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. I’ve heard more promising statements…

  2. 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.

    So in other words, they are rushing it to get it out before Call of Duty? no?

    • Exactly, the first one released will definitely take a small slice out ot the others profits, it wont be a game changer, but will be noticed i think!

    • or you could read the article

      • I did. im talking about the statement i quoted. They say they wouldnt realease it today. theyve got a month to finish what they can. why the rush? Nexf time, read what i said. woodsy didnt seem to struggle

      • “When you make a game you don’t have it shippable every day, and just add on pieces to make it better. At times the game is literally unassembled into various pieces. And that is a hard sell to the executives, who would like the game to be shippable every day and just have us keeping improving it until the day we reach deadline.”

        maybe just get better at reading

      • so my point stands. ea are rushing and putting pressure on dice to get the game out before cod. if cod wasn’t a factor, it would have been delayed by now.

        stop being a dick

      • Calling you out on your unsupported assertion is not being a dick. I’m not even attributing bias to it: it’s clear you actually don’t understand what they have said in the interview. Which is this: the game couldn’t be shipped because it is in pieces. It’s not in pieces because CoD comes out on the Nth, it’s in pieces because that’s how game development works. How you are reading politics into that statement I have no idea.
        It’s pretty obvious marketing decisions have been made with regards to release dates and CoD, but that’s got nothing to do with the developers being hard at work up to release: every group of people making a game with a published release date will be working right up til the deadline.
        I expect illinformed comments when I go to Kotaku, not here on TSA.

    • Yes, spot on.

      It must be going gold extremely shortly and off to the disc production factories.

      I’d expect weeks of post-release patches, which to be fair even CoD gets as people exploit loopholes not revealed to them in their internal betas.

      It’s a shame the realities of making money drive publishers to force devs to treat their paying customers (and in many cases, fans) like this.

      F##kers

  3. still not got past the ea log on screen yet on my xbox. . will try ps3 demo today hopefully.

    • when i first booted it up yesterday, it crashed my ps3 twice. then 5 times it stayed on the menu screen and wouldnt load, It then eventually decided to load. Stick with it, you will get in lol

    • to be honest, it is a huge letdown, I can’t even imagine how vehicles are going to be in the game, when basic gun fighting doesn’t even work…I know it’s still a beta, but at this late stage I’m worried that not much will change, it’s a major step backwards from BFBC 1 & 2, I was happy to finally use prone…only to go through the floor ;)

      it just doesn’t look good…plus it feels like you are running in a pool of mud, then you get hit by a bullet and you start to drift until you collapse…I really hope this is a proper beta and not one of those demo/betas of the final product.

  4. That is lazy! NO! Bad Company!

    I’m starting to get fed up with the developers being half arsed when developing their games. Either code it right(i understand that some engines are hard to code for) or delay the game so that you can patch the bugs. But no, let ship out a game with bugs in so that we can patch it once we can be bothered to.

    Not even Bethesade did this and they are known for buggy games(Mainly due to the gamebryo engine). I’ll wait for the game to be completely patched before getting it. That and the lack of gaming funds.

    • “Bethesade” made me think of Lucozade and confused me there for a second. If only you could patch the comment to fix the bugs in it ay, instead of being lazy and leaving it full of them :P (i’m joking of course but you get my point…).

      • Says the man who is known for making mistakes and usually gets picked up on it by Teffers. ;)

      • But I’m not complaining about “lazy devs” am I :P

      • No but you do cause riots on twitter. ;)

        It seems a bit lazy not to fix all the bugs that they know about atm. :-/

      • I think until we have all made a game we cant complain :P Despite any bugs we all manage to enjoy these games. Fallout was one of my favourite games, and possibly the buggiest ive ever owned. =)

  5. well i guess that makes sense. i’d rather work out which bugs cause the most harm and work on those than try to get rid of all the small ones that don’t effect the game too bad

  6. As a programmer myself I emphasize with his statement. You have to draw a line on what is “good enough”. Although this sounds lazy or whatever the truth is that BETA testing cannot identify all bugs. Only by mass release can they fully test it and then concentrate on the bugs.

    This however does not mean I find a product such as dead island acceptable. The game was in lots of ways broken. From previous dice releases im sure it will be a great product and well supported.

    • emphasize – empathize.

      Might wanna patch that, or was it close enough …. ;)

    • Ignoring a bug like the infamous Animus Glitch (which occurred in both AC2 and Brotherhood) is not “good enough” when you know it’s sure to break your game at release time.

  7. Patches are getting very tiring now. When I buy a new game, such as I did with F1 2011, I didn’t expect I’d have to wait over 25 minutes for the game to download what was a tiny patch. I had Nascar 2011 imported this week and I had to leave the game there for three hours to download a 455MB patch. It’s like going “yeah, we’ve made mistakes but we’ll just agonise you longer hahaha”. Ignoring bugs on purpose is a shame but if they are flukey things that don’t happen often then I can understand. If they break the core gameplay then more fool them.

  8. Based on the beta, they won’t have the time to fix all these bugs so we can expect to have some left in! Yay!

    • Which they SHOULD release a patch for..

  9. A little worrying. If you were to play the PS3 beta and think this was the final build, I probably wouldn’t buy it. Thank god for patches in that case. The thing is, I would rather them push it back, release the game without the bugs and not have to constantly download patches to fix things.

  10. Well it’s understandable that there are few bugs in games but the amount of bugs some games have had these days is just ridiculous a game in that state would never get out of my company if i had a company that is :D

    • The later, describes bf3 (PS3) perfectly atm.

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