I’ll be the first to admit that I give Treyarch and Activision a lot of grief over the debacle that has been Call of Duty: Black Ops for the PlayStation 3. As someone who has owned Black Ops for both the 360 and the PlayStation 3, the quality control differential between the two is pretty astounding despite what Treyarch may have you believe. However, today, Josh Olin, the Community Manager for Treyarch has made the claim that gamers shouldn’t expect developers to be able to ship bug-free games.
On one hand, as a realist, I can’t fault Olin for making this comment and I agree 100% entirely. It’s ridiculous for any gamer to expect a game to be free of glitches or bugs to a certain extent. After all, nobody is perfect and neither are developers around the world. However, on the other hand, as a gamer, I find myself trying to define the line at which point flaws, bugs, and glitches become a case of poor quality control or just accidental slippage.
According to Olin, one of the reasons many bugs make it through Quality Assurance is that millions of plays play Call of Duty within its first hour around the world that not even a life-time of QA could catch the things that so many players playing in succession could catch.
“If you look at the population size of the Call of Duty franchise, just a single hour of gameplay collectively after the game’s been out – you add up all the man-hours that all the fans put into it – that’s more time than you could put into Quality Assurance in a lifetime.”
“The sheer number of people [playing] is staggering, and they hit buttons and they hit glitches and walls in such weird, strange ways that we could never predict or think of,” he said.
Obviously this is true. It’s hard to deny that developers can’t always predict how Player X is going to play the game different than Player C, B, or A. You’re not always going to catch everything, but with a game that had as many problems as the PlayStation 3 version of Call of Duty Black Ops, it just feels like this is more of a scape goat that anything else.
What do you guys think?
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