Rare Gambles On Dark Discs 87
Next Generation reports on the risky choices Rare made with Perfect Dark Zero. They actually began stamping the discs before the game was certified so that they could make the Nov. 22nd launch date. From the article: "The certification process is the final stage a game goes through before manufacture. Microsoft's team picks through the game making sure there are no bugs, that menus all work correctly, and that there are no compatibility issues. Games that fail, even in the smallest detail, are sent back to publishers and developers for changes. The process can take days, or even weeks."
Trickle-down QA (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What's the issue? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:This is about gameplay and interface, not conte (Score:3, Insightful)
So a newbie who knows that his memory card has 40 blocks or whatever and the game says 40 Kb; that would be ok with you?
Re:Trickle-down QA (Score:4, Insightful)
Frequently, developers would want to hurry the process along so they wouldn't miss their ship date. Mostly, this meant overtime for us to try and get the full test cycle completed in time, but occasionally developers would want to start the print run before we were finished (and this became much more noticable with titles that offered 'patching' functionality over the network, since the feeling was they could fix any serious issues that way. That might be why MS was willing to take the risk, I imagine that Live allows them to patch games to some degree.)
Our attitude towards these requests was basically 'OK, but it's on your head!' If the producer chose to push the game through, we all knew that it wouldn't be on OUR heads if we missed something in the abbreviated test cycle. The producer (or whoever) made the decision and chose to take the risks. I imagine the development crew would feel much the same way, although they have a bit more of a personal stake in it.
"least" favorite? (Score:3, Insightful)