is the game that is released that does not require a patch just to play it when it is first released at retail. Some will argue this is to foil software pirates, although this is a moot argument, as most pirate groups are able to crack patches and subsequent updates to games they obtain (however, the false security of CD protection and other anti-pirate methods is an argument for later). Others will argue it’s a fact of life in the modern age of computing where there are so many different systems available, but even that is moot, for more often than not the problems occur with the average user’s system using a popular hardware setup. In the end, there is no excuse to release a game that requires a patch almost immediately. There should of never been releases like ‘Pools of Radiance’ (Ubi Soft, suffered from a crippling amount of bugs at release), and popular titles such as ‘Neverwinter Nights’ (Bioware, required a patch to fix early mission errors that crippled it), ‘SimCity 4’ (Maxis, suffers from incomplete features and some crippling bugs), ‘Neocron’ (Reakktor, multiple patches after release to make it playable), and ‘Anarchy Online’ (Funcom, still buggy after nearly a year and a half). Yes, two of those are MMOG (Massively Multiplayer Online) games, however, they are held to the same standards as any other product. The solution lies within the gaming public to help solve the problem of poor quality product releases. Some of it is already practiced, more through caution than through any organized action. The keys lie within denying game developers/publishers what they want after release, which are high marks for their games and excellent sales. The public can avoid buying games until two to three weeks after release and gaming media outlets (PC Gamer, Gamespy, Gamespot, GMR) should drastically lower scores for games that do not play well (if at all) out of the box. By combining both methods, the message that the gaming public will no longer stand paying to be the Quality Assurance team it’s obvious they don’t want to pay for… but will when the message starts impacting their wallets.  |
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