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Employees from Cyberpunk 2077 QA company said the company lied about providing experienced, well-staffed QA teams

LectureMaster

Gold Member
https://www.pcgamer.com/quantic-QA-tester-report/


Two current and eight former workers at prolific Romanian quality assurance outsourcer Quantic Lab spoke to PC Gamer about their jobs on the condition of anonymity, alleging that management not only pressures its testers above and beyond the norm for this vital but too often under-resourced subset of game development, but also misleads clients about the size and competency of its QA teams⁠—and directs employees to keep up the charade.
A number of the employees we spoke to were intimately involved in Quantic's testing of Cyberpunk 2077. They allege that Cyberpunk 2077 and NBA 2K were a gravity well at the company, pulling talent from other divisions and leaving other projects short-staffed even as the Cyberpunk project in particular floundered. All the employees we spoke to indicated that these two marquee projects were fully staffed, but not with the experienced testers promised to the clients.

"From a team of 30 people [initially assigned to Cyberpunk 2077], I think only 10 of them had experience on QA," a source who worked on Cyberpunk for Quantic told us. Of those 10, they said that "none of the 'experienced' testers had more than a year."

Several of the employees we spoke to mentioned being told by management to avoid talking about how many years they'd worked in the industry when communicating with CD Projekt employees, and they agreed that the Polish developer was not getting the level of experience it paid for with its QA team at Quantic. They said that CDPR contacted Quantic several times about the team's underwhelming performance.

Let's say that by no means CDPR is now just an innocent genuine kid who's been lied to the whole time, them only allowing reviewers to review PC version thing was pretty shady.

But I do hope they well learned the lesson the hardest way and strive to deliver a good launch product next time. After all, I do really like their way of telling memorable stories in their games.
 
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Using Romanian QA tester company. Well there's your first problem, surprised they didn't go with a Western Company instead, cause my god us Eastern Europeans like the muddy the numbers, and fuck over people a lot
 

Three

Member
Didn't we have this rumour a year or so back too? I guess it's getting more coverage/confirmed now?
Yeah we did. I also kind of don't buy it because they were saying old consoles are giving them problems and they were delaying the game so they must have known something was up. It's not like they thought they were releasing a perfectly bugfree game.
 
Alright, not sure if I should say this or not but whatever. My romanian friend worked at a specific...QA testing company which also handled the testing for FIFA 23 ahem
ukcLIec.png
, NFS(yeah the new one, I knew it was coming many months ago), and others...now I think they're doing testing on Dragon Age(no name but has a code attached to it) but since he no longer works for them, doesn't know what exactly they are specifically testing, probably inventory stuff, nothing major, I hope. Anyway, my point is, from what he told me, NONE of the employees have any gaming experience besides playing CS or League or other f2p mp games. They took online classes for QA certification and thats about it. He was laughing at how bad they were. I noticed a lot of QA companies popping up out of nowhere in my country and it seems major gaming publishers hire them for cheap and fast labor.
 
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Testing is dead. Companies push products out the door and (if you're lucky) patch out problems post-release.
Currently running through Pathfinder 2 on ps5 and that game is a hot mess. The further I get, the more common crashes seem to be, I've had it kick me out probably over two dozen times now. A host of other technical bugs have reared their head. Most are mildly annoying but there have been several that required reloads. I'm powering through it because the actual game is amazing, but it is a broken ass release for sure.
The game has been out for over a year on pc, I was kinda shocked how bad it was. I suspect many of the problems come from the fact that it has to run in the base ps4/xbox platforms and the hardware just isn't up to the task. A native ps5 patch would be great, but given the size of the studio I will be shocked if we get one.
 
Did the developers ever play their own game?


Anyway the truth is that games are released broken and nobody cares including gamers. I'll just wait a year for them to be fully patched up.
 

fatmarco

Member
I mean its still horseshit, any developer could have seen the Xbox One and PS4 versions were running at 15fps with pop in and glitches.

That some 3rd party didn't test it adequately is in my view, irrelevant given how clearly poor the game clearly ran to anyone with eyes.

The glitches, which the QA company would have some responsibility for, were overstated in comparison to how little they'd put into the games current gen versions.
 

Roni

Gold Member
Third party contractors are hired to take the blame. They knew the state the game was in, but they also knew if push came to shove they always had the option of dumping it on Quantic's lap.

Quantic's no saint either. I work in QA and the allegations are spot on to what I've seen happen time and again. All they care about is getting the deal in writing and then squeezing as much money out of the contract as possible, usually by using junior professionals so they can pocket the difference from the promised seniors.
 
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it was obvious the game wasn't tested properly lol.

i'm not hating on the game because i think it's great but yeah it felt like CDPR devs just built the game/made changes and didn't properly test it. when it comes to last gen... i don't know what they were doing. probably half assing it and pushing it out for the sake of capitalising on what was a huge market. so much for "we leave greed to others". i mean they are business and that was marketing bullshit. can't blame a business for trying to make money but they were desperate for PS4/XB1 sales. No way they were going to ditch it back then.

on release i personally didn't have many bugs (played on PC) and the ones i did weren't anything game breaking. they were fixed quite quickly. that would be expected of any game. but the game is coming up to 3 years old and nothing really major has been added to it and yet we're still getting patches with a shit load of bug fixes. maybe if they had properly QA'd it then it'd have launched in the state it is today.
 
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Did the developers ever play their own game?


Anyway the truth is that games are released broken and nobody cares including gamers. I'll just wait a year for them to be fully patched up.
I remember the documentary on Streetfighter 2 the original. And the developers were horrified to find bugs in the game after launch.

The easier it is to patch bugs, the more bugs are left unpatched until release. And buggy games die unpatched because developers abandon them.

No one is to blame. The industry just doesn't care about debugging now that it COULD be patched. Note that "could" does NOT mean "would". People need to not buy buggy games or just accept that the community would have to fix it themselves like with Elder Scrolls.
 
Testing is dead. Companies push products out the door and (if you're lucky) patch out problems post-release.
Currently running through Pathfinder 2 on ps5 and that game is a hot mess. The further I get, the more common crashes seem to be, I've had it kick me out probably over two dozen times now. A host of other technical bugs have reared their head. Most are mildly annoying but there have been several that required reloads. I'm powering through it because the actual game is amazing, but it is a broken ass release for sure.
The game has been out for over a year on pc, I was kinda shocked how bad it was. I suspect many of the problems come from the fact that it has to run in the base ps4/xbox platforms and the hardware just isn't up to the task. A native ps5 patch would be great, but given the size of the studio I will be shocked if we get one.
That studio has a pattern of broken console releases now ..inexcusable ..don't care how small they are
 
I remember the documentary on Streetfighter 2 the original. And the developers were horrified to find bugs in the game after launch.

The easier it is to patch bugs, the more bugs are left unpatched until release. And buggy games die unpatched because developers abandon them.

No one is to blame. The industry just doesn't care about debugging now that it COULD be patched. Note that "could" does NOT mean "would". People need to not buy buggy games or just accept that the community would have to fix it themselves like with Elder Scrolls.
Gaming companies are to blame. But gamers do need to not buy thus stuff as well (if the game is truly a buggy mess)

Especially if the company is charging $70 and is a huge company like Bethesda (now that Bethesda is attached to MS, even less excuse).

We all know Starfield will run like shit thpugj
 
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StreetsofBeige

Gold Member
All blame to CDPR.

- Lousy launch state
- Lousy last gen versions
- Only allowing game sites to promote PC versions
- Almost no PR videos to go on. In 10 years, I think the only good video released was that 40 minute demo. Thats it. Going by it looked fine, it shows it was probably a next gen or PC version

It makes no difference whether not not the test team was good or bad. It's not like the game has obscure bugs that slip through cracks and only after millions of gamers play it they find them. CD management and employees knew the game was in bad shape and mislead gamers with PC rig media. They knew what they were doing.
 
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