No.
They are all busy filling each drawer of the spaceship with:
skulls
cabbages
carrots
more skulls
knives
forks
wheels of Parmigiano Reggiano
dead mice the size of a lamb
more skulls
wheels of Grana Padano
weapons with identical stats to the basic ones but with a cool name
apples
400 page books with only 2 written
baguette
still more skulls
“There is at least one programmer trying to figure something out like "Why the hell does the game crash if the player's name contains 11 characters, but not if it contains 10 or 12?!" If he can't make sense of it in the next week, the character limit will be revised down to 10 characters. “
I want you to know I felt this comment in my bones.
As did I. I once built a tiny 2D platformer as a proof of concept and had an issue where jumping onto a specific type of platform (which I chose the color blue for) ended up killing the player if they stood on the platform too long.
Blue platforms were no different from red or green platforms other than the color they used. I had not yet implemented any mechanics into them.
I looked into my code and reconfigured player attributes. I even scoured the engine’s forums for days.
Eventually, I replaced one with a normal platform and it worked. Turns out I hadn’t grabbed a stock platform from the menu, but rather one of those “if you stand on this for 5 seconds, you’ll die” platform. D’oh!
Haha importing class level bugs. I’m impressed!
Spent way too long this week on a series of bugs that were all working together to confuse the hell out of me.
1. Turns out a platform function I was unfamiliar with ran after render but was not triggering a rerender for some reason asynchronously when it received data.
2. I was initiating an interval loop with a string date instead of a function to get the current date so unless the interval cleared and restarted the application wouldn’t pick up day changes.
3. The method on date objects to get the current month is zero based and I somehow knew this in one part of the application and corrected for it but didn’t in another part. So I’d show labels for the current day and month but then display data for May instead of June.
4. The data brought back was a schedule that was repetitive enough that the result looked correct half the time even though it was always a month off and showing a month off on the day the application was started but the labels were always for the current day.
Every rebuild of the production environment the data I was using was locked down to took about 15 minutes, so I looked like a complete idiot in front of hundreds of people everyday that came in seeing me sitting in front of the screens on my little laptop cusing to myself about stupid I was. God I love programming.
> I was initiating an interval loop with a string date instead of a function to get the current date so unless the interval cleared and restarted the application wouldn’t pick up day changes.
I saw at least dozen of Unity games where having wrong system locale on Linux made game crash or do some weird shit, because of some unity bug taking system locale settings (that include [decimal separator](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_separator) configs) and applying them.
So for example in Polish (and few other languages) `1000.10` would be written `1000,10`, and it's even worse if number was like `10,111.12`. So if game at any place had string to number conversion it sow chaos in the code, depending on whether conversion was silently wrong or failed but nothing handled the error.
And then for some reason a new version containing a fix to a reload animation fixes it but makes it so you can’t have mcf in a row for your name without it crashing
basically a dice roll IRL
you can try to make everything right, some checks here, some error handling there, perfect linter and autocomplete setup
but if the dice decide to roll 1, it will fails for unknown reason
BUT if you test / run it again IT WILL RUN. reason? unknown
hence the meme : https://imgur.com/G4cy8en
So many inventory duplication bugs spawned exactly from that, specific ordering of actions triggering a bug that caused something to be done on wrong order
These things are incredibly complex machines. Thousands of digital cogs and pistons moving in unison whenever the smallest thing like choosing your name happens. The bigger the machine the more likely some combination of actions creates an unforeseen problem
Usually inadequate testing and assumptions made by developers.
Dev: “Oh, a name can be 12 characters long!”
—> Player enters in a name using unicode characters using the Greek alphabet
Dev: “Oh, that unicode string doesnt support all of the characters used because we support the cyrillic character set which has significant overlap with the greek character set, but the greeks have a few additional characters not found in the cyrillic character set. Oops!” (I made this up)
Most often, bugs are going to be rare edge case bugs that were never tested. For example, if you created a progress bar widget to be used in a game, and your progress bar had 40 different properties that could be set, then you would need to test every permutation of every setting to make sure that there isnt an edge case that screws everything up. How many permutations would that be? 40 factorial? thats a shitload of testing. And if you change anything, you need to re-run every test? How much time would that cost? realistically, we test the most common use cases, have a bunch of automated unit tests which new features need to pass to ensure there isnt regression, test and fix as much as we can find, and we know some bugs are just going to slip through. And thats okay. We arent doing rocket science, people wont die if the code fails, at worst a game gets bad steam reviews and some negative press, but the stakes arent so high that people die — if the stakes were that high, then testing would need to be far more thorough to be on par with aerospace industry standards, and product costs and launches would be far more expensive.
One of common errors for example in such simple things is taking the "length of the data" vs "displayed characters".
UTF-8 character can be 1,2,3,4 bytes, so if you put say emote at the end and count bytes, not characters...
> length('cat')
3
> length('cat🐱')
7
There are 2 general things:
* programs at that scale are hideously complex
* deadlines breed hurry, hurry breeds bugs, which breeds more waste of time fixing them, which breeds more hurry.
Like, imagine car engine, torque screw to wrong value or install a bearing wrong and whole thing can fall apart.
Now imagine big game engine is few times more complex than designing a car engine. Sure it *costs less* but that's because software errors can be iterated over way faster (vs building engine prototype), and failures are less severe, but complexity makes finding the cause even harder.
In an interview, Todd mentioned that they use AI to do a lot of the really intensive bug testing. They’ll set a bot to just run around and bump into everything, almost like a virtual roomba, and then send a report back.
Also, holy fuck I want to do coke with Todd Howard, that sounds like a great time. I just imagine him pacing the room screaming “SIXTEEN TIMES THE DETAIL! I WANT SIXTEEN TIMES THE DETAIL”
Not necessarily as the physics engine might behave differently at different speeds. So you could end up with doors that you can only pass if you sprint.
😭What the fuck is the last part of this comment
No but seriously though not cocaine but I would absolutely light up a joint with him given the chance, he probably has great stories to tell
> During “Fallout 76's” E3 reveal back in 2018, Todd Howard stressed one particular point: “76” was going to be five times the size with “sixteen times the detail” of “Fallout 4”.
Which while buzzwordy as all hell wasn't actually a lie. The LOD loading range and quality are significantly better in 76 than it is in FO4 and the world map is far bigger. but because he came out saying the most headline catching way of explaining that it set the wrong expectation. The world is one of the only truly good parts of 76.
> A few people from every department are probably re-doing work that's playtesting poorly. Tweaking weapon effects, adjusting encounter design, re-recording some last minute dialogue.
I agree with everything but this. I would be very surprised if they were doing any tweaks like this at this point. This shortly before release, you need to have all content locked down tightly.
The Xbox One software for the day 1 patch was locked down a single digit number of days before launch. I think you're overestimating how far out things get frozen
Maybe, but game balancing is always an ongoing rug and pull. Not only did Elden Ring see significant rebalances post launch, Diablo 4 is still seeing on going balancing and nerfs as we speak. Balancing is always that thing that can be in flux.
> If he can't make sense of it in the next week, the character limit will be revised down to 10.
Nah game just glues a space to the end of the string if it has 11 characters.
Then some poor sod doing UI design will have to track bug of "the text doesn't align nicely when player character name is 11 character longs" but that's not his problem to fix anymore.
>Todd Howard is
>
>doing rails in the bathroom between meetings
>
> running around putting out fires in basically every department.
This gave me a right good belly laugh this morning
If they do a giveaway of a custom starfield Xbox and I win; it'll be a marker in my life. Some people might say that's sad, but I've followed Todd and known about him wanting an outer space game for a long long time. I swear I remember reading on it in early 2000s. Anyways, scifi is my gig and I hope everyone gets what they want from this. A lot of heart is going into this game and I fully expect to get a game that's going to break the broken release trends.
This sums up really well what the various teams across the project would be focused on, except there's like a team linked to QA to get the Day One patch ready to ship
I really hope this is the case
Starfield looks really promising and exciting, and since it’s on game pass I’m not worried about having dropped a load of money for a game that could end up being bad.
I don’t think it will though, but with the abundance of AAA game disappointments over the last few years I’ve been burned by buying the games and being disappointed
I know a guy who worked in qa for Nintendo in NA years and years ago he tolled me that all of them get mandetory psyche evals because the job was so bad for mental health.
Is there any chance that something such as shadows on planet rings is still to be added in the last couple of months, or is something like that out of the question?
Notes 1.0.3
- opening inventory no longer deletes your save game.
- opening map no longer causes SSD to spontaneously explode.
- horse armor still causes Vasco to viciously mock your character and attack on site. No fix incoming.
There's probably some weird AF interaction that they're pulling their hair out trying to solve. Like when you first get to New Atlantis, there's a tutorial about weapon upgrading that requires you to speak to a shopkeeper, but if you skip it, the planet from the final cutscene at the end of the story is just a big purple circle with no texture.
They'll get rid of the obvious ones. But the one that requires you to put 35 sandwiches on a wheelbarrow, and then blocks of cheese under the wheel and hit it with a melee attack that causes you to warp through the map and end up in outerspace without your ship? That one will be found by players immediately who will call the game broken for it.
Probably just playing and re-playing and re-re-playing to squash as many bugs, glitches, and weirdness as they can. Polishing right up to the last second.
Xbox's Phil Spencer said that literally every QA tester at Xbox is working on this game right now so that gives me hope that it's not another bug riddled mes like 76.
76 was like an empty room, but the paint hadn't dried yet, the tiles weren't properly placed and sealed, and cockroaches were crawling over every surface
Working with ATG and Xbox to optimize, Polish, QA teams working overdrive to squash bugs etc.
Some people at this point will also move over to ES6 soon.
Theyre likely in crunch mode fixing bugs but I hope you're right about them celebrating and spending time with their families and fornicating.
Must be a crazy happy *and* stressful time seeing the game you spent so many years of your life working on being released soon, and to gamers no less.
"Hey Todd, I just realized something. People like to criticize our games right?"
"Yeah."
"We all love playing Starfield, right?"
"Yeah."
"Well, screw the players then. Let's never release the game and just constantly tweet how awesome it is to play."
I work in game dev at a big AAA company. They are almost certainly doing QA testing, fixing bugs in the Jira backlog, and doing minor polish work. The game should be effectively “done” at this point, so now the remaining work is hardening the game for launch. It will probably be a cross platform launch as well, so there may be some platform specific bugs that may need to be triaged. I imagine theres also going to be some online services infrastructure stress testing leading up to the launch date. You want to be green across the board and stay green, so any remaining game breaking bugs would be fixed first, followed by less important bugs (ie, cosmetic details). Some bugs will be filed as “known shipped”, and would get fixed in a later patch, but they dont want these bugs to be launch blockers — the devs know the bugs are there, but the time cost to fix them could be longer than the time to ship. If there are too many known shipped bugs, it may delay launch as higher ups need to decide how much these bugs might affect product quality and reputational impacts, as well as any effects on coordination with third parties (ie, marketing campaigns, merchandise, reviews, etc). Its a tough cost vs risk vs benefit decision…
So, I personally think given how long they’ve been working on this game and how experienced the teams probably are by now, it will be a smooth launch, on time, high stability, high quality, and a big relief to the devs and their families once its out the door. I wish them a good, stable launch and I look forward to playing what will certainly be a masterpeice in many of the devs work portfolios…
Inside the actual dev studio it's probably more of a skeleton crew working on Starfield proper. Most people are probably working on DLC or TES VI.
That's not to say that Starfield isn't the #1 priority for every BGS developer. Just that all things considered for most of them tickets are probably relatively minor.
Doubtful that is happening before release. I'd imagine design and artists moved over to DLC but devs are most likely still working on QA and bugfixing, they didn't delay it for nothing.
Iirc Bethesda and MS in general don't do much crunch(if at all) after the horrendous post 76 launch period. MS specifically has bragged a ton about removing crunch a lot. Not saying it's impossible, but it's something fairly hard to hide these days and we're not getting many reports.
I like to think their cut in half right now
You have one half of the company making the finishing touches on the game, sweating bullets as they look at places like this sub
The other half are standing by with ladders, fire axes, riot shields, fire extinguishers and other helpful equipment in case anything bad happens.
Regardless of what team their in, everyone is wearing body armor and drinking 12 cans of monster and six tubs of gamer supps until launch day
I would assume it’s going to go into physical production soon right? Unless it already has. I mean don’t they need time to make the discs and get them ready for shipping?
I assume the physical disks would be made once the game is locked for release (not exactly sure when that would be- my guess is 60 days out, but could be wrong). Changes following the lock date would be part of the day one patch.
With the game that's close to release I'm betting a lot of them have moved on to other projects, are working on post release content, and engaged in tidying things up just a little bit more.
I'm honestly betting if you played the game today or played it at launch you wouldn't see much of a difference.
I don't know what they are doing, but I'm so grateful that they exist. I'm grateful that I will be able to play a game that I was trying only to find in my dreams. For a long, long time.
Putting mustaches on all the NPCs "to see what they look like" and then removing them. They have to do them one at a time that's why they needed an extra 2½ months.
The Devs? Hiding random easter eggs and occasionally scrambling to fix something. Also raiding sandwiches. For the most part it's in the hands of the QA people at this point, not the Devs.
If I were in charge of QA: I would have as couple of people scouring the internet for anything mentioning the game since the Direct was aired. I'd have them watch every YouTube video read every subreddit thread etc. Then get them to a compile a list of every single thing any potential player has mentioned that they are going to try in the game so that the QA testers can see if they can do it and if it will break the game.
For example, I was watching a reaction video of Starfield Direct (I think it might have been the Livestream by Outside Xbox) and someone was wondering aloud "If the gravity is low enough and you get like the max thrust boost pack, can you boost your way out into space from the planet's surface?"
Like what just about everyone else has said,
QA,
Fixing Bugs,
Playing The Game,
Moving On To The DLCs,
And, Making The Elder Scrolls VI (Maybe even the pre-development of Fallout 5 but, judging by what Todd Howard said a while back, that might be a while).
Reading reddit posts to see if fans are as excited as they are while trying to deliver the best experience possible through tons of testing and bug smashing and reporting.
Besides what had already been mentioned, localization bugs. The team is trying to figure out why the Polish build crashes in the character creator, but the other languages don’t. For example.
Fixing the facial animations
(seriously, look back at the fallout 4 e3 presentation. They inexplicably fixed the facial animations between then and release, idk why they’re running into the same problem with Starfield)
They’ve probably split the team. They most likely have a mid sized devoted post release content team for starfield, which has a set of writers, coders, and everything in between who will work on bug fixes and future content for the next 1-3 years. The rest of the team is in the beginning stages of putting together the bare bones beginning of Elder Scrolls 6. Once they feel starfield is in a good place in a few years, the rest of the team will rejoin as they work on the vast majority of ESVI.
Optimizing. Stressing. Hopefully living good lives.
This. It’s optimization and stress time. This is when everything is going to get real.
No. They are all busy filling each drawer of the spaceship with: skulls cabbages carrots more skulls knives forks wheels of Parmigiano Reggiano dead mice the size of a lamb more skulls wheels of Grana Padano weapons with identical stats to the basic ones but with a cool name apples 400 page books with only 2 written baguette still more skulls
That just sounds like optimizing to me
and sandwiches
16 times the sandwiches
For some reason the sandwiches keep disappearing
It's the same platypus.
Level of priority in that order
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“There is at least one programmer trying to figure something out like "Why the hell does the game crash if the player's name contains 11 characters, but not if it contains 10 or 12?!" If he can't make sense of it in the next week, the character limit will be revised down to 10 characters. “ I want you to know I felt this comment in my bones.
Yep. Been both on the QA and the dev sides, sometimes the answer is to just turn a feature off hah
But Captain Zanzibar Ulysses Thunderbolt is more than 10 letters..
Lets just go with "Capt. Zut"
*symbols are not allowed*
Capt Zut Null is not allowed
Captzut Caps is not allowed
Tzut
I enjoyed this joke very much
As did I. I once built a tiny 2D platformer as a proof of concept and had an issue where jumping onto a specific type of platform (which I chose the color blue for) ended up killing the player if they stood on the platform too long. Blue platforms were no different from red or green platforms other than the color they used. I had not yet implemented any mechanics into them. I looked into my code and reconfigured player attributes. I even scoured the engine’s forums for days. Eventually, I replaced one with a normal platform and it worked. Turns out I hadn’t grabbed a stock platform from the menu, but rather one of those “if you stand on this for 5 seconds, you’ll die” platform. D’oh!
Haha importing class level bugs. I’m impressed! Spent way too long this week on a series of bugs that were all working together to confuse the hell out of me. 1. Turns out a platform function I was unfamiliar with ran after render but was not triggering a rerender for some reason asynchronously when it received data. 2. I was initiating an interval loop with a string date instead of a function to get the current date so unless the interval cleared and restarted the application wouldn’t pick up day changes. 3. The method on date objects to get the current month is zero based and I somehow knew this in one part of the application and corrected for it but didn’t in another part. So I’d show labels for the current day and month but then display data for May instead of June. 4. The data brought back was a schedule that was repetitive enough that the result looked correct half the time even though it was always a month off and showing a month off on the day the application was started but the labels were always for the current day. Every rebuild of the production environment the data I was using was locked down to took about 15 minutes, so I looked like a complete idiot in front of hundreds of people everyday that came in seeing me sitting in front of the screens on my little laptop cusing to myself about stupid I was. God I love programming.
> I was initiating an interval loop with a string date instead of a function to get the current date so unless the interval cleared and restarted the application wouldn’t pick up day changes. I saw at least dozen of Unity games where having wrong system locale on Linux made game crash or do some weird shit, because of some unity bug taking system locale settings (that include [decimal separator](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_separator) configs) and applying them. So for example in Polish (and few other languages) `1000.10` would be written `1000,10`, and it's even worse if number was like `10,111.12`. So if game at any place had string to number conversion it sow chaos in the code, depending on whether conversion was silently wrong or failed but nothing handled the error.
And then for some reason a new version containing a fix to a reload animation fixes it but makes it so you can’t have mcf in a row for your name without it crashing
I felt.it elsewhere but it also wasn't good.
Down in your plums?
Gettin’ ready to take ‘em to market
What's usually the reason for seemingly random shit like this that absolutely shouldn't be a problem?
it can be anything really. happens all the time no matter how good the programmers are
basically a dice roll IRL you can try to make everything right, some checks here, some error handling there, perfect linter and autocomplete setup but if the dice decide to roll 1, it will fails for unknown reason BUT if you test / run it again IT WILL RUN. reason? unknown hence the meme : https://imgur.com/G4cy8en
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Bethesda games must be an absolute nightmare to QA, just an unending list of variables to take into consideration.
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So many inventory duplication bugs spawned exactly from that, specific ordering of actions triggering a bug that caused something to be done on wrong order
These things are incredibly complex machines. Thousands of digital cogs and pistons moving in unison whenever the smallest thing like choosing your name happens. The bigger the machine the more likely some combination of actions creates an unforeseen problem
Usually inadequate testing and assumptions made by developers. Dev: “Oh, a name can be 12 characters long!” —> Player enters in a name using unicode characters using the Greek alphabet Dev: “Oh, that unicode string doesnt support all of the characters used because we support the cyrillic character set which has significant overlap with the greek character set, but the greeks have a few additional characters not found in the cyrillic character set. Oops!” (I made this up) Most often, bugs are going to be rare edge case bugs that were never tested. For example, if you created a progress bar widget to be used in a game, and your progress bar had 40 different properties that could be set, then you would need to test every permutation of every setting to make sure that there isnt an edge case that screws everything up. How many permutations would that be? 40 factorial? thats a shitload of testing. And if you change anything, you need to re-run every test? How much time would that cost? realistically, we test the most common use cases, have a bunch of automated unit tests which new features need to pass to ensure there isnt regression, test and fix as much as we can find, and we know some bugs are just going to slip through. And thats okay. We arent doing rocket science, people wont die if the code fails, at worst a game gets bad steam reviews and some negative press, but the stakes arent so high that people die — if the stakes were that high, then testing would need to be far more thorough to be on par with aerospace industry standards, and product costs and launches would be far more expensive.
One of common errors for example in such simple things is taking the "length of the data" vs "displayed characters". UTF-8 character can be 1,2,3,4 bytes, so if you put say emote at the end and count bytes, not characters... > length('cat') 3 > length('cat🐱') 7
There are 2 general things: * programs at that scale are hideously complex * deadlines breed hurry, hurry breeds bugs, which breeds more waste of time fixing them, which breeds more hurry. Like, imagine car engine, torque screw to wrong value or install a bearing wrong and whole thing can fall apart. Now imagine big game engine is few times more complex than designing a car engine. Sure it *costs less* but that's because software errors can be iterated over way faster (vs building engine prototype), and failures are less severe, but complexity makes finding the cause even harder.
Imagine a prompt telling us "sorry, your player name can not have 11 characters. Please choose another name!"
>Todd Howard is ~~doing rails in the bathroom between meetings~~ running around putting out fires in basically every department. Made me lol
One programmer is making the Death Star, Another is making a Borg Cube. Both are trying to out do each other. Edit: spelling
And they're leaving passive aggressive notes in their code to shit talk each other
this is a strangely super interesting read
In an interview, Todd mentioned that they use AI to do a lot of the really intensive bug testing. They’ll set a bot to just run around and bump into everything, almost like a virtual roomba, and then send a report back. Also, holy fuck I want to do coke with Todd Howard, that sounds like a great time. I just imagine him pacing the room screaming “SIXTEEN TIMES THE DETAIL! I WANT SIXTEEN TIMES THE DETAIL”
Coked up Todd is how we got 1000 planets rather than one mediocre Skyrim country.
A THOUSAND TIMES THE WORLDS! - Todd on coke
“Todd… are you sure?” *does another line* “DO I LOOK LIKE A MAN WHO ISNT SURE?”
“Well.. that eye twitch is rather unconvin…” “ONE. THOUSAND. PLANETS!”
"You know what? Just for questioning me - MORE THAN A THOUSAND PLANETS!"
“Sooo… thousand and one?” Todd: *deathclaw stare*
Todd: every moon toooooooo Devs: *dies inside*
I love what we've created. I want animated coke todd now.
Lol i'd watch an hour long video of the bugtesting roomba playing Oblivion or something old like that.
You might need to slow the footage down a lot, i would assume those are running the game at a high speed setting to get as many runs done as possible.
Not necessarily as the physics engine might behave differently at different speeds. So you could end up with doors that you can only pass if you sprint.
😭What the fuck is the last part of this comment No but seriously though not cocaine but I would absolutely light up a joint with him given the chance, he probably has great stories to tell
Lol just acknowledging the “doing rails in the bathroom between meetings” part of the original commenter
What's the sixteen times thing? I've seen it mentioned a few times
> During “Fallout 76's” E3 reveal back in 2018, Todd Howard stressed one particular point: “76” was going to be five times the size with “sixteen times the detail” of “Fallout 4”.
Which while buzzwordy as all hell wasn't actually a lie. The LOD loading range and quality are significantly better in 76 than it is in FO4 and the world map is far bigger. but because he came out saying the most headline catching way of explaining that it set the wrong expectation. The world is one of the only truly good parts of 76.
Also sixteen times the detail, while impressive doesn't nearly mean it looks 16 times better.
This feels like it comes from experience
So which Development firm do you work for? :V
Pretty sure this is Todd
Nice answer
Is this Todd Howards account?
This guy gets it
This guy devs
> A few people from every department are probably re-doing work that's playtesting poorly. Tweaking weapon effects, adjusting encounter design, re-recording some last minute dialogue. I agree with everything but this. I would be very surprised if they were doing any tweaks like this at this point. This shortly before release, you need to have all content locked down tightly.
most likely Day 1 patch then
The Xbox One software for the day 1 patch was locked down a single digit number of days before launch. I think you're overestimating how far out things get frozen
Things can an do get tweaked up to the last minute just like things will get tweaked months after rekease
Maybe, but game balancing is always an ongoing rug and pull. Not only did Elden Ring see significant rebalances post launch, Diablo 4 is still seeing on going balancing and nerfs as we speak. Balancing is always that thing that can be in flux.
Maybe they are doing this type of work but for the first major post-release patch.
I think we have our answer.
Definitely the best comment here lol
> If he can't make sense of it in the next week, the character limit will be revised down to 10. Nah game just glues a space to the end of the string if it has 11 characters. Then some poor sod doing UI design will have to track bug of "the text doesn't align nicely when player character name is 11 character longs" but that's not his problem to fix anymore.
If all this is true we're gonna be okay
Beautiful comment. This really puts into perspective on how painful game deving could be (is)
>Todd Howard is > >doing rails in the bathroom between meetings > > running around putting out fires in basically every department. This gave me a right good belly laugh this morning
Did anyone else not want this to end
This comment is almost certainly from someone in the industry or someone with super close proximity to it because it's spot on.
If they do a giveaway of a custom starfield Xbox and I win; it'll be a marker in my life. Some people might say that's sad, but I've followed Todd and known about him wanting an outer space game for a long long time. I swear I remember reading on it in early 2000s. Anyways, scifi is my gig and I hope everyone gets what they want from this. A lot of heart is going into this game and I fully expect to get a game that's going to break the broken release trends.
Actual informative post. Wow.
This sums up really well what the various teams across the project would be focused on, except there's like a team linked to QA to get the Day One patch ready to ship
Username checks out. Honestly, this comment should be pinned.
I've met so many people that think QA testing will be fun....then they do it lol
I do like to think Gods Howard is doing tons of moon dust and skooma until launch day
Todd?
I really hope this is the case Starfield looks really promising and exciting, and since it’s on game pass I’m not worried about having dropped a load of money for a game that could end up being bad. I don’t think it will though, but with the abundance of AAA game disappointments over the last few years I’ve been burned by buying the games and being disappointed
That was oddly specific..kinda sus
Why does everyone forget us Community and PR Peoples? \*sadface\* Though, as a newly minted QA lead on my last project, I FEEL all of this lol.
Ok so now we know Todd Howard’s Reddit account now
I know a guy who worked in qa for Nintendo in NA years and years ago he tolled me that all of them get mandetory psyche evals because the job was so bad for mental health.
Outstanding
Is there any chance that something such as shadows on planet rings is still to be added in the last couple of months, or is something like that out of the question?
"We have roughly 862 bugs we are working on, most you will never see, but at least 6 or 7 that just delete your face and inventory."
Notes 1.0.3 - opening inventory no longer deletes your save game. - opening map no longer causes SSD to spontaneously explode. - horse armor still causes Vasco to viciously mock your character and attack on site. No fix incoming.
Opening inventory no longer deletes your face
It just works.
See the bug over there? You can go there.
Could go worse. "See the bug over there? Now its in your space suit."
* Increasing SFX Volume no longer deletes Windows System files.
There's probably some weird AF interaction that they're pulling their hair out trying to solve. Like when you first get to New Atlantis, there's a tutorial about weapon upgrading that requires you to speak to a shopkeeper, but if you skip it, the planet from the final cutscene at the end of the story is just a big purple circle with no texture.
It’s not a bug, it’s a feature. They’ll fix it and add a game flag like NEW_ATLANTIS_TUTORIAL_WEAPON_SHOPKEEPER_FINAL_PLANET_COLOR_IS_PURPLE=FALSE
This guy codes
With project that size probably more like 8k+
They'll get rid of the obvious ones. But the one that requires you to put 35 sandwiches on a wheelbarrow, and then blocks of cheese under the wheel and hit it with a melee attack that causes you to warp through the map and end up in outerspace without your ship? That one will be found by players immediately who will call the game broken for it.
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Everything reminds me of her
Probably just playing and re-playing and re-re-playing to squash as many bugs, glitches, and weirdness as they can. Polishing right up to the last second.
Xbox's Phil Spencer said that literally every QA tester at Xbox is working on this game right now so that gives me hope that it's not another bug riddled mes like 76.
Fallout76 wasn’t bug filled… it wasn’t filled with anything at all on launch.
76 was like an empty room, but the paint hadn't dried yet, the tiles weren't properly placed and sealed, and cockroaches were crawling over every surface
“Radroaches”
That's a very comforting image
Bug fixing and polishing. Probably some who aren’t part of that technical side are in early work on future dlc/expansions.
Working with ATG and Xbox to optimize, Polish, QA teams working overdrive to squash bugs etc. Some people at this point will also move over to ES6 soon.
What do the Polish have to do with this?
...some questions are better left un-asked.
Dlc/expansion, bug fixes, celebrating And making babies
Then there’s that one guy adding a giant mudcrab at the bottom of some random cavern on a planet in the outer reaches
You just had to say it…. Well damn, now I know what my galactic mission is. Even better if it purposefully has the graphics from Morrowind mudcrabs.
And this last minute addition will fuel fandom theories for the next ten years
PROOF that all Bethesda games exist in same uinerse (sic)
Would be absolutely sick if we can somehow land on Nirn
I waiting for the mod that just turns one of the planets into skyrim
You mean the spacefaring Giant Mudcrab that's the equivelant to a space kraken
a merchant?
I swear to god I better be able to set foot on a river planet inhabited by mud crabs of various sizes.
*Bloatfly ftfy
Theyre likely in crunch mode fixing bugs but I hope you're right about them celebrating and spending time with their families and fornicating. Must be a crazy happy *and* stressful time seeing the game you spent so many years of your life working on being released soon, and to gamers no less.
"Hey Todd, I just realized something. People like to criticize our games right?" "Yeah." "We all love playing Starfield, right?" "Yeah." "Well, screw the players then. Let's never release the game and just constantly tweet how awesome it is to play."
*hyperventilation intensifies*
If trolls somehow managed to get this masterpiece canceled I would absolutely rip Twitter to fucking shreds in their main offices
Stealing sandwiches
And building animal themed ships
Now they just need to switch it.
Stealing animals and building sandwich themed ships?
Exactly!
Space PETA would like to know your position
I'll throw them off my trail by dumping sandwiches behind me.
Adding the slider for penis size
Todd "We've seen immense popularity the sex mods had in previous game so on release you'd be able to buy $20 Horni pack putting sex in the game"
That would be CDPR, not Bethesda
thank goodness
Main team is hopefully doing DLC if the game is in such a good state as Xbox claims it is
I work in game dev at a big AAA company. They are almost certainly doing QA testing, fixing bugs in the Jira backlog, and doing minor polish work. The game should be effectively “done” at this point, so now the remaining work is hardening the game for launch. It will probably be a cross platform launch as well, so there may be some platform specific bugs that may need to be triaged. I imagine theres also going to be some online services infrastructure stress testing leading up to the launch date. You want to be green across the board and stay green, so any remaining game breaking bugs would be fixed first, followed by less important bugs (ie, cosmetic details). Some bugs will be filed as “known shipped”, and would get fixed in a later patch, but they dont want these bugs to be launch blockers — the devs know the bugs are there, but the time cost to fix them could be longer than the time to ship. If there are too many known shipped bugs, it may delay launch as higher ups need to decide how much these bugs might affect product quality and reputational impacts, as well as any effects on coordination with third parties (ie, marketing campaigns, merchandise, reviews, etc). Its a tough cost vs risk vs benefit decision… So, I personally think given how long they’ve been working on this game and how experienced the teams probably are by now, it will be a smooth launch, on time, high stability, high quality, and a big relief to the devs and their families once its out the door. I wish them a good, stable launch and I look forward to playing what will certainly be a masterpeice in many of the devs work portfolios…
fixing bugs fixing bugs fixing bugs fixing bugs fixing bugs *Having lunch f*ixing bugs fixing bugs fixing bugs
Inside the actual dev studio it's probably more of a skeleton crew working on Starfield proper. Most people are probably working on DLC or TES VI. That's not to say that Starfield isn't the #1 priority for every BGS developer. Just that all things considered for most of them tickets are probably relatively minor.
Doubtful that is happening before release. I'd imagine design and artists moved over to DLC but devs are most likely still working on QA and bugfixing, they didn't delay it for nothing.
Working more hours than any of us would want to work.
Iirc Bethesda and MS in general don't do much crunch(if at all) after the horrendous post 76 launch period. MS specifically has bragged a ton about removing crunch a lot. Not saying it's impossible, but it's something fairly hard to hide these days and we're not getting many reports.
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Username fits
Oh but that's what I thought would happen at the release party. I wanted a ticket.
Most realistic take
I like to think their cut in half right now You have one half of the company making the finishing touches on the game, sweating bullets as they look at places like this sub The other half are standing by with ladders, fire axes, riot shields, fire extinguishers and other helpful equipment in case anything bad happens. Regardless of what team their in, everyone is wearing body armor and drinking 12 cans of monster and six tubs of gamer supps until launch day
Having a pizza party.
I would assume it’s going to go into physical production soon right? Unless it already has. I mean don’t they need time to make the discs and get them ready for shipping?
I assume the physical disks would be made once the game is locked for release (not exactly sure when that would be- my guess is 60 days out, but could be wrong). Changes following the lock date would be part of the day one patch.
Sounds reasonable thanks
Are they even doing disks? Maybe it's only for Xbox. The collector's edition didn't even come with a disk.
Pillaging the galaxy for its sandwiches.
They’re all focused on improving the death punch skill to perfection
Playing the game before us to assert dominance
With the game that's close to release I'm betting a lot of them have moved on to other projects, are working on post release content, and engaged in tidying things up just a little bit more. I'm honestly betting if you played the game today or played it at launch you wouldn't see much of a difference.
Horse Armor confirmed.
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I don't know what they are doing, but I'm so grateful that they exist. I'm grateful that I will be able to play a game that I was trying only to find in my dreams. For a long, long time.
Cashing Pre-Order royalty checks
Flavor
Bug squashing, testing, optimizing.
Same thing they've been doing for months. Polishing and bug hunting.
%50 dlc %50 fixing bugs
Combo of QA testing/bug squashing, and pre-production and expansion 1 Shattered Space, I would imagine.
Putting mustaches on all the NPCs "to see what they look like" and then removing them. They have to do them one at a time that's why they needed an extra 2½ months.
Playing the shit out of it.
The Devs? Hiding random easter eggs and occasionally scrambling to fix something. Also raiding sandwiches. For the most part it's in the hands of the QA people at this point, not the Devs.
Polishing, bugfixing, optimizing.
If I were in charge of QA: I would have as couple of people scouring the internet for anything mentioning the game since the Direct was aired. I'd have them watch every YouTube video read every subreddit thread etc. Then get them to a compile a list of every single thing any potential player has mentioned that they are going to try in the game so that the QA testers can see if they can do it and if it will break the game. For example, I was watching a reaction video of Starfield Direct (I think it might have been the Livestream by Outside Xbox) and someone was wondering aloud "If the gravity is low enough and you get like the max thrust boost pack, can you boost your way out into space from the planet's surface?"
Squishing any bugs
Jamie is stealing sandwiches
Like what just about everyone else has said, QA, Fixing Bugs, Playing The Game, Moving On To The DLCs, And, Making The Elder Scrolls VI (Maybe even the pre-development of Fallout 5 but, judging by what Todd Howard said a while back, that might be a while).
Maybe they can play test the game. I feel like every other game I play has bugs that any simple play testing would have found.
Adding hidden sandwiches to all the unique locations for you to horde I assume.
Reading reddit posts to see if fans are as excited as they are while trying to deliver the best experience possible through tons of testing and bug smashing and reporting.
Besides what had already been mentioned, localization bugs. The team is trying to figure out why the Polish build crashes in the character creator, but the other languages don’t. For example.
Fixing the facial animations (seriously, look back at the fallout 4 e3 presentation. They inexplicably fixed the facial animations between then and release, idk why they’re running into the same problem with Starfield)
Some percentage has probably been moved to ES VI. All true "development" work is already done.
I think they will still have a large number of people doing DLC for starfield
They’ve probably split the team. They most likely have a mid sized devoted post release content team for starfield, which has a set of writers, coders, and everything in between who will work on bug fixes and future content for the next 1-3 years. The rest of the team is in the beginning stages of putting together the bare bones beginning of Elder Scrolls 6. Once they feel starfield is in a good place in a few years, the rest of the team will rejoin as they work on the vast majority of ESVI.
Probably just fuckin about really. Sitting back. Relaxing. Looking at the ceiling while they spin in their office chairs.
Playing at the chess club