New Games Suck... Or Is It Just Me?

People who say DEI is the problem are really saying if you only hire white males there would be no problem.

IMHO people **** up all the time. All people. this includes white males.

As to DEI representation in games do you really want to play games with no female characters? Do you think FFVII would be better if Barret was white?

No, people who say DEI is the problem are really saying that if you only hire the most qualified people for the job there would be less problems. This is probably true to an extent, and it's just a coincidence that in most of those fields the most qualified people are primarily composed of white[and asian] males.

More important than the quality of the staff is the C-suite pushing decisions for investors.

Profit motivated decisions are the smoking gun, the *** black girl with purple hair is the scapegoat.
(... and usually dumb enough to be out front, taking the credit, not knowing they're going to get crucified for it)

There are really no evidence shows that DEI increases bugs in a game. QA is generally a department that has lower qualification, so the anti-DEI argument is harder to apply here. Are you saying that if you hire X amount of certain race then such obvious bugs can't be found? This doesn't make sense at all.

If the job is hard task like building an game engine from scratch, and you claim that DEI hires may hinder this task, I am more likely to believe in it.

But catching obvious bugs in a playtest? Come on.

I think those bugs aren't found is probably because the game is large open world(hence more bugs) and time allocated for QA isn't long enough, so it doesn't pop during QA. Or they popped but no time to fix. That's really it.


It's also pretty well-known that open world games will have more bugs. Elder scrolls games have been bug-fest since 20+ years ago. Nobody said anything about DEI back then. But open world games with bugs today=DEI's fault? Doesn't make sense to me.


I don't think hiring more black or gay or less to playtest in this case makes that much difference tbh.

No one says that
People are going to ask questions when a company that publicly states their hiring process is focused on DEI and are more concerned over someones skin color, gender, what they identify as and who theyre attracted to vs what knowledge they have in their brain when said company puts out a shitty bug riddled product. No ones saying "if you had only heterosexual white males, this wouldnt happen". People have the right to point out that the hiring process was focused on things other than merit, and the end-result shows it.
This is not "racism".

Metroid
Tomb Raider
Horizon (getting ANOTHER remake, what the ***)
Returnal
Resident evil
Stellar Blade
FF 6/3 (Terra is the title character. You dont need her to beat the game, but Celes is the first char you get in WoR. Its a female main regardless)
FF13
Control
Nier: Automata
Bloodstained

All games I've played and thoroughly enjoyed even if I dont identify as a female. I will be picking up Echoes of Wisdom next week too, with Zelda as the main character, another female lead.

Literally no one has ever said anything negative about Barret.

What?

I already answered this to a T:

I'd think on the gaming side management, but especially whoever is designing the narrative, has a more significant effect on the end result than the lower level engineers. I'd expect these decisions boil down to what a small handful of people, high level managers, think the path should be and the lower level engineers/writers are just kindof stuck with whatever they are given. This could just as easily be a bunch of white or Asian men driving these decisions based on what they think will appeal to a wider audience. When you have hundreds or more working on a title, individual contributions are much smaller at the lower end of the pole.

The people writing the code, dialogue, doing VA, motion capture, etc are just dealing the hand they've been dealt and, in this era anyway, likely have less input in the higher level end result (or so I'd expect). I don't work in the gaming world much but every other large scale software project with a lot of engineers - decisions like this are made way above the person actually doing the implementation.

and I've never met a software engineer that gave two shits what you looked like in an interview as long as you had basic hygiene. It's hard enough finding competent and driven people to fill technical roles, there isn't a lot of room for discrimination. Hiring managers can override engineering decisions in interviews based on DEI objectives but I doubt that happens often and I've never seen it personally.


This really depends on the type of bug. Some can be tied to hardware that may not be in their test environment, others could be due to conditions that weren't found during testing, or even a last minute change.

I also think current distribution models have made development lazy, they know they can push an update at will and so it's easier to push it off compared to decades prior where it had to be stable when it went gold. You see this in other software industries, also, including several prominent open source projects.

That and games are really complex software. It's real easy to introduce bugs that get buried, but like I said about the Crowdstrike thing, for most major bugs - someone somewhere knew it existed, fought to get it fixed, and was overruled or told to push it off.

A lot of older open world/non-linear games, such as Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall, were notorious for being super buggy. I also vaguely recall Fallout 2 had many many bugs.

On the other hand, linear jrpgs are generally bug-free. Even modern linear jrpgs like FF16 were still relatively bug free at launch.

Personally, I think non-linear structure is the biggest reason behind bugs. Maybe modern update method is still a reason, but it probably matters less than game structure itself.

Since there are more open world games these days, it's normal that more games are buggy these days.

That's fair, there were a lot of more open ended games from that era (e.g. Infinity Engine titles) that were bug ridden messes, so the release format isn't the only culprit. The community ended up fixing a lot of these issues over time, so yea, I'd agree with this in some cases.

It is absolutely reasonable that the more complex the code the more likely there are to be weird bugs, but at the same time there are a number of simpler games released that have game breaking or dumb bugs in otherwise simple content that get fixed via update shortly after release.

There is no universal answer, most bugs have their own unique story, but I don't think there is any real tie to DEI and # of bugs introduced. This is a technical issue resolved by engineers which doesn't relate at all to the issues most people seem to take with modern games.

simpler on the outside doesnt mean that it was implemented simply, as an example I have some code that I am working with that uses a laser to cut an L in a metal substrate, I have found dozens of little logical error ("game breaking" bugs that when the conditions are right will destroy the part being made) but the system has been running for 42 years and the "unexplainable" weird performance has always been chocked up to a random cosmic ray.

After rewriting it, I took the L Cut function from 193 of lines down to 11 simple lines (how it should have been to begin with.)

Sometimes people miss the forest through the trees and make a series of decisions that over complicate what should have been a simple clear design, more lines of code more chances to get something wrong.

Simpler was probably a poor choice of words on my part - smaller in scale would probably be better representation of what I meant. The difference of a linear title with no decision trees to something with a bunch of branching paths and complex logic like decision trees. There are a lot more opportunities for bugs in the latter, but the former can absolutely be written shitty or have sections with "here be dragons" plastered across the top.

Your comment is true, though, for sure. I'm in the process of refactoring something I wrote years ago that grew into this monstrosity when it should've been simpler and cleaner in the first place. In my defense it got scope creep over the past few years and people kept stacking ***on top of it that it wasn't meant for, I miscalculated in the original arch when I was asking "what are people going to ask of this 4 years down the line?"

Of course no one says that. They don't have to if they just say DEI.

Fellas, what is a DEI hire??

Not white or asian male hired for diversity requirements, not merit.

I mean
It could be merit, but its secondary: merit based out of who fills the diversity requirements.

Curious - do you work for or around, in real life, any places or spaces that practice these evil DEI practices that urk you so much? Or is this all purely an online experience for you.

I dont work for a video game company, no.

However, I do have eyes, and I can read, rather proficiently. I can see when these companies put out statements saying they are pushing DEI narratives, they put out job postings citing certain personal criteria unrelated to necessary skillsets for the job. I can see their group photos celebrating the release of their games and its always majority female with a couple rainbow color haired males, not a drop of testosterone in sight. I see when male dominated studios release group photos, all the outlandish comments of “groups like this still exist”. I see the outrage over Soulash II over the fact you cant have a gay couple, except part of the gameplay involves bloodline lineage, and a gay couple wouldnt fare very well in that aspect. I see the angry comments directed at Sabre Interactive CEO over comments about making games fun without political ***.

I have eyes, I have a brain, I use it instead of blindly believing everything I see.

I also roll my eyes at the people pushing back against the woke DEI ***. The new thing is people getting upset over Dragon Age character customization. “Omg you can make mastectomy scars”, who cares? Its fully customizable across the board.

You know that a lot of what you currently see on the internet are carefully filtered information aim to push certain political stance right?

Maybe one out of 5 photos are full of females, but only THAT photo is used in an article or post.

Just FYI, I quickly googled ProbablyMonster's group photo, which is the company that started the development of Concord. I see majority male. And that company should be pretty woke if they started Concord project.

So if there is a mostly female photo, it's probably an outlier that was picked to make a point.




I also decided to quickly search the hiring ad of Ubisoft on their website, I searched the engineer position.

I don't see requirement on race nor sexual orientation.

If such requirement existed, it's probably for different job type. And again, probably picked to make a point in online articles.

I don't know if they actually filter out white male during interviews. But posting such requirement in Engineer hiring ad is probably against the law tbh.

OH, I see the day was quite productive here

Here, grab this and do something productive

Gotcha - so you don't work in the field, but to substitute for your lack of experience your online reading of reputable sources filtered through your rational and unbiased lens has given you the ability to accurately infer, with laser precision and certainty, how the inner workings of the gaming industry operates from a companies hiring practices, to a games inception, creation, and launch. I apologize for ever doubting you.

Presuming this is true, loading the clip and giving people who call your company "a DEI focused company who cant put out a good product" a ***ton of ammo sounds like a bad idea.

Thats just me though

So I guess you work for a successful gaming company? And you have first hand experience to know everything I'm saying is incorrect, right?

Probably because that would be illegal big time. Not like in jail illegal, can't jail a corporation (darnit), but as in getting slapped hard by federal agencies and a few hundred lawsuits.

I don't, but I'm also not making any definitive statements about the state of these games and the industry at large - you are. The burden of proof is on you proclaiming these things are actually happening. You can't point the finger accusing of something then turn around and go - prove I'm not right! That's not how it works, because you can't prove you're right either.

I do work in an adjacent industry with arguably more DEI initiatives and things happening than gaming and if you want a normal discussion about how and why these things are implemented, I'm happy to. I just don't think you actually care to have your views challenged or have a real discussion.

Gaming companies that preach DEI and hire ESG consultants produce shitty buggy games that dont sell
Gaming companies that hire on merit and tell ESG racketeers to *** off produce quality games that do sell

Thats sufficient for me.

Correlation doesn't imply causation. Pretty basic stuff

But you know all this, you just have your boogeyman and everything is DEI's fault. I don't understand it, and it seems tiring crafting new narratives to affirm your bias' - but more power to you

Thats your best?
"Correlation doesnt imply causation"?

Perhaps you could enlighten us to the other variables in play that lead to the DEI games being buggy failures and the non-DEI games being successful? Surely you can bring something to the table instead of just being dismissive and hand-waving it away?

Its a recurring trend here:
"no, thats wrong"
"thats a conspiracy"
"correlation doesnt mean causation"
Lots of dismissive comments, but no elaboration. Its easy to say somethings wrong, somethings a conspiracy, but it seems to be impossible to actually put substance behind those words and back up the statement with something tangible.

I do. Not gaming industry, but male dominated field that HR was desperate to have more women represented in. Multiple hires of which did not have any relevant job experience or educational background to justify their hiring other than being women.

2 in particular lingered for years as trainees because they failed the certification exam repeatedly and were given opportunity after opportunity to retest. They were even flown out to a training program especially for exam prep, but continued to fail the test.

They then threatened legal action for 'discrimination' when they couldn't pass a certification exam required by law for the performance of job duties and were subsequently given jobs elsewhere in the company.

Before anyone asks, it's an exam written by one 3rd party and administered digitally by a different 3rd party and is exclusively technical questions on standards, regulations and operations.

Maybe a LOT of non-DEI games are also buggy failures and some DEI games are still successful?

But you choose to ignore those examples?

Those titles are even mentioned in this discussion. Elder scroll II was a very buggy mess, DEI didn't cause those bugs. Spider man II and God of war Ragnarok are DEI games, they are successful. So it's easy to draw the conclusion that DEI isn't the deciding factor of product quality.

Gaming industry always has good games and bad games. There are more games being made now of course bad games also increase.

But to me, trying to draw an equation between "bad games" and "political ideology(DEI)" is political movement itself. I can't take those claims seriously because it is political agenda to begin with.

You are right, it's hard to pinpoint exactly why a project went wrong unless you work on the said project itself. Another post in this very discussion kinda explained why: every bug has their own story. Likewise every project (fail or successful) also has their own story. You can't really use your personal experience from other projects or fields and apply it on everything.


If I actually work on Concord then I can probably tell you who is the real culprit behind those decisions. But since I don't, I can only make generalized assumption based on job titles. And even then I would add the word "probably" before such assumptions.

I certainly wouldn't make blanket statement that targets everybody. Such as "CEOs are bad" "Investors are bad" "woke invasion" etc. that's simplifying issues of those projects.