As someone that does software testing and makes a very good living at it - something has always seemed off with that same process in this franchise. It is clear as day to me as a professional in this field that the play testing lacked actual throughput and cycles.
This is absolutely unacceptable… Not the mistakes, not the bugs - but not paying your employees and contractors a living wage. I wanted to maybe think that this wasn’t actually the case, but - now I know why the Q/A in these games seem to have missed the mark so badly.
You get what you pay for is a common idiom I see C-level suits toss around all the time. Well guys, you got what you paid for, that much is clear.
It makes me sad to think I wanted to bring my talents and skills to do something like this for these games because I enjoy them so much and then to see the popularity of this franchise and then to learn how you treat the people responsible for making sure it meets not only your vision but ours.
Some of the problems are so immediately obvious that they should have been picked up by the developers without needing testers to inform them, I would have thought. The management of the studio seems to have some profound problems.
I tried rivals again today and in addition to the mixed-up percentages (if you are top 25% it says you are top 75%) it also says you failed to beat a time, when you actually beat it. This is amateur hour stuff.
Testing and bug reporting is an entirely different skill set, and your dev’s shouldn’t be doing that part of it at all. This is why you have testers. We concentrate on informing the process of the bugs and issues. Product Owners and Manager’s prioritize the work for the Dev team to fix.
At the end of the day, the testing team is responsible for informing the developers of the bugs and that too me is approximately where the breakdown is. When your testing team is not appreciated, doesn’t make a living wage, and watch as these games are out unfinished, then to see all this anger from the player-base who you know they want to please because they enjoy this stuff too, just like we do.
I take a great deal of pride in what I do, I read this stuff, I see the state of the games and it’s all clear to me now. It’s very disappointing as a fan of the franchise, and someone that works in the field, I cannot even begin to imagine how the testing teams feel right about now about it all. Especially since I can pretty much guarantee whose contract is on the chopping block every time the backlog gets too long and the swell of down-ratings and refunds begins to head.
It’s an interesting take and one that makes a lot of sense. But has anything really changed on that front since past releases which faired much better (ie FM4)?
Interesting thought looking at this quote
““This is an empowering victory that allows us to protect ourselves and each other in a way we never could without a union. Our hope and belief is that this is the year in which game workers across the country exercise their power and reshape the industry as a whole.””
like the employer is their enemy
But if FM23 is not finished at launch I think more of a management problem than union problem.
On the early access long broadcast as well as another shorter I got the feeling they focus on that everybody feel good, not get the job done.
I got the same impression. A culture of complacency and low standards seems prevalent at Turn 10. I wouldn’t be surprised if testers did point out the flaws and they were just ignored.
Oh certainly - I wasn’t suggesting that the totality of the issues are on the Testers here… not at all what I mean, at the end of the day the Product Owner and Manager said “Go” and it’s on them regardless of what testers did or did not show.
I agree this ends at the top. My point is; I’ve been in places like this, it doesn’t produce the best work, and it doesn’t matter how much you personally care, or how much personal integrity you think you can maintain in these situations. When you bear the brunt of the failures, and the C-offices continue to make record salaries while you can barely afford the bare minimums… that has an impact - when they don’t care, neither do you.
I see this stuff all the time… My state is front and center of an Autoworkers strike right now… ask me how I know about this stuff and what it means. Things people enjoy the world over today exist because some people in a town called Flint in Michigan decided they were tired of being expendable and made to carry the collective losses the company experienced from poor management decisions.
Unionizing exactly keeps these people from being pushed aside when things go wrong.
I wouldn’t go that far, just that management weren’t tough enough.
Being a boss also means you might have to be unpopular but then you loose “feelgood”.
late hours maybe even weekends
Will be interesting if FM team pass on next Forza Monthly or are up for reactions in realtime.
…management didn’t make the play testers play test hard enough?
Didn’t make them work more OT? Or Weekends (when remember, they’re underpaid to begin with which is the entire point of their attempts to unionize now.)
Overtime didn’t help when the QA team was even less competent than the developers. Many bugs are so obvious that you can’t even avoid encountering them in the game, no matter how hard you try. Most of the bugs reported by the community are game-breaking. Essentially, you can’t miss them.
They don’t need overtime to do what they were hired for in the first place. If they can’t handle it, perhaps this job isn’t what they’re looking for and they should consider something less stressful.
Really, so better pay and game would be all good at launch?
I stand by poor management as reason
As I recall those at broadcasts at least have been at T10 4-5 years or so and still there, so why stay if bad pay to that degree that they did not do their best?
it does not add up for me at all
Not that many AAA console exclusive titles Microsoft has, so Forza is really important for the platform over all.
Software development is hard to estimate time to be ready, and when that fails management will change the rules enough to fix that.
I think team knows their job, just ran out of time before deadline
so then you have to do something about it and that is managements job to negotiate enough OT and weekends
A union strike would not have fixed that!!!
Good management would fix whatever needed, fixing baby sitters for workers and whatever it takes.
just getting the job done
And those broadcast signalled it was all about feeling good and passionate every day going to work.
Ultimately it comes down to the consumer, continuing to buy marketing hype and purchasing unfinished products with the promise of them being fixed at some point after release. Until that changes nothing will. Look at all the flack the industry gave to BG III devs, after they released a solid product.
Thats the issue we face now. The industry is so big and bloated. They’re self sustaining. And people not buying something will result not in the conclusion that it was a poorly made and delivered game, but that the market for such a genre or franchise isn’t what it used to be, or the interest isnt there. So they will drop the idea and any future ideas like it. Thats speaking in general terms of course. I’m sure that internally, FM is seen as the consoles flagship graphics seller and still their answer to GT on Sonys side.
But what used to be a live or die by sales is no longer the case.
True, but from the developer side, you should at least be checking that your code apparently does what it’s supposed to (and doesn’t, for example, mix up beating and not beating a time) before you pass it to the testers. QA is supposed to test the edge cases and do the error testing (because developers can easily fall into the habit of testing the ‘successful’ routes through code and not testing all of the failure cases), they shouldn’t be the first line of defense against obvious coding errors.
The problem is game pass, and Phil Spencer’s hands off approach to managing his studios. Today he is praising Forza as a big success because early player numbers beat its predecessor, which of course it would because it’s day one on game pass which was in its infancy when FM7 came out. I’m one of the people who tried it too, for £1. If he wants to crow about that as being a success then more fool him. I doubt the model is sustainable and the industry is heading for a crash if it thinks it can survive without quality products.
And I agreed. But the testers had no say at all before. Maybe if they had some power, they could have stood up to management that seems bent on ignoring them and putting out garbage instead of maybe getting fired.
Why would the industry pay more for testers, when the consumer essentially pays the industry to be game testers? That’s pretty much the reality these days.
those that signed up for beta testing used such a bad bugtracker system that devs missed it?
I cannot see any reason to ignore it.
As a retired programmer I see that sorting all kinds of reports from testers to see which might have the same cause, even though different way how problem became visible.
this is the big job so they can narrow to which part of code to address
Many things are hard to impossible unless they can be reproduced.
somebody get hung on startup?
it’s surely not anything that appeared when devs ran game or 99.9% of gamers either.
Some things appear after hours of play
this takes forever to track down unless really good bugtracking system
same issue could for somebody else be crash in menues
Is the same issue there in a similar fashion for console as for pc player?
this might help devs a lot
Only reason to ignore a reported problem would be that they could not find a way to reproduce.
Half my active years I had my own software business, and were really greatful to customers that could give a well described issue.
I think quality of reports for FM vary a lot
You see a lot of posts here on forum where people are unable to describe why this or that game is better, they just state that.
it’s like going to the workshop with your car and just state “it does not work”?
what should they do with that information?
So will be interesting with next Forza Monthly what will be said.
Interesting thread, so many truths. My take is simply that the team who worked on this Motorsport over the last 6 or so years are incompetent as a whole.
