Do gamers expect a master piece everytime?

[Besty]

This!! I ran into this bug as I tried to push past Far Cry 2's many other flaws and finish the damn thing... Suffice to say I never bothered to replay the entire game just to get past it. I'm glad Far Cry 3 doesn't seem as shoddy (so far!)

I would not hold your breath.

I decided to give FC3 a whirl after the great reviews and yes it is awesome in its scope but it is a bug riddled POS and there is a major bug about 20% of the way into the game which prevents me from continuing (cannot travel to Badtown). Going to ask for a refund (hah).

A real shame as it is the game that Crysis 3 should have been.

Mark of the Ninja now, that is a masterpiece in pretty much all respects (art, design, sound, gameplay).

 

[Divinious]

I guess they need some method of determining when to stop testing.

A great way of knowing when to stop testing for bugs is when there are'nt any coming up in the testing anymore.
I'm not ragging on you I promise, I just think we as gamers in general are too forgiving of devs/publishers, personally I get stung once I'm going to think long & hard the next time they release a game, & by the same sentiment if I get a great product that I feel has been brought to a reasonable standard on release I'm more likley to risk a pre-order on the next game.

 

[uncle_rufus]

I would not hold your breath.
I decided to give FC3 a whirl after the great reviews and yes it is awesome in its scope but it is a bug riddled POS and there is a major bug about 20% of the way into the game which prevents me from continuing (cannot travel to Badtown). Going to ask for a refund (hah).

That sucks!!! I'm at about 83% and haven't had any problems at all so far (mind you I'll be nervous around the 88% mark )... Just goes to show how different the same game can run for different people

A great way of knowing when to stop testing for bugs is when there are'nt any coming up in the testing anymore.
I'm not ragging on you I promise, I just think we as gamers in general are too forgiving of devs/publishers, personally I get stung once I'm going to think long & hard the next time they release a game, & by the same sentiment if I get a great product that I feel has been brought to a reasonable standard on release I'm more likley to risk a pre-order on the next game.

Not to worry, nothing like a healthy debate! And as I said I do agree that ultimately it's a crazy way to determine when a game is ready to ship... At the same time though how do they know when no more bugs are coming up? If no tester reports a bug for 3 days is that good enough? 4 days? 5? Remember that the "90%" is based only on an estimate of the number of bugs - in some cases they might stop finding bugs (or so they think) before reaching this number (or they might hit 90% and stop but really they've not found anything close 90% of the bugs). Playing devils advocate a little (I do believe that for the millions they make they can afford to invest in more thorough methods), but testing is quite a complicated process for these massive titles (and very, very boring at times I might add )

 

[HangTime]

A great way of knowing when to stop testing for bugs is when there are'nt any coming up in the testing anymore.

The thing is to apply a principle like that, you'd have to have a completely stable product and I bet developers are making tweaks quite late in the day.

Some years ago I worked as a test lead (albeit commercial sector not gaming) and one of the things you are taught from a theory perspective is that you will never find all the bugs.

Also something that is commonly overlooked is the cost of testing and indeed fixing bugs, what a lot of people struggle to get to grips with is the fact that the majority of software developers will ship software with known bugs because fixing them either:

1) Introduces a significant amount of risk relative to perceived benefit of fixing the bug
2) Costs too much to fix and retest
3) Opportunity cost i.e. a lot of the time senior stakeholders want their developers implementing new features (or indeed working on something else entirely). In other words they add more value by creating something new (lets say, adding a new weapon) than fixing a bug (lets say, an animation glitch in an existing weapon).