Now that you've got all that off your chest, that's not what i asked. I asked who are these armchair specialists that you're referring to in this thread, or was it just bait for the wall of text?
As for the wall of text itself, it's not exactly a revelation to anyone. And this would've all stopped at UAT if it was true. Speaking as a QA of 13 years at outsourcing companies in particular, if we're dropping numbers anyway.
Come on, the thread is littered with "the fuck it was!"-esque dismissive replies.
Every project i've been part of in games QA has used the Agile methodology, so your description of 'a UAT department' who perform some sort of final check to save the day is alien to me. Compared with Waterfall, these checks in Agile are performed iteratively by the QA team via Sprints throughout the course of development:
Based on the reviews of the Sprints, plus assessing any major issues remaining in the database which could fail the Sony/MS certification process, you get an idea of whether something is 'done' and could reasonably be released.
But if there is a pattern of incompetent testers consistently marking areas off as done when they aren't, then I can foresee that plenty of issues can slip through the cracks. I've seen things marked as done for over a year, across a dozen sprints, which when probed into further turned out to be completely broken. And as I said (if you read the wall of text instead of complaining about it), since external QA are often involved in that decision making process of whether a project is 'done', a false impression of the state of the game could be created by a bad acting QA company.
The only parallel I would draw to UAT would be the certification check done by the console manufacturers at the end of the process (which I also mentioned in my post as its own separate area of failure for not denying CDPR the release). But that's by no means an exhaustive check and has its own pitfalls (see below).
Thanks for the insight! Would you be able to share what exactly Sony and Microsoft look for during the certification process? Always wondered about that in regards to how a game like cyberpunk 2077 gets released
It's more like technical and safety checks than explicitly testing the contents of the game. At most it might check that you can at least finish the game (which you could since day one, just very poorly).
It mainly checks for:
- stability
- performance (fps)
- excessive loading times
- whether the software puts their platform at risk (ie. console exploits)
- how the game behaves in circumstances like the HDD being full, or a controller disconnect
- whether the game is correctly following all of the procedures on the platform like
- DLC + microtransactions functioning
- trophies unlocking correctly
- PS menu and store branding is fine etc.
Off the top of my head if you had sustained drops below your target FPS, it can fail. This is a very strict requirement in VR games, otherwise it can cause motion sickness. Epilepsy checks are taken seriously (I remember Wipeout HD had to be altered because of that). Crashes can fail you. Loading times over 60 secs used to fail you (if over 30 secs, you needed some sort of moving icon on screen to let the player know it's not crashed).
Basically there are a number things that should've barred CDPR from releasing the game.
However, Sony can also give you a conditional pass, which is like you promising that all of the problems will be fixed at the last minute in a day one patch. CDPR admitted that they attempted to do this, but failed to actually address the issues they said they would. Hence it got pulled by Sony.
So if they used two external QA contractors in addition to their internal QA team how does one company lying lead to the giant mess that Cyberpunk was?
You're not very convincing.
It depends on what testing areas were assigned to each team. QLOC also co-developed certain areas of the game so it's possible they may have been testing their own contributions (they handled and tested Stadia implementation, for example).
I'm not here to convince you of anything, just to provide my input of why it's plausible despite people still being too mad at the game to actually want to find out why it turned out like it did.
If you don't like that pretty reasonable response and just want to treat this as a confrontation then you can suck my cock.