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CD Projekt Red is under investigation

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Re: CD Projekt Red is under investigation

#91
As buggy as the game was on launch, and as badly as this damages CDPR's reputation, I have not heard a single thing that implies they broke any U.S. laws. How this Polish office works, I have no idea, but I guess I'd be surprised if they came to a different conclusion.

Re: CD Projekt Red is under investigation

#92
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How? games are probably the most diverse art form in existence today, there is literally no rules to what a game can be. Really? Compared to film, music, visual arts? I would say it's the least diverse of them. It's starting to branch out, especially in the indie scene, but it's still in it's infancy.

> Really? Compared to film, music, visual arts? I would say it's the least diverse of them. It's starting to branch out, especially in the indie scene, but it's still in it's infancy. Yes because gaming actually unify all other art medium without being burdened by their 'rules'. Movies today have clearly defined cinematographic rules, very little professional produced movies can be deemed experimental. Games do not s…

This doesn't make sense. What are the rules of music? Sure if you want something on the radio it's wise to follow some guidelines, but obviously that's not where the diversity is. You can make a song with no defined key or time signature, it can be hours long or seconds long, it can have no vocals, only vocals, or controversially, no sound at all. You could go on and on. Video games have not pushed the limits in this way.

Re: CD Projekt Red is under investigation

#93
post #84

I hope this will encourage big studios to stop releasing broken games, but I doubt it will. The incentives are just so broken due to ease of patching, a need/desire for cash after a drawn out dev process, and a general disrespect for their customers. I think releasing a "broken" game in the form of "early access" from smaller studios can be good in terms of iterative and community development, but also that can be ab…

I wonder how much of this is broken QA throughout the industry. I burned ~60 hours in cyberpunk on a ps4 pro, the content of the game was fun - but the bugs were pretty dumb. Many of the worst bugs originated in story pathways that would only be triggered if various conditions had occurred (which undoubtedly changed during development). From a testing perspective It seems like it would require an impossible amount of…

> Q: Open-world games are often really buggy, because there’s just so much going on. But I experienced very little of that in my time with Breath of the Wild. How did you pull that off? Was it just a really extensive QA process?

> Dohta: There was another point that we developed during our QA process. We came up with a number of scripts that would basically allow the game to be played automatically, and allow Link to run through various parts of the game automatically. And as that was happening, on the QA side of things, if a bug did appear I’d suddenly get a flood of emails about it. That was one tool that we found to be really handy.

https://www.theverge.com/2017/3/11/14881076/the-legend-of-ze...

Breath of the Wild used a tool to do automated run throughs as part of their bug testing suite. This is just a quote from one interview, but if you do a bit of Googling you can find some good information about their development and planning process.

Re: CD Projekt Red is under investigation

#94
post #84

I hope this will encourage big studios to stop releasing broken games, but I doubt it will. The incentives are just so broken due to ease of patching, a need/desire for cash after a drawn out dev process, and a general disrespect for their customers. I think releasing a "broken" game in the form of "early access" from smaller studios can be good in terms of iterative and community development, but also that can be ab…

I wonder how much of this is broken QA throughout the industry. I burned ~60 hours in cyberpunk on a ps4 pro, the content of the game was fun - but the bugs were pretty dumb. Many of the worst bugs originated in story pathways that would only be triggered if various conditions had occurred (which undoubtedly changed during development). From a testing perspective It seems like it would require an impossible amount of…

It's not rocket science. It's devs treating QA like second-class citizens and substituting (cheap) person-hours for proper technical tools.

Any sequence of events can be represented as a directed graph.

Any event check can be validated against that directed graph as feasible.

Instead, Bethesda (equally guilty) and CDPR seem to let their devs add whatever checks, and then trust QA to untangle and validate the infinite number of combinations.

tl;dr - open world games are incompatible with traditional QA methods and tools

Re: CD Projekt Red is under investigation

#95
post #2

It seems that everybody seems to hate this game, or rather unfinishedness of it. Meanwhile, I am playing it since 2 weeks on PS4 (not Pro) and totally enjoying every minute it.

Yeah I'm with you on this. I installed it to see what all of the fuss was about and have been loving it. I haven't run into a single glitch or problem of any kind.

Re: CD Projekt Red is under investigation

#96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Really? Compared to film, music, visual arts? I would say it's the least diverse of them. It's starting to branch out, especially in the indie scene, but it's still in it's infancy. Yes because gaming actually unify all other art medium without being burdened by their 'rules'. Movies today have clearly defined cinematographic rules, very little professional produced movies can be deemed experimental. Games do not s…

I don’t think you have much knowledge of film if you say “professional produced movies are not experimental.”

[deleted]

Re: CD Projekt Red is under investigation

#97

Reminds me of the quote by Reid Hoffman: “If you aren’t embarrassed by the first version of your product, you shipped too late.” Pretty sure they’re embarrassed by the first version.

Buy you don't release half cut movies, unfinished novels, unmastered songs. Technically you can, but not at full price after years of hype.

I think what happened here is that investors pushed the game to be out since it was xmas and the two console platforms were real hungry for a big title.

Re: CD Projekt Red is under investigation

#98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sony itself removed that game from the playstation store and still has not put it back yet, because it doesn't meet Sony's playstation certification requirements. I don't think 'gamers' are the issue here.

They offered it in their store so it obviously met their certification requirements at one point in the past. Perhaps they don't really have certification requirements...

> They offered it in their store so it obviously met their certification requirements at one point in the past. Perhaps they don't really have certification requirements...

Because CDPR promised to Sony they'd fix it at launch, it was Sony being lenient, obviously that was a mistake from Sony.

Re: CD Projekt Red is under investigation

#99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having played Cyberpunk on a PS4 and then a PS5, It is nowhere near what you'd expect from a AAA title in terms of quality. Had to stop playing it because it's not worth it to ruin the experience. I can only imagine what the folks at Rockstar are thinking about this launch and what they can take away from it.

> I can only imagine what the folks at Rockstar are thinking I imagine they are thinking the same thing since GTA5 Online was released. Why even bother making new games when you can just drip feed some DLC every now and again and continue to print billions.

I'm not going to say that's a worse model.

We saw outsourcing of engines to companies who focused on that as their core competency. Then middleware. As AAA budgets go up to maintain pace with SotA, it makes less sense to trash-and-start-from-scratch (traditional practice).

DLC on online games is the ultimate realization of this. Why sink the cost of rebuilding a game, when you have a battle-tested core, with bugs already fixed, and content tooling already created, that you can start from? Essentially: EA {Sport} {Year} model, for everything else.

Re: CD Projekt Red is under investigation

#100
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's just a freaking game, for heaven's sake... By the same standard, Peter Jackson deceived me and stole 9h of my life with the turd which is "The Hobbit".

It's not about the game being bad, it's about CDPR lying to their shareholders.

"Everything is Securities Fraud" - Matt Levine
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