Dragon Age News Thread

Anonymous asked:
Why does it take game developers so long to make fixes to things people outrage over(usually coming in new updates)

askagamedev:
The process of pushing a patch to the public has several steps that most people aren’t aware of, each of which has a deadline. We don’t patch single issues as they come - patches have to get certified by the first party console manufacturers before they are approved for release, and that costs money. Instead, we bundle up a bunch of changes that all go in at once, and then release it as a patch. The process generally goes like this:



Determine the list of must-fix issues in the patch

The leadership goes over the list of bugs and assigns them a priority rating. This might be something like “causes a huge amount of server log spam”, “animation T-poses under these conditions”, or “warlock class ability Death Blossom is too strong in pvp”, or “item duplication possible under these conditions”. Those with the highest priority will be fixed first. Sometimes the priority is super high (like server connectivity issues or item duplication bugs), and that will get an emergency patch. Most issues aren’t that critical, so they get bundled into the patch schedule. By launch, we usually have a rough schedule for when each patch is supposed to be delivered for the upcoming year.

Relevant stakeholders give their estimates on how long it will take to fix those issues along with how long it will take to complete any new content that comes in the patch as well. The exact date and contents of the patch is determined at around this time. Some patches are small and only contain bug fixes and/or optimizations. Some are large and contain new content. Devs generally try to fix the issues in order of our prioritization.



Fix the bugs and make the content

This is where we fix the bugs. We do the stuff we estimated time for in the preceding step. Content creators finish building the new content. For emergency patches, this could be very fast turnaround. For regular updates, this could take weeks. The deadline for adding new content is called content complete (or content lock). After content lock, any new content or other changes must go into the next patch, not the current one. Fixing bugs has its own deadline, and that’s generally called code complete (or code lock). Once it’s code complete, there’s no new changes allowed unless specifically asked for by QA and approved by production. We can’t risk introducing new bugs in the patch so we lock it down at this point for stability.



Test the patch

QA tests the patch to make sure it works right. Any issues that will cause the patch to fail certification will be bounced back and must be fixed. Additional bugs may be found during this time, in which case they will be prioritized. If they are important enough, they will be fixed before the patch is submitted for certification. If not, they will be put into the prioritized list of remaining issues that have yet to be addressed and (possibly) fixed in an upcoming patch.



Submit the patch for certification

If the game is on consoles, this means we have to submit the patch to first party (Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo) for approval. If the patch fails for some reason, we have to fix it and resubmit. The patch certification process is usually a much faster (and cheaper) turnaround than submitting an entire game, but it isn’t free. If we can avoid putting out emergency patches, we’ll do it. Emergency patches tend to be hurried fixes crushed together very quickly in order to address an immediate need and not tested nearly as thoroughly as they should.



Players finally get the patch

Console manufacturers will generally hold onto the finished patch until the following Tuesday to release them. That’s the schedule set by Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo, not the publishers or devs. This might be where you ask about the PC since there isn’t a cert process for that platform. Unfortunately, it’s really super hard to maintain two separate versions of the same game, so we usually want to release the patch for everyone at around the same time. This means that a console patch can actually hold up the release of the PC patch. The PC patch usually gets released when the console patch passes certification.



So, in summary: 1-4 weeks for patch development, 1-2 weeks for testing, one week for certification, and then up to six days until the next Tuesday means non-emergency patches usually take at minimum three weeks (and usually longer) to go from active development to your console or PC. We usually have lists of bugs hundreds deep by the time we ship, but they’ve all been judged to be low enough priority that we will either fix them in a patch on the schedule, or that they just aren’t important enough to address. As we get more data about how the players are playing the game, we reprioritize the list as needed while we build the patches according to the schedule. This entire process is why it takes so long to get a patch into your hands.