Mass Effect PC: DRM'ed Alien Sex

[Asher]

Originally posted by snoopy369
Usually there is a period where 'additions' are locked down (ie, only bugfixes), in the projects i've been involved with that is about 2 weeks, and then three to six weeks while the game is being mastered ('going gold') you start working on the first patch.

The problem is usually bugs later in the game - they are hard to find because you have to set up certain circumstances usually. The "If you take this quest and then go over to this city and kill this guy, suddenly the game hangs" bugs.

Crash on startup is something they should have been able to catch, IMO... they should have the cards and the machines to test most of the cards out there. A few older - or super new - cards I wouldn't object to, but the breadth of cards this is failing on means that a) their coding was probably poor (relying on things that weren't effective across cards) and b) they didn't test this on a lot of major cards, even to the point of just starting up the game.

I wouldn't at all be surprised if the "crash on startup" is caused by new drivers that weren't available to developers in the last months of testing.

[LDiCesare]

It comes from BOTH.

Yes but it's 100 times because of the graphics cards and 2 because of the OS.
Testing twice as much is NOT a problem, tesing 100 times is.

[Asher]

Originally posted by LDiCesare

Yes but it's 100 times because of the graphics cards and 2 because of the OS.
Testing twice as much is NOT a problem, tesing 100 times is.

Are you forgetting about the effort involved in FIXING these defects or just those involved in IDENTIFYING?

Clearly it is the latter, which is ridiculous.

[Wiglaf]

This game would have been better if it allowed more choices, and did not offer rfake choices that have no impact on the game or even the dialog. Also it is impossible to have sex with the male party member, but sex with aliens is okay. I am not sure if this offended anyone on the site but I was fine with it.

[DrSpike]

You can have sex with Kaidan if you are a female Shephard. Also, lesbian action is permitted.

[Solver]

Also, lesbian action is permitted.

Must-buy!!

[Harovan]

edit: NM, wrong thread

[Apocalypse]

Originally posted by Asher


I wouldn't at all be surprised if the "crash on startup" is caused by new drivers that weren't available to developers in the last months of testing.

No, it crashes for cards that haven't even had driver updates in the past few months.

[LDiCesare]

Are you forgetting about the effort involved in FIXING these defects or just those involved in IDENTIFYING?

Yes I focus on identifying, because I talked about development, not maintenance. Fixing doesn't require you to buy the 24 cards that the game might run upon but the 2 on which it doesn't work, therefore it's not as hard or time consuming.
But it's done late, and the reputation of the product is hurt, and you wouldn't have to do that if you had fixed hardware. Still, my point was that graphics cards and their variety was far more annoying than the variety of OS, not that graphics cards variety wasn't a problem. And I maintain that if games weren't made for PCs because of graphics cards, there wouldn't be as many graphics cards and therefore you'd reach a kind of balance.

[Asher]

Yes I focus on identifying, because I talked about development, not maintenance.

In what world does fixing bugs before a release not fall under development?

[lord of the mark]

what LD is saying is kind of what I was trying to say. It seems to be PRIMARILY a difficulty of video cards, and if PC gaming truely declines, it wont be possible to support the number of video card releases (though i was thinking more along the lines of a deliberate action by the GPU makers than of that kind of natural equilibrating action)

[Kuciwalker]

I wouldn't write off an order of magnitude contribution from OS differences...

edit: also, decline in the gaming market probably won't do much to condense the number of low-end offerings (i.e. integrated graphics), which IIRC constitute a large majority of sales. In fact, the higher-end market collapsing would force game makers to target those more and more.

[LDiCesare]

In what world does fixing bugs before a release not fall under development?

In this world, if you have not identified a bug, you're unlikely to fix it.

[Asher]

Originally posted by LDiCesare

In this world, if you have not identified a bug, you're unlikely to fix it.

This doesn't preclude it from being a development effort.

[Kuciwalker]

Also, that is not really true anyway, IME.