I’m ok with “portmortem” on this one.
I… #
- Flew across the country to spend a week looking after a relative in the hospital.
- Survived a rather thorough reorganization at the day job.
- Made far less progress than expected in that Unity course that I bought on Udemy.
- Made no progress in PMGAI. Of course, it looks like they’re behind as well.
And… #
Well, frankly, I’ve played an awful lot of Fallout 4. It combines a lot of my favourite video game elements, and still manages to be a great “after a long day, just relax and play” game. Well done, Bethesda, well done.
As a habitual QA professional, it’d be easy to be hard on Fallout 4 for the bugs. Texture oddities, objects falling out of the world, quests getting stuck, companions getting lost, etc. It just makes me want to learn more about their internal testing processes. I’ve seen a few GDC talks on automated testing of big games, but it seems to still be the exception instead of the rule. I can also see the end result being a matter of priorities: If the systems gets flakey, we still pass certification; if it crashes, we fail certification; so just make it keep going, whether the internal data structures still make sense or not; and since only a crash would get proper attention from the dev team, those “system drift” problems just stay in the code.
I’m playing through with maxed-out Charisma, by the way, to see how that goes. I have enjoyed the times I’ve been able to purely talk my way out of situations, but I definitely have needed to invest in firepower as well. At least the prices are good.
