Standing by the railroad tracks.
I’ve worked on a bunch of games and they’ve all left me with different feelings and memories about the job of QA. One of my most recent titles was a large (200+ team) action game that was a critical and commercial catastrophe when it was released.
The worst thing about it was sitting there in QA seeing it all falling apart. You could see that the vehicles were no fun, that the shooting was awful, that the weapon balance made no sense, and the entire progression system was laughable.
You could see it was slow, ponderous and plodding and you just knew it was going to be a total disaster and all you can do is submit suggestion bugs saying “The general feeling in QA is that the weapon is, at the moment, significantly above the average in terms of killing potential,” only to have a one word response of ‘no’. They say no because they have the numbers for all the guns and can see that they’re obviously balanced just fine.
The math is right there! So what if as soon as you pick up that gun your K:D goes from 4:12 to 50:3.
The numbers show that it’s fine. It’s just… fine.
Imagine standing on the side of a railroad track. You can see this giant train speeding toward your best friend and he’s just standing there looking at the train like it’s some sort of alien thing they don’t recognise. You want to pull your friend off the tracks and save him and you can even see how you would do it, but all you can do is whisper.
“There’s a train coming. Get off the track. There’s a train coming and it’s going to kill you.”
Your friend puts their fingers in their ears and says, “Lalala I’m not listening to you.”
And then the train hits, your friend explodes and everyone loses their job.
