Quality assurance is becoming a bigger and bigger problem in gaming.
Too many games are releasing broken and it’s time developers stepped up to ensure this doesn’t happen in future or they are risking consumer faith and support. This should be a very straight-forward thing, right? So why then are games still releasing in a ridiculously broken state? Why then can I not play Batman: Arkham Knight on my PC?
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I’m so sick and tired of people dismissing gamers as entitled. There are many situations (Mass Effect 3 ending anyone?) where yes, gamers act like complete children by holding developers directly responsible for much they enjoy a game, and in those cases it is completely justified to make the assertion. But I often feel that context should apply, and in many situations if it does not affect a particular person it results in that person immediately dismissing the issue. Why? Quite simply because it doesn’t affect them so why should they care to find out more, it’s obviously just whiny, entitled gamers again.
I would know; I was guilty of this for many years.
And since many of the louder-mouthed critics online could be held to very serious allegations about how much they actually play the games they talk about (*cough*), it’s rather easy to see why they are so quick to dismiss gamers. They’re out of touch, they lack context, and at times they’re just being a bit pretentious about things. “Why don’t you just get the console version if you care so much?”
We often use allegories and metaphors when describing the problems gamers face. Ever wondered why? It’s because if we stated them straight-forwardly they would immediately be dismissed as childish or irrelevant. After all, people are angry about games. Games. Things people do for pleasure. Why would anyone getting upset over a pleasurable pastime ever be taken seriously, right?
All good and well, except we’ve spent a lot of money for those pleasures.
Batman: Arkham Knight runs terribly on PC. How terrible, you might ask? So terrible, in fact, that Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment were forced to suspend PC sales while Rocksteady and Nvidia worked to fix the game. Meanwhile sources close to the game have come out and said that they knew all along just how broken it was but Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment never endeavoured to fix this.
The problem is obvious. Quality Assurance was lacking, in preparing this game for its final release.
The question then becomes: Whose problem is Quality Assurance?
You could lay the problem squarely at the feet of Rocksteady, but they were busy at work developing a game that had already been delayed a few times. You could lay the problem at Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment (a publisher that has gained infamy in recent years with Arkham Origins and Mortal Kombat X on PC) but many publishers outsource their Quality Assurance, so can they be really blamed here. You could then lay the problem at Iron Galaxy studios, the developer that handled the PC version, but they were taking someone else’s game and doing their best to translate it so is it really their fault if the original developer was focussed squarely on consoles.
Ultimately, it becomes a bit of a sticky mess and everyone has an equal share of the blame.
Rocksteady for not putting more consideration into PC, Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment for ignoring problems with the final product and not prioritising their flagship release for 2015, and Iron Galaxy for taking what was no doubt a lot of money while not standing up for themselves and saying that the game is not in a fit state to be released.
As it so happens, I have some fledgeling experience in Quality Assurance — I started a QA job only this year, at a local online game development company. And for the most part, I can get behind the claims made by inside sources based on personal experience. Sometimes you are forced to work on offline environments and those environments, because they are virtual, have problems of their own that cause delays or interruptions in testing. Sometimes those environments do not provide sufficient load and performance testing. Sometimes they skew test data and you think you’re alright but live testing (done at a much later stage) proves otherwise, resulting in further delays. Most importantly, sometimes you will find hundreds of bugs but because developers have limited time, only some issues will be addressed by the developers, prioritised over others where the rest are either fixed at a future time, assessed for viability, or outright ignored as acceptable failures.
This happens. And it happens often. Far more often than you would think.
All the same, the responsibility falls on everyone to ensure that the game promised is the game delivered, or at the very least that the game is a complete product. The problem in this case is even more staggering when we think that Batman: Arkham Knight looks and plays perfectly fine on consoles, which are comparatively inferior to modern PCs. So what gives? Surely there’s a large enough contingent of PC gamers around that they too deserve the same attention and care. Over and above all that, games are developed using PCs. Sure, PCs are finicky creations, but is it really asking a lot to optimise a game before accepting money from consumers for it?
Surely I am not asking a lot by directing the following request to Rocksteady: “I want to play Arkham Knight on my PC. Please can you fix it?”
No boycotts, no petitions, none of that silly business. Just a pure and simple request from a fan who wants to enjoy a game along with everyone else, without needing to look elsewhere.
Give us the game we deserve; not the one we have right now.
But hey, maybe I’m just entitled…
Ultimately though, Batman: Arkham Knight is not the only game that is currently broken to the point of being unplayable. Too many games are releasing, nowadays, with massive day one patches or worse. Some of them take months to get fixed, literally months before you can play the game you paid for. It’s not about how much you enjoyed the game you played but rather whether the thing you paid money for was the thing you got. I cannot emphasise that enough. I refuse to use an allegory here but I’m certain you can think of a hundred and one other things that, if they were broken, you’d immediately demand a refund for. Entitled, or just being a responsible consumer? You decide.
I’ll conclude this short but somehow convoluted column with the following sentiment: Quality Assurance is vital in today’s game development cycle. It’s probably the single most vital part of the process, nowadays. A Quality Assurer would say, “It’s not about making games, it’s about making games better.” And sure enough, it’s all in the title. Quality. You don’t pay for broken games. Nothing can ruin consumer faith faster than paying for a game you can’t play.
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