Early Access and proper Beta testing?

[ricijs2002]

Curious about your opinions on CDPR if they should start to move on to early access modules in future when they create their games.
Similar to bannerlord and baldurs gate 2 were they want to bring people in the development process more as to have a more hands on suggestions and opinions on their games ever since the big cyberpunk 2077 flop i thought more and more about this i think maybe its time to bring more people in on the development so they actually understand what we want in the game what works and what doesnt
Thats what i think at least because i always appreaciate devs and managers who value their fan persectices and actually put lots of their ideas in the game along the development to improve it for the end product
Its one thing to WOW your audiance whit surprise content once the game comes out but its another promising to put stuff in but never to deviler it and change minds at the last second , there should be deffinetally more and MORE communication between them and us
Beacause by the end of the day who are they really making these video games for and what for ? a quick buck? ruined rep ? Well either way thats the way i feel
How about you guys do you think early access sounds like something should be done more or should we put our trust in company ?

 

[Hayte]

It is possible but certain things have to change to facilitate and filter the information going between players and devs.

1. You must have a community team. After the Bioware forums catastrophy, nobody can convince me that direct, unrestricted communication between players and developers is a good idea. It just leads to inappropriate conduct both ways. Individuals cannot speak freely on behalf of an entire company. There must be consensus.

2. You must have a public issue tracker or some other type of open repository for organizing, de-duplicating and tracking bug reports.

3. You also need a community of players who have been conditioned to help collaboratively solve problems by using issue trackers and reporting faults in a structured, searchable way.

REDsupport isn't built for this. It is built to solve individual user problems. So anything you submit to REDSupport is done in a private ticket. Nobody else sees your ticket, nobody has independently verified its contents. So this system makes it very easy to submit false and misleading information (as at least 2 people did by reporting "The Gift" as the cause of the access point bug).

With early access and perpetual betas where there will be lots of broken game systems, bugs and incomplete features, you need a playerbase that has been conditioned to deal with that. I've played Warframe for 3 years so the bugs in this game are nothing I haven't seen before.

If you played Naughty Dog games the last 3 years (super linear, heavily "designed" and hyper polished), the bugs in CP2077 and Warframe will probably shock you. Its just something you will not have seen before.

The one thing I think is really important is to have a CDPR community team liason for the tool devs in the modding community. This will allow filtered information to pass between modding tool devs and CDPR devs and this is needed because so many aspects of the game's internals are blackboxes.

For example, people in the mod community are working on exporting/importing animations but its very hard because of the number of special bones/joints in many meshes (particularly anything to do with the head - I assume the enormous number of bones in head meshes are for JALI). Without dev assistance, there is no way to tell what these do and how to work around them.

The way faces are stored in .mesh files is also perplexing and it took one of the best tool devs in the modding community ages to figure out that they are stored twice (once front facing and a second time back facing). The way CDPR does certain things is...how do I say this. They are brilliant but its like they go out of their way not to adhere to industry standards.

 

[Olaf21]

Early access is, IMHO, a lame and lazy route the companies have started to not take any risk, and it has led us to homogenic visions and a profound lack of originality in games.

Time was, game companies would make a game. Their game. Their vision, thought out and fleshed out. Then they'd put out a free demo. And people would like it and buy the game, or not like it and not buy the game.

Nowadays, game companies start a game, with no idea on fine tuning. And they put out an early access game. And gamers give their input.
But as long-ass franchises tell us, most gamers just want the same game over and over again. So that's what we get. We get the same game, over and over, developped by different companies, until you can't exactly tell them apart. "Hey, wouldn't it be cool if we made a Batman man game with Spider-man in it?" "Hey, what if we made an Assassin's creed with the Lord of the rings?"

So no, no early access in my book. I don't want gamers input in my game, I want game developpers input in my games. That means not all games will be to my liking. I'm fine with that. I don't want to play all the games, I want to play a few good games. To do that, I need people with original vision, not people who listen to the majority.

Let CPDR do their thing. If you don't like it, just don't play it. Or start your own studio and do it your way. Sure, it would fix soe things, but it would also make us lose a lot of contents that we don't find elswhere.

Beta testing is another thing, and it was probably cut short here to get to the release date. Which is more of a (time-)management issue, and less of developping per se. That subject is tired, though, so I'll let it lie.

Sorry if I come accross as aggressive. That was not my point, but I feel very passionately that early access killed a lot of chances for video games to try nex things, and it pisses me off.

 

[Hayte]

I prefer it when creative people stick to their creative vision too and if I don't like the game, then its just not the game for me. Some other one will be.

But I think theres a big difference between using community feedback for features and using it for bug squishing. In Warframe I'm happy not to have any creative input whatsoever. But when it comes to technical issues in the content updates they release, that is a whole different matter. I really enjoy speedrunning eidolon hunts in Warframe and every content update seems to break old functionality that is well known by speedrunners at this point. I think this kind of community feedback is valuable. Vomvalysts used to move at a certain speed but after the update they are now 3 times slower. Its not on me to decide whether this is a deliberate and undocumented change - I am simply reporting behaviour that is different post patch.

Some things break that are clearly unintentional. For example, they once did an update that caused one particular trash mob to do insane damage with their guns and this ended up breaking the mechanics of the fight. You have to gather lures to trap the eidolon boss but any time a lure would stray near one of these trash mobs both the player and the lure would get one shot.

I think this feedback is valuable because once the creative vision is set and is made into a reality, there are so many inter-dependencies that small changes in an update to one game system can have break things that are seemingly unrelated in a totally different game system. Having a large number of players who are mentally prepared to isolate and report weird edge case behaviour like the Warframe trash mob bug can be a very useful resource. In a really buggy game, thats what some of us are doing anyway. But being able to funnel that information to devs enables them to iterate solutions incredibly quickly.

I believe this is part of the reason why the Warframe devs break everything all the time but they also hotfix lightning fast. It is not uncommon for Digital Extremes to deploy a major content update on Wednesday and hotfix the same day. Then hotfix twice the following day.

 

[Ayinde_Palmer]

Curious about your opinions on CDPR if they should start to move on to early access modules in future when they create their games.
Similar to bannerlord and baldurs gate 2 were they want to bring people in the development process more as to have a more hands on suggestions and opinions on their games ever since the big cyberpunk 2077 flop i thought more and more about this i think maybe its time to bring more people in on the development so they actually understand what we want in the game what works and what doesnt
Thats what i think at least because i always appreaciate devs and managers who value their fan persectices and actually put lots of their ideas in the game along the development to improve it for the end product
Its one thing to WOW your audiance whit surprise content once the game comes out but its another promising to put stuff in but never to deviler it and change minds at the last second , there should be deffinetally more and MORE communication between them and us
Beacause by the end of the day who are they really making these video games for and what for ? a quick buck? ruined rep ? Well either way thats the way i feel
How about you guys do you think early access sounds like something should be done more or should we put our trust in company ?

incorporating player feedback is not a slammdunk, it is a skill and process. There is nothing to suggest cdpr would work better with more player feedback.

Also, I think I have seen as many games get worse from player feedback as better.


The only thing I will say, is marketing wise calling the release early access would probably have lead to people expecting less on the bugginess front. That said, I think the reality is cdpr simply isn't where they need to be in terms of productivity and bug fixing, so people would be disappointed regardless. It takes them a long time to implement and fix things so even early access players would probably be frustrated.

 

[Deathlyhearts]

Early access is, IMHO, a lame and lazy route the companies have started to not take any risk, and it has led us to homogenic visions and a profound lack of originality in games.

Time was, game companies would make a game. Their game. Their vision, thought out and fleshed out. Then they'd put out a free demo. And people would like it and buy the game, or not like it and not buy the game.

Nowadays, game companies start a game, with no idea on fine tuning. And they put out an early access game. And gamers give their input.
But as long-ass franchises tell us, most gamers just want the same game over and over again. So that's what we get. We get the same game, over and over, developped by different companies, until you can't exactly tell them apart. "Hey, wouldn't it be cool if we made a Batman man game with Spider-man in it?" "Hey, what if we made an Assassin's creed with the Lord of the rings?"

So no, no early access in my book. I don't want gamers input in my game, I want game developpers input in my games. That means not all games will be to my liking. I'm fine with that. I don't want to play all the games, I want to play a few good games. To do that, I need people with original vision, not people who listen to the majority.

Let CPDR do their thing. If you don't like it, just don't play it. Or start your own studio and do it your way. Sure, it would fix soe things, but it would also make us lose a lot of contents that we don't find elswhere.

Beta testing is another thing, and it was probably cut short here to get to the release date. Which is more of a (time-)management issue, and less of developping per se. That subject is tired, though, so I'll let it lie.

Sorry if I come accross as aggressive. That was not my point, but I feel very passionately that early access killed a lot of chances for video games to try nex things, and it pisses me off.

Perfectly put. Couldn't have said it better myself.

Feedback is good, especially objectively constructive feedback, but sadly most of the time (read almost always) gamers feedback is extremely biased based on their personal preferences that often times might not align at all with the original vision of the game.

As it was said I want to follow the artist's vision who created the game not any gamers visions about how it should've been done in their opinion.
So no I don't think early access is particularly a good idea either in any way, shape or form.

Buy the game if you like it or don't if you didn't like it. There is plenty of ways to make an informed decision nowadays. One thing gamers should absolutely stop doing though and that is feeling entitled to any saying how a story in a game should be told. You don't like it? That's absolutely fine. But please don't feel like you are in any place to tell the artists how they should change their story to fit your preferences. This is absolutely unacceptable in my opinion. Like it or not, buy it or not - That's, as far as your rights, as a consumers go.

 

[Olaf21]

Point to case, I tried all three Witcher games, and didn't like them one bit. Same for Mass Effect. Or plenty other games. Doesn't make them bad, just not for me. Just like I don't like Baz Luhrman's movies, of Brian DePalma's, or plenty others, but they still know their stuff. Or I don't like Céline Dion, but the woman can sing. Just because we interact with games, we sometimes make the mistake of thinking they belong to us. Imagine going to Mozart and telling him "Hey, man, you used a G, here. I think you should change that to an F, because, you know, i gave you my money."
Games are still, in my view, works of art, created by artistswho set out to make one thing. Sometimes, reality stops them short of that vision, for some reason or other, just like Dali never finished his hologram with Alice Cooper. Does that make Dali a failure? No. Should he have listened to art consumers before making his paintig. F*** no. But the artists make, and we watch/listen/use. If you want to have a say in how the game is made, make your own. Anything else is entitlement. What makes my opinion more valid than CPDR's, as in "they should correct their game with my input?"
If we're going there, do you think Johnny Silverhand asked any listener his or her opinion before making music or bombing Arasaka? Didn't think so.

 

[Phair]

I think the artist/developer should not be influenced by player feedback when developing their game. One of the most obvious reasons is when you get a small but loud group of people who insist they get their way. I have seen other games that have tried player feedback, that failed miserably. Because they listened to the loudest people.

CDPR would benefit more, by creating their game for one platform first like the PC.
And then porting it over to the console, because trying to make a game like this for the two platforms at the same time is what got them in trouble. Consoles have limitations that's a fact that cannot be changed.

Or if they'd just make it for consoles, and they port to PC they need to make sure it is done properly and has added features that utilize the power of a PC.

But the way they did it this time turned out to be catastrophic for both platforms.

 

[Geodek69]

They should have public beta testing, several months before the game is released, to address technical issues only.

This was very successful with Division 2 and Ubisoft.