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Cyberpunk 2077 disastrous launch allegedly in part due to outsource QA fraudulent conduct

Killer8

Member
Ah yes, the ridiculous notion that you have to actually do a job professionally before you could ever possibly understand what their job entails.
So please then, never complain about a meal at a restaurant, unless you're a chef. Don't complain that your car won't start, unless you're a mechanic. And definitely don't have an opinion about a movie, unless you're a director. Oh wait, those sound like stupid statements, don't they? Hmmm

Who is saying not to complain about the game generally? If my car doesn't work, of course i'll complain to the company - but if i'm also a mechanic, then perhaps i'll have my own insight about why it doesn't work. And perhaps if I had that insight, i'd be slightly more sympathetic that the fault does not entirely lie with the car manufacturer itself. Perhaps the parts they sourced ended up being dodgy.

You sound like you just enjoy being a whiny little karen bitch who doesn't particularly care about the 'why' - in which case why are you even in a thread discussing that?
 

SF Kosmo

Al Jazeera Special Reporter
I mean this may well be true and could have compounded issues. It doesn't mean that CDPR didn't know the game wasn't nrelease ready. It's clear they did. But if they have a legit beef with a business partner they are entitled to seek compensation.
 

darrylgorn

Member
'Allegedly' and 'in part.'

sure-jan.gif
 
No, it really isn't. The "whistleblower" isn't even from CDPR, its from Quantic Labs.
I said: "Kind of is". Both companies are to blame. But is on CDPR (as the creators of the game) to actually ensure the end product's quality.

No having an In-House QA department. Is a big issue. Specially when you are a AAA dev studio.
 

Guilty_AI

Member
I said: "Kind of is". Both companies are to blame. But is on CDPR (as the creators of the game) to actually ensure the end product's quality.

No having an In-House QA department. Is a big issue. Specially when you are a AAA dev studio.
i don't think you interpreted my original comment properly....
 

Raven117

Member
Them relying on QA of a company that was lying to them is absolutely a contributing factor. CDProjektRed may not have had the time to address the game breaking bugs if they were being falsly led around by a defrauding company.

Is it the sole excuse? Of course not, but CDProjektRed was likely under their own obligations to publish the game at a certain time...So they got jammed.
 

Mikky

Neo Member
Did they forget about that leaked video that the developers had? The montage of all the bugs dated before release
 

ZehDon

Gold Member
I'm halfway through my second playthrough as we speak using a different lifepath. Apart from a few instances where you get a unique conversation choice, absolutely nothing has been different. And don't get me started on the boss battles where you can choose to kill or spare them which has no effect on the final outcome of the story.
The entire opening portion of the game is completely unique for each of the three life paths. Why are you lying about something so easily confirmable?
 
The entire opening portion of the game is completely unique for each of the three life paths. Why are you lying about something so easily confirmable?
You mean the opening portion that lasts less than 10 minutes and then leads to a short cinematic that is the exact same across all lifepath options? That one?
 

ZehDon

Gold Member
You mean the opening portion that lasts less than 10 minutes and then leads to a short cinematic that is the exact same across all lifepath options? That one?
No, I mean the one you mentioned - the one who's selection, you said, showed that "absolutely nothing has been different". Surely, there must be a different life path opening that's entirely identical for all three life paths, which is the one you wrote about?
 

Wolfe

Member
Here's what i'll say with 5+ years of experience in games QA: the story is absolutely believable. Gamers need a massive dose of reality when it comes to how QA really works.

Outsourced QA companies are routinely used in the industry. This is nothing new. Sometimes you will even have multiple outsource QA companies assisting, or even working in place of a game developer's internal QA. Just check the credits of most games released nowadays and you will frequently see names like KWS, Quantic Lab, PTW, QLOC etc. Cyberpunk looks like it used both QLOC and Quantic Lab.

These external QA companies often have more responsibility than you'd expect. Senior staff will formulate test plans themselves based on documentation sent over by the game developer. They may also be trusted to make the call on whether the game is in a good enough state to ship. If these people fuck up and miss something, it absolutely can reflect in the quality of the final product. In my own experience, these companies are frequently mismanaged and bleed talent due to shitty working conditions plus poor wages (but gamers are head in sand regarding that point too). So the line about how they had junior people with under 6 months experience working on the game is not surprising at all.

Neither is the revelation of the company lying to cover that up. One company I worked for would often shuttle people from its localization projects within the same office and dump them on the functionality projects, just to get asses on seats - despite it being a different branch of QA testing altogether. Bug quotas are an absolutely terrible practice, because they reinforce a culture of just reporting small shit to make it look like they are doing something, rather than focusing on important shit. You can have someone who you'd say is a 'great' tester on paper because they reported 100 art bugs, but then if they miss multiple major quest breaking bugs, you can't really same the same about them can you?

Gamers also seem to have this view that programmers magically know everything. Even on a project of CP2077's size, it's just a dozen or so people having to keep this spaghetti code together. You can have literally 100s of thousands of bug reports over the course of a project, so good luck keeping tabs on what still needs to be done without decent QA...

"How did they miss this!?" is also frequently uttered on forums when player's encounter bugs that made it into the final game. Truth is, they likely didn't miss that. If their QA was competent, you might even find the very bug report for that issue sitting as a priority 4 in their JIRA - there were just much more pressing issues for the strained programming team to deal with, like stopping the game from crashing every two minutes.

All of this doesn't exonerate CDPR at all, but it's seriously dumb to suggest it wasn't a major contributor. Outside the outsource issues, the project managers bear the most responsibility. The execs who wanted the game to release on time for Christmas probably even more responsibility. Sony and Microsoft also share responsibility for not gatekeeping like they should have (their TRC/TCR checklists absolutely should have denied this game to release in the state it did). It's just a failure on every level from top-to-bottom.

As someone with also 5+ years game QA experience it's bullshit.
 
If QA is important enough that you can blame QA for faulty game quality, than QA is important enough to warrant higher wages, benefits and respect, rather than being farmed out to the lowest bidders and being seen as dead-end jobs in the industry.
 
it doesn't change the fact CDPR knew the game wasn't ready and released it anyway. The game has many flaws at the game design level that no amount of QA is going to fix.
 
That’s a long winded way to say “I don’t know what I’m talking about”.
Sorry, but I took the time to play through every scenario in the game multiple times to test this out. You have to tell where all these big choices exist... because they DON'T exist in the real world.
 
Who is saying not to complain about the game generally? If my car doesn't work, of course i'll complain to the company - but if i'm also a mechanic, then perhaps i'll have my own insight about why it doesn't work. And perhaps if I had that insight, i'd be slightly more sympathetic that the fault does not entirely lie with the car manufacturer itself. Perhaps the parts they sourced ended up being dodgy.

You sound like you just enjoy being a whiny little karen bitch who doesn't particularly care about the 'why' - in which case why are you even in a thread discussing that?
That was not what you were saying. You were literally saying that people who aren't in QA don't understand what they're talking about, which is asinine.
 

Irobot82

Member
I decided to try, for the third time, to give this game a chance. Near the beginning when you are Johnny and Adam blows his arm off, queue next scene, strapped to a chair, arm is back. It's fucking armature hour in this game sometimes.
 
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