"Darkwingz;c-18172875" wrote:
"halloweenchild;c-18172609" wrote:
"Gamer_34567544;c-18172431" wrote:
I'll believe it when I actually have a bug-free game. I've lost all hope for Sims anymore. There are games built by single developers or a small group that run better than this. Not being mean, I've seen it. A few indie games with a low amount of bugs:
Game Dev Tycoon
Game Dev Masters
The Infected- this one is huge, as it features building, cooking, and an open world- things that Sims 3 had- among other things. Only bug I've notices was a set of stairs that you had to jump over to reach the top- that's it.
Why are indie devs (AKA independent game developers, sometimes in a team) able to fix and have less bugs than big AAA companies, who have more experienced developers?
Heck, look at Five Nights at Freddy's. The game series was made by a single man who also tested his own creations, with the help of his sons on occasion in case he missed something. That is until FNAF Help Wanted, where it became an AAA title. But the point still stands, an indie dev who made a franchise all on his own and did the QA on top of everything else.
I can't remember who got burn-out from the game's community drama-lama... Scott Cawthorn or Toby Fox.
Maxis/EA aren't indie and have to meet expectations of investors and sponsors. (Which is no longer as bulky as FIFA bankroll.)
In the case of Nintendo, that's been visible to it's consumers as a quarterly schedule.
Indies have a smaller team, so communicating bugs is a thousand percent more efficient and effective than something like SEGA emailing PSO2NGS bugs to the SEGA JP division. (emails are pretty much standardized communication for larger companies)
Indies can freely choose to continue a franchise or work with one of their passions; that's what Toby Fox has done with occasional official Pokémon soundtracks. With the way the TS4 team has been trying to be as diverse and inclusive as Disney Dreamlight Valley, I'm thinking that some design-work apprenticeship for Disney would do them some good in seeing the difference between the company standards.
(Because tbh, if Disney were to ever reach for Sims property, it wouldn't have the darker themes in it anymore.
TS1-TS4 might even become lost media in such a buyout.)
Back before the technology boom of 2010's, Game Freak had dozens of bugs pop-up in Pokémon, but that (Bad Egg) was always an intended side-effect of bypassing/altering the system's coding. Nowadays, the only way you can see stuff as crippling as that is if you're an apprentice like ILCA and you're not paying attention to the old code and modern revisions/patches to that data.
So TLDR: TS4 debug team just doesn't test as efficiently/retain as much experience as the uber-tier nerds at Nintendo.
It's not entirely bad, just normalized modern company expectations compared to hardcore employees who work the same code for 50+ years while learning new code along the journey of technology growth.
I know Scott was forced to retire from FNAF due to stupid drama related to his personal life (and his drama was literally minor in comparison to some of the antics of other Indie devs like HN, BaTIM and Poppy Playtime) Toby Fox, IIRC took a step back for a while, but is still slowly working on Deltarune last I heard anyway feel free to correct me.
I do agree that EA doesn't need to meet expectations, but they really should since it will cost them not only sponsorships but also their audience and as a business they should know that a quality product means more profit. But I guess that's a bit hard for them to grasp, since they're only a step above Blizzard at this point.
I really wish that the amount of debugging and QA testing that is done in Japan would become normalised in the West, like at least companies in Japan know that a quality product sells. EA USED to know this, but it seems in their corporate greed, they have forgotten. xO
