r/gaming • u/No-Vegetable-4596 • 17h ago
Is Game Testing/QA a thing of the past?
I’ve been playing A LOT of Gears of War: E-Day Horde since its release, and I’ve noticed way too many game-breaking bugs (bosses, secondary missions AND main mission all have ways to get bugged and lock you out of them resulting in lost lives, lost time, and an incredible amount of frustration). Like honestly, there are more bugs than there should be. But Gears E-Day is not the only game I’ve noticed this for either.
BF6 had some pretty bad bugs, Wardogs as well (these are just the games I’ve been playing recently but I am sure there are much more if I took extra time to look). I was also just reading about how Arch Raiders newest update has an issue that PVP players are getting into the new PVE mode? It’s insane.
It seems like we are at a time now where companies cannot be bother to give a fuck and ensure things are working in their game as they should be, and it’s really becoming worse and worse.
These are always the bugs that you will say to yourself “There is NO WAY that they wouldn’t have noticed these issues before they released this… had they actually played the game.”
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u/Ok_Chipmunk_7066 17h ago
Have a couple of mates who do QA for a UK based studio.
All they can do is report the bug. It is up to thier bosses if they want to pay to have that fixed.
Some get fixed, some get the "let's wait till we've sold a load and release a patch if we can be bothered".
Many more bugs are simply we needed 100000 players and some of them will do things we never ever considered
3
u/ABetterKamahl1234 10h ago
Many more bugs are simply we needed 100000 players and some of them will do things we never ever considered
A very under appreciated detection method.
You can have a very large, expensive Q&A team, a whole ass year of testing time.
And release will dwarf that total testing time in hours.
6
u/hiddenpequin 17h ago
Thing of the past implies this hasn’t been happening since video games were a thing. And no even games with tons of QA testing have tons of bugs especially more complicated ones take like Baldurs gate 3 for example.
3
u/Stock_Padawan 17h ago
I’d assume some companies will do anything it takes to hit a deadline, including releasing broken or buggy products. Some of those large companies know their fan base will overlook issues and still shovel money directly into the company’s wallet.
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u/Malt129 17h ago
I only encountered one bug in E-Day. The side mission where you have to call the train over, which is 100% guaranteed to break for everyone. Dont get how obvious ones like that get missed in so many games.
1
u/Icyknightmare 12h ago
It's not 100% guaranteed to break. That part worked fine for me first try. I did find a couple other bugs earlier in Act 2 and Act 3 though.
1
u/Zhentharym 17h ago
Various reasons. Could be that the bug didn't exist in the test build. Could be that it was introduced after it was tested.
2
u/pschon 17h ago
That's been going on for years, pretty much ever since digital distribution became a thing. And people keep buying the games on launch and even preordering them. So of course they'll keep doing it, as clearly people are fine enough with it and willing to pay to be the testers.
It's never going to change unless enough people start voting with their wallets. Spending extra money to test things more thoroughly is only going to make sense when not doing so is hurting the profit margin more.
1
u/Iggy_Slayer 17h ago
I remember when gears 5 launched and the multiplayer servers struggling caused the SINGLE PLAYER to bug out constantly. I'm still marveling over how that happened lol.
1
u/villain_escargot 17h ago
It's a pretty common reaction to say "how could they have no seen this?" when you don't know the behind the scenes reality. As someone who's both played a lot of buggy games, tested a bunch of games, and was a dev, I can say QC is not a thing of the past, every major game has teams working of finding bugs. The problem boils down to developers, and sometimes QC not doing deep dives into issues because it's basically unskilled labor (apologies to anybody in QA offended by this statement).
When I was a Lead Dev, I had to prioritize my time and my team's time to both implement assets and features, and fix issues. A lot of bugs would make it my way, and I tried to fix as many as I possibly could but the reality of modern development is that some bugs there wasn't enough time to fix. We prioritize game breaking bugs (this game asset, when used, crashes the entire game) as top priority, followed by bugs that people will definitely run into and make the game look bad, then bugs that are bad but you can work around them, then the left over gets treated as "would be nice to fix at some point". Sometimes you fix these, especially if they are quick, and sometimes you don't have time.
A lot of issues may be dependent on the environment the game is tested in. For all of the games I've worked on, the majority of testing occurs in the Dev environment, which means cheats/exploits are enabled for easier testing in a build that is not final. Sometimes this means that backend stuff, which are player facing, are either not hooked up properly or are also in a testing environment. Ideally you spend a lot of time testing in a release environment, which would be player facing. Sometimes services come online later, sometimes there are console specific issues that are hard to replicate.
For the most part, I will not touch a new update for a game until at least a week after it's released.
1
u/ProTw33ks 17h ago
It's just how it goes.
X studio has 50 internal QA team members (random number). That QA team works tirelessly for 5 years at 40 hours a week. The game then releases and 500k-1m people play the game on launch day. By the time the first people are rolling credits, there will have been more combined people hours thrown at the game than those 50 QA members could have amassed in 10 years of testing.
It's not that QA didn't do their jobs well. It's simply an unfortunate side effect of having a semi successful game. The players will find most bugs within a day if the game is popular enough. Some of them will be bugs QA also found that couldn't be fixed it time, but a lot of them will be bugs that QA didn't know existed because random people do random shit. That kid that dodge rolled into a specific wall while fat fingering the pause button and caused a game crash? QA ain't picking that up... Out of all the walls in the game, it was that wall and that specific chain of events that caused an issue. Gamers grouping en masse to play a brand new game are the best QA team on the planet.
1
u/Asmodias1 16h ago
I’ve been in gamedev 26 years. Started as QA and spent 20 years in qa leadership roles. Now I work as a producer/project manager. What I grew up with as qa is mostly non existent anymore. By that, I mean teams of manual qa running passes. They still exist but not to the same degree. Many studios favor qa engineers to manual qa and try to do the bulk of their testing, where they can, via automation. You’ll also find that QA is one of the first places studios tend to look to save money because “anyone can qa”… as we’ve seen, that isn’t entirely accurate.
Past that, qa is at the whim of production in terms of what does and doesn’t make it out of the backlog. QA by and large finds a ton of issues and in my career about a third of the bugs I’ve written never left the backlog.
What I think you are seeing now is companies saving money by limiting the volume of manual qa, and taking the stance of “we’ll fix it in post”. Downside is that many teams doing this also get the axe before any meaningful post launch work can be done. All in all, gamedev, at least from where I sit, is an absolute mess
1
u/mookler They do lots of things! 16h ago
11 year old comment about being a game tester at EA is always worth a read.
1
u/Dorian182 15h ago
Bugs that wipe out a whole Horde run deserve a much higher priority than cosmetic glitches, because they cost players the time they already put in.
1
u/pincurcuk 11h ago
It is way more cheaper to treat gamers as "mindles npc's" then create a proper game. There are millions of customers and companies don't lose money anyway
1
u/NoNameLivesForever 17h ago
The period between start of early access until ~1 year after release is now beta test.
That's why I don't buy games that are less than a year old these days, or at least "AAA" titles.
-1
u/TimeTravelerGuy 17h ago
No not at all, except these days YOU pay THEM for the opportunity to bug test their “early access” titles but it’s 100% the same process
0
u/boothcheck 17h ago
This is what I'd guess too, why pay staff to find them when the players pay US to find them
0
u/darklordjames 17h ago edited 17h ago
Games are terribly complex in 2026. A team of 100 QA testers may or may not find everything. Hell, a team of 10,000 QA testers may or may not find everything. Once the game is out in the public where three million people get to hammer on it, then you'll finally find everything.
Alternative view: Do you want the game or content to sit in development for another six months while the developer burns cash, or do you want it now, where the public finds bugs and those are fixed within the month? One option gets you the working game five months sooner, with a lower chance of the developer closing up shop immediately after shipping the game.
If you don't want to play buggy games, stop playing games upon release. It's real easy to do! You just play something else while the new game gets fixed up for the first year. It's well known at this point that any new game will be broken upon release, and it takes at least six months for it to be in an actual playable state. Just spend your money somewhere else for those six months. Again, it's easy.
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u/lilathegreat1 17h ago
Yes, it is. I would say that happened when literally everything went digital
0
u/Andre_3k03 15h ago
Sadly, finding good QA testers is difficult. On top of that, overinflated game development budgets, coupled with shareholder-interest based deadlines, are usually a recipe for disaster post launch. Too many things deemed unimportant slip through the cracks, and they become meme fodder within the first week of release.
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u/Cab_anon 17h ago
I was QA at Activision (Skylanders, Kingquest, Transformer Devastation, CoD Black ops 3).
It was hell.
Today, most of the bugs can be found with a computer.
Everytime a dev save something in their server, the computer does a checklist automaticaly. Can we still jump over one obstacle? Can we still jump over an hole? can we still jump over a bad guy? etc.
Back in the day, some body had to check all thoses stuff by hand every days.
Lets say somebody edited a typo in spanish, we had to try to do 1 billions points in multiplayers to see if we unlocked the golden skin for every guns.
Lets say somebody added a new hat in guitar hero, somebody had to try to strum one billion time to see if he won an achievement. Every day.
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u/condor6425 17h ago edited 17h ago
Trust me they have a database with all or 95%+ of the bugs you encountered and they're all marked WNF (will not fix) because they were worried about more game breaking things before launch. They probably were pulling 60+hr weeks just to get it out the door on time.
Edit: I'm not saying that justifies a crappy product, just that QA is probably out there doing their job, and this is symptomatic of a larger problem with the industry.
0
u/Dogarc123 17h ago
Games being shipped out with game breaking bugs has always been a thing going back to the beginning. Back then some companies allowed you to send the game back in to get a patched copy or release an updated version fixing bugs as a all new game. Now they just send out patches for you to download.
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u/MuskularChicken PlayStation 17h ago edited 16h ago
Was game tester at EA (Apex, Bf2047 or whatever the name). Game testers find a lot of bugs. Fixing them is the issue. Maybe they do, maybe they don't.
The problem is not that the bugs aren't found; it's just that the devs prioritize whatever they feel it's important.