Hello, I work in QA and the gap in quality / bug / perfs between "older" Obsidian productions and more recent ones like PoE2 is pretty astonishing. Was there any big changes in the way QA/QC was treated internally that you could have seen due to your role in recent production or was it simply a matter of having "more time and money" / hands free in your timetable ? Thanks in advance for your answer and have a good one :)
Thank you. With Pillars 1 and Deadfire, we were the ultimate arbiters of our ship date. In both cases, when it came down to the wire, we decided to push back the release of the game by a few months. That can make a huge difference.
We’re not total idiots. We know that we have a reputation for buggy games. And while some of that is endemic to making big, complicated RPGs with thousands of different ways through them, it’s still within our power to reduce bugs on our end with more time. When it’s a publisher’s choice, that ability (or priority) can be taken away from us.
With the PoE games, Bobby Null also did a great job of limiting quest complexity at the document stage. There is a potential danger in quest design being so limited that it isn’t complex enough to engage the player’s interest, but we benefit by having less buggy quests overall. Games like F:NV didn’t really have any framework for quest design, which often resulted in extremely fragile quests that took more time to implement than expected and pushed testing outside of the development window.
It’s definitely a trade-off, because some quests in F:NV are very cool because of their complexity. We just have to be very aware of the time commitment we’re making when we have quests like that.
