DICE: “All Games Ship With Small Bugs”

Tuffcub 62 Comments

In a rather candid interview executive producer of Battlefield 3 Patrick Bach has said that developers ignore certain bugs in games.

Just fixing bugs doesn’t make a great game. All games ship with small bugs that developers more or less deliberately have chosen to ignore. The big question is which bugs you choose to fix.

Whilst the news that games ship with bugs is not a surprise, the fact that developers ‘deliberately ignore’ them is.

Day one patches are the rule rather than the exception these days leading many to ask why developers do not delay the game by a few weeks and fix all the problems before the game ships.

Battlefield 3 hits the shelves on October 25th and DICE are still hard at work tweaking the final product, stating that they ‘couldn’t release the game today.’

Source: Wall Street Journal

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62 Comments

  1. There are minor bugs, then there’s Dead Island and Fallout New Vegas!!

  2. He’s just stating the obvious. All software contains bugs, and games are no different. Even after patches and updates, software will contain bugs. There is no way around it. The only thing is how many bugs are frequent and critical enough to warrant spending time and money on fixing. I would absolutely prefer to wait a little longer for a less bug-ridden game, but expecting any software product to not contain bugs is ludicrous.

    • But would you not agree you should fix all the bugs you are aware of before you ship. Fixing new bugs afterwards is fine, but shipping a bug filled product..?

      • That is a good point they should fix the problems they know are there

      • If the known bugs are important enough to warrant taking time away from working on something else to fix them, then yes. I most certainly prefer games as (seemingly) bug-free as can be. The problem is that if developers tried to fix all known bugs, even those that are infrequent or not critical, we would be facing very long development times with very little apparent trade-off.

  3. “Whilst the news that games ship with bugs is not a surprise, the fact that developers ‘deliberately ignore’ them is.”

    Actually, no, not even in the slightest. It’s called cost benefit analysis. When a bug is found it’s reviewed and weighted against the time it would take to fix versus the impact of not fixing it.

    It’s very common to identify a bug, determine that the time it would take to fix it isn’t warranted against the impact to the user and to leave the bug in the software.

    There is no such thing as bug-less software. If a developer had to release bug-less code no game would ever be released.

    Finally, Bach also says “small bugs”. He didn’t say Show-stoppers aren’t fixed. He didn’t say Critical bugs are being ignored. He didn’t even say Major bugs are being left in. Small bugs. Small. Minor stuff.

    • Spot on.

    • Exactly, no matter how much a game could be delayed there will always be bugs. Its the nature of software and fixing a “small bug” could lead to others cropping up in the code. So I barely even class this as news.

    • Yep, exactly. The word “ignore” was very bad choice of words from Patrick Bach.

      • Exactly, this could be misinterpreted as being negligent, which people paying for a product might be annoyed about!

        Perhaps he could have said large bugs take priority, blah blah blah

    • I’m not totally surpirsed that developers ignore them for the resson you’ve stated. I would say that if it’s known about then it’s up to them to fix it, no matter how small.
      What they should be aiming for, I think, is the game to be stable for the purpose it was intended. Bug testing should be for unexpected results of inputs and actions that won’t take place during the course of normal use.

  4. I’ve been enjoying the BF3 beta, although I have to laugh at how I frequently disappear under the grass. At one stage half of me was sticking out of the ground.

  5. i don’t know, anybody who has played more than a handful of games in the last few years probably wouldn’t be surprised to hear developers ignore bugs sometimes.

    i’m really not sure what they’re trying to say here.
    are they just making excuses in advance?

    are they saying that if there are bugs, they didn’t get missed they just got ignored?
    i’m not sure if that’s better than them just not finding them.

  6. The first Infomous game had quite a few bugs, Cole standing with one leg inside of a building or Jumping higher than a ledge but not grabbing it. It was however an amazing title and so much fun.

    I think that if a game is fun enough, you can overlook a few bugs. It’s when the game is already poor that bugs drag it down further.

  7. I read all of that as “We don’t want to spend time making it better because we won’t be able to compete with MW3 if we delay it” Which is true. A 4 weeks later than planned release date could really kill it. But have these bugs not being fixed, already killed it? Discuss.

  8. Based on what I’ve played in the beta, there are a lot of bugs, and there’s going to be quite a few left in it. There’s also some horrible gameplay mechanics, prone and torchlights FFS!

    • I hate those lights. Why give them effect of a flashbang? Everyone is using it. Not to mention that the reflection of the scopes doesn’t seem to work. And i swear the hit detection is a bit off sometimes as i shot someone right in front of me with a freaking shotgun and it did naff all. It’s a shotgun! It should kill anyone at close range combat.

      Is it me or does the cover do naff all as i have been killed plenty of times by hiding behind cover. I agree with Gazzagb. At least you can’t call a nuke and abuse it by killing each other untill the required killstreak is acheived in BF3. ;)

      • I actually found i did better without the flashlight on, as i could move around more stealthily & take people out without them realising.

        Oh & yes steve, cover will generally do naff all, as BF3 features destructible environments. Cover doesn’t remain cover for very long in Battlefield.

      • Lol yeah DICE said that the damage bug is a known issue that will be fixed for release.

  9. Pretty rich coming from Dice. BF1943 still freezes my PS3 quite easily. Bad Company 2 is laden with bugs and hasn’t seen an update in like a year. Their players database is down every other week, resulting in having to play as a Level 1 without perks and basic weapons.
    This article just proves what I suspected all along, Dice/EA don’t really care about the gamers experience. And they would only fix a game if it got really bad press.

    • Never had any problems with BF 1943…

  10. “…leading many to ask why developers do not delay the game by a few weeks…”
    I guess that’s a lot easier said than done. There are schedules and contracts with other businesses like the DVD/Blu-ray manufacturing plants or the retailers. Missing a certain milestone in the development process will warrant a delay of the scheduled release, but minor bug fixes most probably not.

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