This just in: forcing absurd workloads and deadlines on your employees has a negative impact. Who knew? In this industry, it means that games are likely to be bugs-amundo, as Obsidian reports.
Now, if there’s one thing that’s become a huge trend around here of late, it’s the whole open-world thing. Vast, endlessly ambitious titles like Red Dead Redemption 2 have shown us just how much can be achieved in this arena. It’s a little frightening to think about how much further still we’ll be able to go in the future.
This is all super-impressive and immersive and all the rest of it, but crafting these enormous worlds poses incredible dilemmas for the developers. Namely, how the heckola do you play-test every little inch of everything? You don’t, that’s how. You just release the game and let players’ horses glitch through trees or fall straight through the ground into the endless nothing-void of space. That’s just the way things work around here. Or, rather, the way things darn well don’t work.
The fact is, even the biggest dev teams in the business don’t have anywhere close to the resources and manpower needed to test everything. We all know this, and we’ve made our peace with it. It’s part of the charm. What would Skyrim be without its wonky glitches?
So, that’s fine. What isn’t fine is this apparent new trend for studios to expect their employees to work every hour under the sun. Fortnite and Mortal Kombat teams have been at the forefront of some frightening reports on this matter lately, and now here comes Josh Sawyer of Obsidian to weigh in on a similar topic.
When you throw publishers’ restrictive deadlines into the mix along with the factors we’ve already discussed, it’s no surprise that, as Sawyer himself admitted in a recent Q&A, Obsidian has “a reputation for buggy games.”
“…while some of that is endemic to making big, complicated RPGs with thousands of different ways through them,” he went on, in response to a question about the ‘gap in quality / bug / perfs’ between Obsidian’s older and newer projects, “it’s still within our power to reduce bugs on our end with more time. When it’s a publisher’s choice, that ability (or priority) can be taken away from us.”
Now, you might think there’s a whiff of defensiveness about all this, and… well, you’re totally right. Especially as he prefaced the whole thing with “we’re not total idiots.” He’s totally right, though. As is so often the case in today’s world, the desperate need to push things out as quickly as possible to make as much cashola as possible can really cause problems.
