Stanley Woo
QA Ninja
Joined: 17 Oct 2001
From: The BioWare Compound
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 Posted: Saturday, 24 July 2004 12:29AM
Ah, hotpants. I've missed your provocative posts and unique conversation style. Long time no see. 
To answer your question: if you think that NWN was a bug-ridden mess, then no, the testing will not get better.
To everyone else:
Bugs are bad, but unfortunately, they seem to be a permanent fixture in this age of computer ubiquity and near-infinite combinations of hardware and software. There are many opinions about what a bug is and how to deal with it, and whether they're necessary.
Frustrated people will jump on every single bug as though it were glaringly obvious, saying that dozens of testers simply ignored it or should have found it. People like this have likely never completed a difficult project and sent it off to a large group (ie. tens, maybe hundreds) of people to critique. A million people will, of course, be able to find things that 1 person can't.
Those who think games should be (and can be) flawless will consider any bug to be a gamestopper and say that the testing department has failed. These kinds of people generally have never worked on any kind of collective software project before. Any software application is made up of thousands upon thousands of lines of code, written by more than one programmer. Incompatibilities or potential problems are, statistically, a certainty.
Those who think it's easy to make a game, or to test the kinds of games that are released these days, will state that a blind rat could have done a better job of testing, completely ignoring all the things that were done correctly in the game. Why do you think the best games these days come from a group of developers rather than a single guy?
These "accusations" and complaints are the kind of thing one should expect when one is a popular, successful, or prolific content developer. I'll bet everyone from Nicole Kidman to Avril Lavigne to Howard Stern to Dr. Laura to R.A. Salvatore gets the same kind of thing, from "you are a god" comments to "can't you do anything right?" type comments.
I can tell y'all from first-hand experience that the Quality Assurance department at BioWare is a talented, dedicated, passionate crew who, as much as anyone, wants every game that BioWare releases to be the best it can be. To that end, they work more than they should in order to give the end-user the best game experience they can.
In closing, I'll just say that I'm not going to convert anyone who's dead set on seeing the negatives of BioWare, game releases, or the entertainment software industry as a whole. My point with this post is that there are a lot of reasons for the final state of your favourite game, and everyone's got their own opinion on it. The BioWare forums are here for everyone to discuss one side or the other and/or everything in between.
We welcome intelligent discussions and all manner of opinions here, good or bad.
Thank you, and enjoy the Dragon Age forum.
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