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Trenches: August 18, 2011
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08/18/2011 - AnonymousShare:Share On TwitterShare On Facebook
Suppose you found a bug in a game that rendered a console unplayable? Suppose it was something akin to the original Myth II Uninstall problem where it basically formatted your hard drive, only worse?
There was a game that was released in the last 10 years that had a peculiar issue toward the end where you could crash the title just before one of the end bosses by doing a manual save just as it was autosaving.
If you did, it caused the console kernel to overwrite itself, rendering the entire unit non-functional.
After causing this to happen once, I was asked to replicate the issue in front of people who made a lot more money than I did. After sixteen hours of play, I, again, saved while the game was autosaving, and watched with everyone else in the room as the screen turned black and the console shut down. Attempting to boot it up didn’t even result in an error screen, it would just power on and then shut back down.
(To me) “You can do this every time?”
“If I want to, yeah.”
(To a marketing guy) “How long until we’re supposed to ship?”
“We’re supposed to go gold in a week.”
(To a developer) “How long would this take to fix?”
“We’ll have to rewrite the entire file structure. Weeks, at least. Probably months.”
The game shipped.
I got fired.
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Also: I always wondered why topics about PA comics were in the 'off-topic' forums. Took me forever to find the comic thread the first time I visited here. horrah for a forum regarding PA content in the 'on-topic' forums!
I feel like theres some good potential here, but at 3/4 panels a day twice a week it's gonna take a while.
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Testing is an inherently depressing, soul crushing job. If you get on a game for a series you love you drew the worst straw, because after a week you will never want to see any of them ever again.
"I found a bug, they fixed it, it didn't show up again. I got on the next project once this one finished." Is about the happiest a story can be, unfortunately.
They didn't realease the name of the game, since many stories like this are technically NDA violations. As such, they anonomize the names and the games/companies involved.
This is not necessarily true.
I tested Mass Effect 1 from hell to breakfast (seven months), and when the game came out I played through it like eight times.
Some of the games I've worked on, yes, I never wanted to see them again because they inspire rage, but I've usually been able to separate testing (work) from playing (fun!).
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Though I love the story about when they added their first version of the spotting system to Bad Company 2.
Spotting lets you hit Q when aiming at someone and then everyone on your team will see a triangle over that guy for a few seconds, through walls and everything.
They needed a control group. So they set one of their managers to "always spotted".
Of course, they didn't tell him about it.
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A little bit this. There's also, at least sometmes, the feeling that everything turned out alright when you finally deploy the thing you've been looking at for <days/weeks/months/years> into Production. Mind you, thatmoment of Prod signoff is also where the ice goes down your spine because, you know, if it all goes wrong, you were the one who signed it off.
I'm not sure I'd agree with Aistan that QA is inherently a soul crushing job - my lack of soul is entirely incidental. On the other hand, depending on where you are, there can be a lot of regression (test the same stuff over and over). I think the field is a little less prone to that these days, with the emergence of Agile (and Agile-ish), because QA is usually too busy working on the 'new' to end up drowning in the 'old' - though that carries its own risks as well.
On the other hand, I can imagine that signing up to do game testing, with the expectation that you'll be playing games al day and having fun, can cause real shock to the system when those expectations are subverted. Work is work, fun is fun - if you can make the two meet up, that's a bonus, but I suspect more than a few people starting out got a shock when they first heard "Deliverables" in the context of "We are here to make some money off this game. You are here to help."...
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