Damien 'Puuk' Foletto Interview, Part One
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Q: CRPGs have a reputation for being buggy. It's been said that publishers don't know how to handle quality assurance for something more complex than racing games or FPS. Since you started in the QA Dept. at Interplay, what are your thoughts on this statement?
A: CRPG's are the toughest game to debug, bar none. If you make a game with a myriad of quest options and world interactivity, you are just setting yourself up for an avalanche of potential problems. If a designer does his job well, he has made quests that have several paths towards completion. While this sounds great, it opens up a whole can of worms for the programmers and scriptors to overcome. If the designer does their own scripting - which most designers do nowadays - then that is just more complexity the designer must contend with. Often times, the designer must seek out the programmer to get a particularly complicated script to function. On the surface, this complicated script might work in its initial phase, but once a slew of testers jumps on said quest, something will break because a tester tried something neither designer nor the programmer initially thought of. The script will get fixed, but it might not be entirely fixed. This is because compared to the general populace who purchases a game, the testing pool is infinitely small. There is bound to be a large group of people who will try things in a CRPG that the designer, programmer, producer, tester, etc. never thought of doing. Of course, the people who find this bug will be the most vocal people rarely take the time to post praise, but always seem to have more than enough time to post complaints. So, this gives the perception of a (buggy game,) even though the game probably shipped relatively bug free. This is not to say that CRPG's are not buggy, but what I am saying is that CRPG's actually have a legitimate excuse for being buggy upon initial release. Some worse than others, that's for sure.
