In the game development field, there are many important roles that help bring the game together. Without artists, there are no visuals of any kind. Without programmers, nothing “gets done” regarding making animations, gameplay flow, and so on. Without audio engineers, the game won’t have any music or sound effects to help bring the world to life more. Then, without QA Testers, the game can be released with bugs galore, and basically doom it without much effort. For Borderlands 4, this was a title that had been in development for six years, yet was released in an incredibly buggy state, much to gamers’ chagrin.
So that makes the latest interview on the Borderlands 4 Steam Community page all the more interesting, as they interviewed Jeff Mott, who happens to be the Test Manager at 2K, and thus, the one who oversaw all the QA work on the title. And when he was asked how to tell if a game “felt right” after all the testing, his answer was…curious:
“To me, quality means doing our best to meet customer expectations. It isn’t about finding every bug anymore; that’s an impossible task. Games are simply too big and they’re ever-changing. It’s about finding the bugs that matter and advocating on behalf of the customer to get them fixed.
For me, achieving this goal comes down to collaboration and experience. There isn’t a single person making this call; it’s a discussion, backed up by data from multiple groups, to ultimately decide when something feels ready.”
That’s interesting for various reasons. The first reason is that, objectively, that is how “it should be done,” but that’s not exactly what happened with Gearbox Software’s latest title. After all, there were plenty of bugs and performance issues that should’ve been caught by QA, but they “felt it felt right” and let the game go forward anyway. That’s not really “advocacy on behalf of the customer,” as proven by all the customers who blasted the game at launch for the quality issues.
You can even extend this to the seasonal content that was just released, as it was also blasted by gamers as some of the “worst content” that the franchise has ever seen, and needed a quick patch to fix one of its key items! You’d think that would’ve been “worked on” in the QA process, but it wasn’t to be.
Needless to say, this won’t give confidence for future content, because if they’ve screwed up this much so far, what will happen next that will need to be heavily patched?
