[TRENCHES] Thursday, March 7, 2013 - Cranial
LegionPerseus VeilRegistered User, Moderator, Penny Arcade Staff, Vanilla Staff vanilla
Cranial
http://trenchescomic.com/comic/post/cranial
The first cracks.
AnonymousI had only been a tester for a few months, so the shine was still in my eyes. The heart beating in my chest wasn’t yet a blackened thudding thing pumping coffee and cynicism. My skin had not yet gone London Level pale from the many hours confined in the testing bay colloquially referred to as “The Dungeon”.
Like Pandora’s box, I still had hope.
So it was to my joy and delight that I learned I was to be sent to test “on site” at an actual developer’s HQ several states away from the Publisher I actually worked at. I hadn’t yet learned that only a fool wanted these assignments.
For a while you often made a lot of extra cash, since food and accommodations were comped, and you put in as much overtime as the developers during crunch. You were also quickly forgotten when it came time for review. For all your inattentive manager knew, you might have been on call for the time you were gone. Even if HE was the one who sent you on the trip in the first place!
Soon I was sent on my first real business trip! So exciting! I even had a traveling buddy; another junior tester, though my senior in actual age. At first I wondered what could lead a 38 year-old to enter this profession. By the end of the trip I found out; really shitty divorce settlements.
When we arrived, it was quickly discovered that the developers didn’t know know what to do with us, who we were, or why we were there. But they did know to be on guard. We were quickly introduced to the FOUNDER and CEO of the studio, who expressed his confusion in as polite and fearful a manner as possible while my traveling buddy and I stared at each other in disbelief.
“Man, these developers must really respect the common tester!” I thought.
Alas, but no. It had just been poor communication. Hasty emails had been sent a week prior with crunch rearing its ugly head, and all they knew was that the publisher that had purchased them only a year or so prior was sending two of its number to the relative safety of their offices to ensure that they met their deadline.
When he learned that they had just been sent extra help rather than auditors, the tense smile on the FOUNDER and CEO of the studio broke into a relieved mask of pleasant superiority. He soon sent us to an underling and we soon never saw him again.
But before the underling got there and took me into my first foray into overtime hell (where I learned that there are in fact 36 hours in a working day, you just don’t see the extra 12 until your eyes bleed a specific mixture of despair and deprivation) an impromptu meeting occurred with other key members of the senior staff barging into the FOUNDER and CEO’s office.
Once it was explained that we were testers not spies, my traveling companion and I were quickly ignored as the dev-team’s staff complained about the early reviews coming out for the PC version of the game we were all working on. The total anonymity of my status allowed me to see a side of a development team I thought impossible before.
They were hurt that a publication they had invited to preview the game early had the gall to call their game “run of the mill”, and “mediocre”, which surprised me as I didn’t realize developers took these reviews so personally. It made sense though, this was a project these folks had spent years of their lives making getting torn to shreds in the few minutes it took to write a few paragraphs. Which is probably why they acted like petulant children, promising revenge by vowing to never give an exclusive to these folks ever again.
But more importantly, they proved to be either severely lacking in taste or delusional. Because the fact of the matter was, the review was right.
Perhaps because I was new to the industry, I still retained some semblance of what made a game good, and the game I had been playing over the last few months, the game I had been sent so far to work on, could easily be called “mediocre”, if you were being nice about it.
The more commonly used words were"garbage”,”****-pile” and several combinations therein, as it was one of the most rehashed concepts ever done in as generic a method possible. It reinvented no wheels, had nothing to say, and its “plot twist”, as ineffectual as it ended up, was touted on the back of the damn box.It was the day I learned directly that developers are only human, and were all too capable of losing their objectivity. That spending two years struggling just to get a game out the door under grueling conditions made you forget that perhaps you should occasionally keep a few villagers on hand to tell you that you’re naked.
It was the day I learned HOW bad games get made even when the people making them are all otherwise fine, talented folks.
It was the day that the first cracks appeared in my sense of hope.
It took about a year before it crumbled entirely, but then, I was always an optimist.
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The story, by Trenches!Story standards, is pretty average.
Wait, what Kingdom of Amalur thing? - Ooh i need to play that game again.
I liked the story. Really well written. Reminded me a lot of my first jobs. When i still believed err.. lets just say a lot of things.
Wait, can you still play Kingdom? I thought the game required servers to play even though it was a single player RPG. I should fire it up sometime. Oooh, imagine the new SimCity not being playable because EA went out of business. Oh man, that would be just ridiculous. Single player games should not require access to some server, man.
It doesn't fit though, because by most accounts, they had a lot of work done on Project Copernicus. Todd McFarlane recently said in an interview that the game was nearly complete.
http://youtu.be/Mgm8c8UCqqg?t=5m18s
Certainly, from a graphics angle, they had a lot of assets already in game, as this fly-through shows:
A few gameplay videos:
And a trailer for the game:
Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning doesn't require server access at all. New copies came with an "online pass," but that was to unlock some additional missions, not to play the basic game.
Man, chocolate tester sounds like the best job ever. Then again it's probably grueling 36 hour days being force fed the worst sub-chocolate imaginable.
We didn't really see much of the devs (even with Q's transition there) in season 1, so I don't think they would have the expectation that they should see devs in the first place.
Although the lack of polish in the game might lead Cora to WANT to see devs, just to make sure they actually do exist, granted.
kingworkscreative.com
kingworkscreative.blogspot.com
If they brought that up it'd be hilarious.
yeah I started playing it again last week. It played entirely locally, though it does authenticate with your EA account when you start it up.
It's explicitly a comic that is solely about QA.
Isn't that basically describing Better Off Ted?
Isn't that basically describing Better Off Ted?[/quote]
Better Off Ted is kind of a microcosm of a larger company. You have senior management, management, testing, and engineering all represented.
[/quote]
Would The IT Crowd be a valid example of a show that focuses almost exclusively on one department of a company?
The IT Crowd oscillated a bit between just the IT department and the top brass, which is not too dissimilar to what is happening in this comic (with QA standing in for IT, and Q being the top brass).
30 Rock focused myopically on one sketch comedy show, even though Jack Donaghy was head of all of NBC.
I'd watch the shit out of Nasa Janitor show. Make it like Scrubs but at Nasa and with janitors.
I am now penning a "nasa janitor (c) " tv series script thanks
*me deliberately sticks a penny in a sliding door to screw over some starting engineer*