Incompetent software engineers

[Crazy Taylor]

I didn't realise people actually downloaded digital titles for 10% more than high street retail price. I just assumed that was a software coding error.

The world is becoming far too eco-friendly!

More the fact that digital titles are more convenient to have than physical. Dont need to go the shop, no disc/drive cant be destroyed. Also games on store are at times cheaper than in store(especially in with UK prices at the moment). Bearing that in mind i do like to pick up backward compatible games for my xb1 instore.

Anywho there are much worse titles for bugs than gts (at launch). Naming a few are

• Battlefield 4
• Skyrim on ps3
• Final fantasy 14
• Sonic 2006
• Batman arkham knight on pc
• Assassins creed unity
• Driveclub

 

[Zevious Z]

This is 200% false . You obviously don't retro game. Old games had serious bugs that made the game unbeatable . Jak X shipped with a bug that would wipe your entire memory card ..

yeah, it happened. But my memories of gaming on the Atari 2600 and nintendo and supernintendo and PS1 and Dreamcast don't have many patches or many gamebreaking or even really terribly notice-able bugs in them. I look back sort of fondly on being able to buy a game, plug it in and play it and not have to have patches, paid dlc and endless microtransactions to look forward to. Otoh I also enjoy downloading stuff to add to a game to make it bigger and better than it was on release day. What can I say...I'm an enigma.

 

[Alpha Cipher]

Actually, if we're being fair, these sorts of rare glitches have existed since far before connected gaming was widespread.

It's just that, back then, when gamers found a glitch, there was nothing devs could do to remedy them.

I've had this happen once or twice since the beta started almost a year ago. Was it annoying? Yep. Is GT unique in this regard? Nope. Is it acceptable, and does it warrant labeling an entire team as "scam artists"? That's up to each individual, but I'd say yes and no, respectively. A pre-race hang-up is a rare thing — at least for me, at something like 200 Sport Mode races.

I replayed Destroy All Humans this past weekend (side note: easy Platinum for those so inclined). It crashed to the main PS4 menu no less than eight times in the course of three days. And that's a game with zero online.

Like @Nando deBem said, online racing in particular is likely no simple development task. Hiccups can and do happen — I can't think of a single title in the genre where they don't.

Fair enough, you do made some really good points.

 

[KingFrog]

yeah, it happened. But my memories of gaming on the Atari 2600 and nintendo and supernintendo and PS1 and Dreamcast don't have many patches or many gamebreaking or even really terribly notice-able bugs in them. I look back sort of fondly on being able to buy a game, plug it in and play it and not have to have patches, paid dlc and endless microtransactions to look forward to. Otoh I also enjoy downloading stuff to add to a game to make it bigger and better than it was on release day. What can I say...I'm an enigma.

Do you realize we have the internet now right? Any bug is instantly found when 2-3 million people are playing and sharing videos etc. If you think old games were flawless I suggest you head over to the speedrunning community. Bugs are their forte. If this was put out the day the games came out we would be crying super Mario 64 was a buggy mess.

• Driveclub

Did you ever play the vanilla version, it wasn't buggy at all. Drive club had server issues, not bugs. I beat the game bone stock 1.00 since my internet was down for two weeks. It had some questionable penalty choices but that was about it.

In fact server issues ( again not bugs) aside, I thought drive club was the most polished vanilla PS4 game iv ever played. 30 fps 100% of the time, no visual anomalies, perfect audio, snappy menus etc.

 

[tofuhero]

This is 200% false . You obviously don't retro game. Old games had serious bugs that made the game unbeatable . Jak X shipped with a bug that would wipe your entire memory card ..

They had bugs certainly, but Atari 2600 games through to PS2 gen games generally didn't straight up crash. They were much more stable than PC games. PS3 we started seeing some crashes, and some PS4 games like GTS have been really crashy.

 

[Northstar]

Old games don’t seem as buggy simply because there isn’t much to them. Hell, during that period a gigabyte wasn’t even fathomable for a game (IIRC the NES cartridge had a whopping 1MB capacity), nowadays your lucky if it’s only a couple gigs.

It should also be mentioned that video games, like any other form of media benefit from time filtering. As the years go by people only tend to remember things that were extremely good or bury them in a desert bad. The just plain bad titles get forgotten about.

 

[Zevious Z]

Do you realize we have the internet now right? Any bug is instantly found when 2-3 million people are playing and sharing videos etc. If you think old games were flawless I suggest you head over to the speedrunning community. Bugs are their forte. If this was put out the day the games came out we would be crying super Mario 64 was a buggy mess.


Did you ever play the vanilla version, it wasn't buggy at all. Drive club had server issues, not bugs. I beat the game bone stock 1.00 since my internet was down for two weeks. It had some questionable penalty choices but that was about it.

In fact server issues ( again not bugs) aside, I thought drive club was the most polished vanilla PS4 game iv ever played. 30 fps 100% of the time, no visual anomalies, perfect audio, snappy menus etc.

You seem to have reading comprehension issues. I never said old games were flawless.

 

[CliveH]

It happened again. Counting down to matching, gets to zero, and... error. Sorry, no race for you. Have to restart the PS4. Do I want to describe the error and send you a report? No. I'm not getting paid to be your beta tester. In fact, who at Sony, or PD, or whoever these scam artists are do I get my money back from? When did software engineers decide it was ok to sell product to consumers that doesn't work? When did consumers decide this was acceptable behavior?

You should learn more about the complexities of modern software development before calling them incompetent. This game models the car and engine behaviour, real time lighting and shading and runs at an amazing frame rate. Before you criticise you have to be 100% sure the problem was not caused by your ISP or connection. I've been playing GTS just about daily since release and it's never crashed for me.

 

[jasguer]

I disagree. There are game-breaking bugs in almost ALL games released. Period. Some are easier to find than others, some are more frequent than others, but there was never a time when devs had to make sure their games were bug free...

I get your point on games being more complex, but it's just a law of averages. More lines of code = more bugs. Simple as that. More interactions between lines of code = more glitches.

The OPs bug isn't very widespread, so it would almost give the impression that the issue doesn't lie with the code and lies more with the hardware/ connection or some other external factor.

I'm an incompetent software engineer and I live by the philosophy of do more with less. Fewer lines of code means fewer chances that I introduced some world scorching bug. At last count, my stats site only has about 2,400 lines of code that I wrote. That being said, development environments are like Cloud Cuckoo Land from the LEGO movie and production environments are more like Mount Doom in Mordor. You never know what environmental variable will be introduced that will put the system in a state you never even imagined.

 

[Nando deBem]

I'm an incompetent software engineer and I live by the philosophy of do more with less. Fewer lines of code means fewer chances that I introduced some world scorching bug. At last count, my stats site only has about 2,400 lines of code that I wrote. That being said, development environments are like Cloud Cuckoo Land from the LEGO movie and production environments are more like Mount Doom in Mordor. You never know what environmental variable will be introduced that will put the system in a state you never even imagined.

I'm a software developer too. Everytime I read a “lazy, incompetent developer” describing developers that work at PD... I think:
“Now that’s someone good at his/her job. Like one of the best in the world. I mean, if a developer at PD is trash... high standards!”

People should realize that when they see Orma Snow (and other aliens) on track and they keep drooling, watching, hipnotized by their skills... that’s how good these programmers are at developing!

 

[Voodoovaj]

They had bugs certainly, but Atari 2600 games through to PS2 gen games generally didn't straight up crash. They were much more stable than PC games. PS3 we started seeing some crashes, and some PS4 games like GTS have been really crashy.

Gran Turismo 2 was so bad that they recalled it and replaced it with a new disc.

Keep in mind that they complexity of games is many orders of magnitude greater. A PS4 game, aside from having to deal with techniques that are quite complex within the game itself, it has to be able to suspend everything and allow seamless interfacing with the PS4 hardware. Being able to tweet a screenshot mid play without stopping your game may seem trivial, but it's not, and that's one of the less complex elements of the game.

 

[Crazy Taylor]

Gran Turismo 2 was so bad that they recalled it and replaced it with a new disc.

Keep in mind that they complexity of games is many orders of magnitude greater. A PS4 game, aside from having to deal with techniques that are quite complex within the game itself, it has to be able to suspend everything and allow seamless interfacing with the PS4 hardware. Being able to tweet a screenshot mid play without stopping your game may seem trivial, but it's not, and that's one of the less complex elements of the game.

Safe to say theres too much that happens in the sofware to call those who 'make the magic happen' incompetent.

 

[tofuhero]

Gran Turismo 2 was so bad that they recalled it and replaced it with a new disc.

Keep in mind that they complexity of games is many orders of magnitude greater. A PS4 game, aside from having to deal with techniques that are quite complex within the game itself, it has to be able to suspend everything and allow seamless interfacing with the PS4 hardware. Being able to tweet a screenshot mid play without stopping your game may seem trivial, but it's not, and that's one of the less complex elements of the game.

Sure there's always been bugs. I believe GT2 had disappearing reward cars, which apparently PD still hasn't solved in GTS 15 years later. But I specifically said crash. I see game consoles as an appliance. Crashing is a cardinal sin, because that usually goes hand-in-hand some type of data or game progression loss for the player.

So I'm not thrilled with PD for not making 1) data loss from corrupted save files, and 2) crashing a priority to fix. But I certainly wouldn't call their engineers incompetent. Asynchronous multiplayer code is far from trivial, and tying their wagon to an online save system that has to talk to the server practically every time you do something in the game hasn't helped matters.

 

[Draggon]

I believe GT2 had disappearing reward cars, which apparently PD still hasn't solved in GTS 15 years later

The original US version had a bug that wiped out the entire garage. 19 years later and things haven't changed much.