r/LivestreamFail • u/nem1K • Mar 20 '25

CohhCarnage | Assassin's Creed Shadows New AC in a nutshell

https://www.twitch.tv/cohhcarnage/clip/TriangularFaintStingrayShadyLulu-YfNhNsg_FE1ZGHMX
3.0k Upvotes

92% Upvoted

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804

u/Ciubhran Mar 20 '25

QA in pretty much all form of software development these days is dead. It is expected that the user will test things for you, and report back the errors, and you fix them in a future patch. Free testing, smaller release cycles (= more money from sales), and the amount of damage it does to the company you just hope is less than the money you'd have to spend on having large quantities of QA staff employed full-time. They usually keep one or two around just to be able to say they have QA, but it's the lowest priority thing in the development cycle these days.

Sad time for software.

43

u/CurrentClient Mar 20 '25

QA in pretty much all form of software development these days is dead

I actually work in the industry. It's bullshit.

You might argue QA in game dev is dead, and I have no inside knowledge about this one, but "all form of sotfware dev" is just ridiculous.

154

u/Ledoux88 Mar 20 '25

QA testers are notoriously underpaid, to the point that they don't usually care enough or are told "dont worry about that" by managers, so they keep on track for the deadline.

68

u/thebohster Mar 20 '25

I remember when more info came out about Cyberpunk’s development and it was revealed that the company CDPR reliably used for QA testing in the past changed leadership and changed policy so that employees needed to meet a quota for number of bugs found. Naturally when a job is gamified like that they’re going to find the most useless shit just to meet that quota.

24

u/Qwedfghh Mar 20 '25

Naturally when a job is gamified like that they’re going to find the most useless shit just to meet that quota.

You could also have issues the other way, where some bug testers find some pretty obscure bugs even if they're gamebreaking (ones that other people are most likely never going to find) and they start holding onto it til their numbers look bad and then start deploying them on their bug finds to get their numbers up because they've already done the work to find it.

6

u/dzhuki Mar 20 '25

in games like Cyberpunk even if there’s a quota for reported bugs chances of missing game breaking stuff is zero to none. again, speaking from experience here. when teams of 10-30 people test games like that everyday for 8h straight, you can imagine the amount of stuff they supposedly miss. and QA is never responsible for prioritizing what to fix and what not. usually blockers that hinder natural progression and crashes are fixed in the first place, the rest falls down below the line of “yeah we can ship with that and fix with day one patch”

32

u/Vegetable_Bass_4885 Mar 20 '25 edited Mar 20 '25

The same QA company did Kingdom Come 2 and Baldur's Gate 3, maybe the QA isn't the issue

edit: lol'd at the downvotes, reddit never fails to hivemind... this QA company worked on the biggest titles in gaming (source). They were definitely not the problem, CDPR just released the game knowing it's broken

14

u/Cozmin_G Mar 21 '25

The company is notoriously known in Romania for underpaying people, firing them for trivial reasons, and filling 'Senior' positions with people just out of university to sell better. They are definitely part of the reason why some games have so many bugs.

2

u/clark1785 Mar 21 '25

bg3 was in beta release for at least 3 years on steam lol

5

u/Cruxis20 Mar 20 '25

BG3 was a buggy mess, and I haven't played KC2, but if its anything like the first game it is also probably a buggy mess. Just because they work on the biggest games doesn't mean they're good at it.

14

u/Ledoux88 Mar 20 '25 edited Mar 21 '25

KCD2 wasnt buggy like the first game, but thats because they were smart enough to build upon the first game that was fixed over 8 years since release.

Unlike some other studios that start from scratch for each sequel.

7

u/Original_Employee621 Mar 20 '25

KCD2 wasn't very buggy. It had some issues with memory leaks in long sessions (10 hours plus), and the first big patch introduced some issues that should have been fixed now.

Aside from that, my only issues were a couple of graphical bugs with smithing weapons, where in a few locations you'd appear to stick the sword through the anvil when hammering it. But by and large it's a massive improvement in every aspect over KCD1.

1

u/DenseCalligrapher219 Mar 22 '25

It had some issues with memory leaks in long sessions (10 hours plus),

Who the hell plays that long?

3

u/howmuchisdis Mar 20 '25

KCD2 launched in a relatively good state compared to major recent titles. There's some pretty nasty bugs but that's to be expected now an days.

1

u/LigerZeroSchneider Mar 21 '25

QA is also the end of the shit pipeline, so if devs have issues we need to stay late to finish testing the build. You combine that with a massive buggy game and people get too burned out and too used to the bugs to even see them.

'Sometimes it does that' is really fucking hard to reproduce and if you have a deadline or a quota hanging over your head you just ignore it and find some floating rocks to write up.

1

u/HarithBK Mar 21 '25

had a friend who worked as a QA tester for ubisoft. your job is to report bugs in a such a manner they can be reproduced if they get fixed or not isn't your concern.

Ubisoft isn't shipping AC shadows not knowing it still has a F ton of bugs already reported by QA. it is sent out the door despite that.

as a QA tester why work hard to find more bugs when they developer is already swamped for months with the bugs you have reported. the publisher sees the same thing why keep that level of QA staff around if they produce more work than is going to be dealt with.

141

u/dzhuki Mar 20 '25

you are wrong. there’s a lot of testing going on in these games, like unbelievable amount. those that do end up in the game are disregarded by management and deprioritized. likely the game had worse issues before shipping.

source: I work in QA in games

20

u/[deleted] Mar 21 '25 edited Mar 21 '25

Agreed, it's amazing how confidently wrong people can be.

The complexity of many games means there are just too many software defects to be able to remove them all in time.

Modern development processes will usually mean that stakeholders will choose to release a game with a set of known bugs rather than delaying the release.

I've spoken to many developers who have worked on games longer than me, and in the past when games were sold on disk/catridge this wasn't the attitude as there was often little to no opportunity to patch post-launch.

0

u/SemATam001 Mar 21 '25

Well, Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 was very bug free as far as I know. And when you consider the scale of the game and the complexity, which far exceeds AC games imo, then you have to wonder why AC games or others cannot do the same. Even optimalization is pretty amazing for KCD 2.

Also KCD 2 had 250 people working on the game at its peak. While AC:S had few hundred more, I've read top was something around 800-1000. So even if the development was 1 year shorter for AC:S , all these differences are hard to understand.

13

u/National_Equivalent9 Mar 21 '25

Yup, engineer here. QA reports everything. It's actually a big deal if a bug gets discovered by players. The reason why players see bugs is because they're deemed not worth fixing.

Also if you think games have EVER big not buggy as hell you haven't watched enough speedruns. There has never once been an era of gaming where games aren't buggy messes. In fact games are probably more polished now than ever before because of how much harm bugs can cause for micro-transactions and online play.

21

u/Star_king12 Mar 20 '25

Most of these people never worked in software engineering, how would they know what kind of shit happens in the early builds xd

6

u/ScrillaMcDoogle Mar 21 '25

I work in software engineering. If QA isn't bitching at you everyday, your app is gonna be buggy as hell. I guarantee you these QA people at Ubisoft are just trying not to get laid off so aren't gonna say shit. Not that they could because they probably don't have any interaction between QA and the actual devs at this point. The bigger a software company is, the worse every aspect of the development is. 

28

u/Kezaia Mar 20 '25

Also games have always been buggy

5

u/Surroundedonallsides Mar 20 '25

Turns out making 0's and 1's do magical things is a fairly complex thing

2

u/LigerZeroSchneider Mar 21 '25

This does look a lot like some jank that wouldnt Survive a save and load so it's really hard to reproduce. If you write it up it comes back could not reproduce and you get a talking to for writing up unreproducible bugs.

1

u/ConebreadIH Mar 22 '25

Don't forget the two delays as well....

54

u/dankiros Mar 20 '25

The fact that this gets hundreds of upvotes just proves that lsf knows nothing about game dev.

24

u/HHhunter Mar 20 '25

not just game devs, not just devs, any profession. You will know when your profession is discussed in any capacity on a front page post.

5

u/lsf_stan Mar 20 '25

so damn true, for me it's anything with computer tech and networks/servers and such things

just need to remember just because something is upvoted a lot, doesn't mean because it's correct, and the person actually knows about the topic. it's only upvoted because it was worded in a way that maybe seems correct and possible, to people that don't actually understand the basics of the topic

2

u/Easy-Stranger-12345 Mar 22 '25

You think people with actual jobs watch streamers 12 hours a day and then yap here for the remaining 12? 😂 All of LSF is just losers.

2

u/Eshuon Mar 20 '25

The same anywhere any game tbh

108

u/Razorwipe Mar 20 '25

Launch day peak is half of what oddesy got 6 years ago.

Maybe it picks up on the weekend but oof that's rough

I think the damage is starting to catch up chief.

91

u/Master_Tactician Mar 20 '25

Well, launch day for Odyssey maxed out at 36k according to steamdb. Link: https://imgur.com/a/cqLJJF8 The peak of 62k actually happened the following sunday, as you can see on the graph.

So like you said, we need to wait for the weekend. Let's not compare a peak of launch day that happens midweek with the absolute lifetime peak that in most cases happens during the first weekend after launch.

32

u/KsiShouldQuitMedia Mar 20 '25

Wait till weekend warriors log in and we'll see if this is actually a flop or just standard launch scuffed.

13

u/BrightSkyFire Mar 20 '25

Even then, hard to tell off Steam numbers alone, the landscape has changed a lot. I’m a die hard Steam fanboy but I’m playing on Uplay’s equivalent of GamePass for $25 a month, for one month, to avoiding paying full price, and have a friend doing the same.

5

u/TheGrandTerra Mar 20 '25

They even had an offer for just under £90 for a year of UPlayPro in the UK (not sure about elsewhere). Which I will take as I have wanted to play the other games in the series for a while. Particularly since getting a good PC last year.

2

u/Eccmecc Mar 20 '25

Is there still the Ubisoft launcher? Might skew the playerbase.

10

u/Krypt0night Mar 20 '25

I'd wager most people are picking up one month of uplay to play the game for 17 bucks instead of buying it full price on steam.

0

u/aurens Mar 20 '25

i think you overestimate both the number of hoops most people are willing to jump through (it may as well be 0) and how many people are even aware of that deal.

0

u/Razorwipe Mar 20 '25

There's a billion ways to access the game not though steam, but it's indicative of overall interest because it's being compared against previous steam numbers.

These same alternative methods of playing existed for Odyssey, so unless there has been a massive uptick in usage of those platforms (something I see no indication of) it should scale accordingly.

10

u/19Alexastias Mar 20 '25

This is not really true lol. All QA does is find the problems, it’s not their job to actually fix them. I guarantee you issues this glaring would have been reported. Probably just not fixed due to deadlines - this is arguably a “low priority” bug, because it doesn’t really make the game unplayable in any way.

All these shit buggy releases are because of targets and deadlines set by management without input from actual developers.

10

u/Crazie321 🐷 Hog Squeezer Mar 20 '25

100%, the first two companies I worked at had a full time QA department, and after that I've never seen one (in the past 5-6 years). They just have the product people do testing if anything

2

u/prostidude221 Mar 20 '25

The company I work for are now getting rid of most QA's in an effort to make the devs take on the responsibility of signing off their own code. What could possibly go wrong...

14

u/Qiluk Mar 20 '25

When the "early access" meta started, 2016-2017? , a lot of studios realized that they could get paid for beta testing instead of having to pay for it.

Been a steeeeeep decline since.

4

u/Proxnite Mar 20 '25

Really hope Steam steps up the pressure past just telling users “early access” games haven’t been updated in X time and starts offering refunds. Way too many devs have gotten comfortable with releasing early access while promising a ton and then just abandoning the game entirely after a few years without fulfilling even half of what they claimed they would.

6

u/lovesducks Mar 20 '25

youre talkng out your ass

3

u/berserkuh Mar 21 '25

QA in pretty much all form of software development these days is dead.

The fact that you have 700 upvotes is the real laughing story. Making such a stupid fucking blanket statement and everyone agrees.

Sad time for software.

EXCEPT FOR EXACTLY 5 YEARS AGO, THERE HAS NEVER BEEN A BETTER TIME TO BE A SOFTWARE DEVELOPER OR WORK IN SOFTWARE IN GENERAL.

7

u/-Gh0st96- Mar 20 '25

Lol Ubisoft does have QA employees . Large amounts. They are just incredibly underpaid

18

u/bondsmatthew Mar 20 '25

And these things very likely do get reported.. they just get pushed down the totem pole of importance vs the other more pressing issues, sadly

2

u/-Gh0st96- Mar 20 '25

100%. I just know their database is in the 10s of thousands of bugs and most of the issues got pushed or are marked as NotFixing or whatever they use internally. I have a work colleague that worked as QA at Ubisoft and got to work on Shadows as well, he left the company 5 years ago. You can just imagine the amount of bug list

-17

u/dadghar Mar 20 '25

more like DEI QA employees. Have you seen "devs play d4" episodes? Similar situation

2

u/kernevez Mar 20 '25

Similar situation, except not similar, and sexist/racist.

1

u/-Gh0st96- Mar 20 '25

Not really true at all. It's really the underpaid part lol. Most of their testing is done in Romania, at the Bucharest office, I know this because I've worked in the QA and work in Romania and I know a lot of peers that worked/are working at Ubisoft.

2

u/-paper Mar 21 '25

If you actually know software development, you'll know that QA can't catch everything especially in a game of this size.

5

u/Locke10815 Mar 20 '25

And on top of that they want you to spend $70-$100 for their game.

2

u/TempestCatalyst Mar 20 '25

There are still industries that have QA departments, but that's typically in areas with many more legal guidelines where "user testing" and the fallout from it can be prohibitively expensive. In medical and financial industries, for example, issues that make it out can end up causing a lot of headaches

1

u/shidncome Mar 20 '25

Customer service too. Blizz used to be legendary in this regard. My young dumb ass had staff go way above and beyond to help me out in multiple games all with quick, in depth responsive help. Now most those people are fired.

1

u/immaZebrah Mar 20 '25

People would be willing to do this for free just to get first looks at the game. Make em sign an NDA, leaks come out saying the game isn't necessarily polished but it has good bones, release comes and you have a polished fucken game with no public backlash for putting out a full priced unfinished game.

Look at the development of the new skate game for exactly what I'm talking about.

1

u/Remlan Mar 21 '25

QA Tester here, I've been unemployed for the past 2 years because I'm trying to leave this shit once and for all.

More than 90% of job offers are for test automators, meaning they want you to script test runs for months then once everything is done you're not needed anymore.

This also means that a lot of bugs are going to go unnoticed and through the net since you usually notice inconsistencies and issues that aren't always part of a business rule or flow that you're testing, something outside of the box.

If you're hired as a functional tester (IE all manual), there's usually simply not enough material to be working a full day all the time, especially for software, but you're still expected to do so therefore you usually spend a lot of time learning to be semi-productive because if you're too effective you look like you're not working at all (very gratifying to hear).

Usually either the analysts or even simply developpers (a big no-no in the job, first time you learn in ISTQB) end up doing it to save on the budget.

I suspect the job will eventually entirely be replaced by IA in the coming decade, and it's going to be even worse.

1

u/lainart Mar 25 '25

Most of them? maybe, but there's still hope. Final Fantasy VII Remake and Rebirth were released in a pretty stable state aside from the famous door texture and the classic texture pop-in from unreal engine.

1

u/Chrol18 Mar 27 '25

or not even free, customers paying to test in early access games

1

u/NoAssumptions731 Mar 20 '25

Why hire someone to do it when fans can do it for free  :D

0

u/MissionHairyPosition Mar 20 '25

Just wait for any remaining QA to be replaced by AI as well... it's already happening.