Single player games tend to just have the barrier, while multiplayer games are free to change it up, or so it appears.

Duke Nukem 3D had the titular mysterious walls blocking your egress from its levels on any random street.

And of course Bioshock has its first level, wherein your plane crashes and Mysterious Flames appear whenever you swim in any direction that isn’t towards the destination city. Then once you’re inside, there is a Mysterious Hallway at the top of stairs that goes nowhere but has a plasmid dispenser. Which leaves you no choice but to take the plasmid required to continue onward.

The rest of the demo has gates that never open showing you pathways you can’t take.

Resistance: Fall of Man has the linear valley throughout.

Battlefield 2 gets around this issue with one of the best solutions I’ve seen so far: warnings and health penalization if you go outside the area the level designer set, but still presents an otherwise unblocked view outside of your allowed zone:

“Where are you going soldier? Return to your post or you will be shot.”

Tribes 2′s answer was to repeat the map endlessly, except without any buildings or items beyond the regular area. A barrier also appeared if you tried to fly out with the flag in CTF, showing where the game would force you to drop it so you couldn’t lead the other team on an endless chase.

Of course Tribes and Battlefield 2 are exclusively multiplayer affairs.

This isn’t too terribly surprising, there are quite a few combinations of events that could lead up to it, and the general consensus seems to be that you have to play co-op to even have the problem. It also fits in with my general low opinion of the testing that goes into Microsoft these days. If isn’t in the test literature or doesn’t make sense to the particular tester, it can’t be guaranteed to be tested regardless of what the test plan says.

The official crackdown forums — sounds a bit like a breakfast cereal, “Crackdown, now with twice the fiber!” — has full instructions on the preventative medicine for this issue. Though the important thing to keep in mind is that you only have to do it once after the patch, basically just establishing a post-patch (“Title Update”) single player save game before playing for real.

I’ve just bought the downloadable content myself and it is indeed worth $10 in space bucks, so tread carefully and you should be fine.

With regard to the headset, and Microsoft’s console hardware quality. According to the anecdotal evidence available, especially as the CAGCast’s CheapyD said on his podcast something to the effect of: “I can tell when people are using the 360′s wireless headset; it sounds like they’re using an electric razor as they talk”. This piece of junk cost $60 at MSRP, for $20 I bought a palm bluetooth headset for my Treo 650, which will apparently work with my PS3. I realize that the 360 controller itself is actually good, despite the nickle and diming you to death by charging for the battery pack, the battery pack charging cable, and the stand-alone device that actually charges the battery pack in a reasonable amount of time.

Go watch Major Nelson’s first video podcast. It sounds like crap with the wired headsets. Why can they get so many things right and screw up this apparently already easily solvable problem, especially when you have the opportunity to introduce dedicated hardware for the solution.

The answer to all of my problems with the 360, and the quality thereof, is that it isn’t in Microsoft’s financial interest to care. Right now they have consoles in the stores. Something neither Nintendo nor Sony have. People are picking them up with a copy of Gears. They run it, and it patches the first time it is connected to the net.

What is the meaning of Gold Master when the bits aren’t properly tested, or are, but shipped with bugs anyway. Is this going to devolve to the level of bleem; shipping random data on the disc just so the disc is sale-able at retail? Where we’ll download the entire game content just because it wasn’t ready in time to meet N retail season?

What are you paying for with Xbox Live? Excessive downtime, bogus shills who rant about the competition in a bizarre attempt to put a face behind the world’s richest and most pervasive company. Not that I expect much better from Sony, but still.

Just to give one counter-point to the good argument for long-term testers, Nintendo pulls the same crap with their software. They contract out temps from various services who come onto a project only when needed. In fact the worst game-qa interview I’ve ever had was with the big N. Their temp agency literally yelled at the room full of about 10 potential contractors for minutes at a time. Then it turned out that Nintendo had no need for more testers at the current time, and none of the group were brought on. I suspect I would have been just as disappointed with Nintendo’s testing had I gone onto working with them.

However, Nintendo’s games are of very high quality, even third party games. I’ve been playing Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin just about any time I can, and I’ve run into zero bugs. Perhaps the Japanese understand the necessity of high-quality products. I’d sure like to find out what the deal is behind the high quality games which come out of Japan. Perhaps the worst just don’t reach North America…

So, at every interview I’ve ever done for the game industry (and even some outside of it) I’ve been asked about what games I’m playing; what my favorites are. On testing job interviews they’ve also always asked about what bugs I’ve seen in games. The most amusing interview I had was with Monolith, turned me down, but that is fine since I enjoyed the interview anyway.
I thought their style wasn’t so great, with a 10 interviewer to 1 candidate ratio. The questions were still funny though and I met some people that I’d read about, which is always interesting.

Getting back to my main point, knowing about as many games as possible so you can relate to your interviewer is a great thing. Obviously playing them isn’t unfun either. For a long time I was lacking in knowledge of MMORPGs. I’d played a few for a little bit, Anarchy Online in particular. People were routinely asking about them at interviews so before I went to go interview for Monolith to work with them on one of their MMORPGs I bought Star Wars Galaxies and played it on and off for about a week to make my knowledge current.

Yeah, I know why that was a bad choice now, but at the time I thought it might be the MMORPG for me since it is science-fiction-y. Later I would get into World of Warcraft for a few months. At the time though, SWG was terrible. Buggy as heck and I would go off to do a mission and end up fighting a well defended… Flag……

Yeah. Awesome. I’ll keep killing creatures and …flags. What fun.

Worst $50 ever.

So you might make some mistakes if you try to pick games without researching the current state of them in the case of MMORPGs. Unfortunately the 800 pound gorrilla hanging off of my back has always been Madden. For a long time this has been the easiest game to guess that an interviewee might own and then discuss. Which is one of the reasons why I bought it. Yeah it turned out to not be terrible like SWG, however, it is also fun to see the Eagles win games.

And finally that 800 pound gorilla can get off of my back during the next interview. I’ll tell them about Madden. I’ll tell them about how the framerate isn’t consistent in the 360 version, and that the players sometimes seem stuck in funny positions on the line waiting for the snap.

Most importantly, you have to know these games too, especially ones that the company is worked on that you’re interviewing for. Check out the reviews online first, though. They’re going to help you pick out which ones are worth it. I should have done it with Star Wars Galaxies.

So my girlfriend is sitting here playing Joust, earning achievements and bolstering my gamerscore. Before this she was playing Robotron 2040 doing the same thing. Looking through the list of achievements just to find out what needs to be done to unlock them.

This kind of rewarding gameplay is really interesting, she also plays Advance Wars DS for the S-rank medals she gets there.

Obviously not all games have such obvious rewards. A cool gun is rewarding in the way that it kills bad guys, and an unlocked character is rewarding to see a change of style. Solid Snake with a crocodile hat is also another amusing reward if you’ve spent the time to get the hat.

Along the same lines, also in Metal Gear Solid 3 is the ability to get an invisibility cloak if you happen to go through each area shooting the available frogs hidden throughout.

So all these rewards have to mean something. The high-score in a game in my house never meant much. The high score among my friends on Xbox Live is appealing.

I’ll keep catching the frogs in Metal Gear Solid 3, but I keep wishing I got a fruit salad like in Battlefield 2 for catching them all in addition to the satisfacton of enhanced sneaking. My girlfriend will keep playing Astropop now that she has gotten all of the interesting achievements in Joust.

Somewhere there is a tester sitting in his cave, living in partner net making sure that each of these achievements is activated by the right trigger in the game. Another makes sure that the toast pops up with the right message when the achievements are activated.

The focus on achievement satisfaction and other pretty end-user elements of the 360 UI shows us exactly what kind of testing the console gets. The 360 routinely locked up for a short period twice during the path from system turning on to Robotron. This isn’t an uncommon occurence So with the focus on end-user happyness you break…end user happyness!

Test everything equally and treat your testers like useful people instead of a disposable value proposition and maybe you’ll have better testing. Metal Gear Solid 3 hasn’t locked up on me once, neither has my Playstation 2. I realize that other people have had these problems, however I know far more people who have had problems with their 360.

Anyway, I’ll keep looking for little tiny frogs…

Since Sam asked why in the comments, I’ll answer here:

You will cut the innocent pleading survivors to pieces if it so much as brushes against them. Mwhahahaha. Oops!

Excellent game by the way, the save system gets a lot of complaints, and I understand why. However, nobody should let those complaints stop them from picking up this delightful game.

What might drive you bonkers during the game, however, is the terrible survivor AI. During one play through I tried to rescue a woman whose child had been eaten by zombies. The only options I had for bringing her along to the rescue area were either letting her follow close behind me (she doesn’t seem to want to run), or carrying her on my back.

Although I can’t attack whilst carrying her, at least we moved with some speed, until we reached a fountain in the north part of the mall in which we were attacked. Then I had fallen and lost her in the mess of zombies, I killed those zombies, and ran out of the basin of this fountain hoping she would follow.

Unfortunately her AI wouldn’t get her over the lip of the basin before zombies would attack her, so I was forced to get back in, fight off the zombies, and get back out again. Since you can’t carry survivors over anything that requires a climb or a jump, they have to do it on their own.
This went on until she died.

I suppose there might be some other method of getting survivors out of situations like this, it is still a gameplay failure if they make it that difficult though.

In a similar theme there is an excellent interweb MMORPG called Urban Dead out there. I suggest anyone who is a fan of zombies and their games check it out.

You slide it lovingly into your Xbox 360, awaiting the awesome extreme legume action like you’ve never seen it before, complete with the special collector edition marketing manager interview and then the game breaks. Maybe the legume eaters are
breaking the rules of the tournament and web forum trolls are up in arms about this. Maybe John Madden himself demanded the game change the rules, but most likely it was an error in the testing stage of development. Any statements to the contrary from the publisher are baloney, of course.

If you’re lucky the publisher and developer will either patch the game or recall it, If you’re not lucky they’ll say this is as it was intended and encourage you to buy the version released next year.

Why is Perfect Madden Zero broken? Who failed you?

Most likely, we’re seeing a combination of failure here. On the part of several testing teams, and possibly a developer. Plus some lower testing standards. I think to some extent all parties involved have lowered their standards, deliberately or not, with the lower quality of their testing teams. Which isn’t to say the testers themselves are entirely to blame. I think it has something to do with how they are treated, how much they are paid, what their expectations are coming into the job, and how long they work at whatever particular testing facility.

I’m going to address these issues in order, since I don’t think I’ve done so coherently in the past. Once again I’m going to prefix this with the warning that most of what I’m saying only applies to larger companies, smaller developers/studios can have better testing procedures
and treat their staff better.

Tester Treatment
As I’ve alluded to in the past, most testing facilities at larger companies consist of large rooms
full of consoles and televisions piled high on cheap desks (sometimes even folding tables). Developers I know describe seeing their publisher’s testing facilities as scary darkened
halls of smelly masses. This sounds like an exaggeration but it really isn’t that far from the truth. Windows are often covered – when I worked in the northwest United States I would often get to work before the sun rose and leave work without having seen it all day – to prevent glare. Free drinks are provided, and your coworkers are usually friendly.

I know some people will think I’m silly for even mentioning this, though I feel I must. For whatever reason, due to cheapness perhaps, the toilet paper in the facilities is very often the coarsest sandpaper available. I hope this is not indicative of misguided attempts to improve tester efficiency.

Pay
Most beginning game testers are paid around nine to thirteen dollars an hour. I don’t think anyone can properly live off of this kind of pay, especially if they are on-call, especially if they live in the areas around these facilities (expensive burbs), or if they don’t live around them, they have to commute and own a car with the required costs involved. Bussing in to Microsoft each day from Seattle would require waking at 4AM. Naturally if the tester ops for health care (which everyone should, this isn’t a very relaxing job), their pay will be further reduced.

Job Expectations
One of the few things Major Nelson says that I agree with is that games are like sausage, you don’t really want to find out how they’re made, you just want to enjoy the end result. Most people interview for these jobs thinking they will be cake, you go in for work, you play some games, you go home happy. If you are a mole man and can live without the Sun’s rays for a few months at a time, please do go work in the northwest at one of the testing facilities there.

In reality the testing is fun if you are like me and enjoy making sure that what somebody buys is a finished product. I do not believe all of my past-coworkers have shared this love of bug hunting, and that the end-product may have suffered as a result. Even crap like Sims: Urbz in the City needs good QA. Somebody enjoys the Urbz, for the sake of their happyness, you have to pretend that you like it as well.

Length of Job
As I’ve mentioned in the past, at some companies you might notice your coworkers magically disappearing one day. Turnover rates are ridiculously high in many larger facilities. Sometimes this is good, sometimes they’re throwing out good experience in favor of cheapness. I have seen some excellent coworkers disappear one day, never to return, with no explanation from management. Others clued me in, these folks were fired when there “weren’t enough games to test”. Which really means “we’re all entirely disposable.”

I believe that this policy of replaceable tester units contributes to the lack of quality in many games. If you throw out the accumulated experience of these testers, don’t let them know up-front what to expect, treat them like dirt, and pay them as such, you will have a lower quality product in the end.