There was a clip that square posted a few weeks ago that had the "captured on PC" logo at the bottom.
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Proof that the FF7 Remake texture issues are a technical problem after all (
- Thread starter Ignis
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Disgraceful was too strong a word. They are too common though throughout the game to be acceptable, I find.
Thanks both. I have around $50 credit on PSN so was just waiting for any sale price below that, but I reckon I'll just wait for PC instead if this is the case.
just to clarify on this, basically every modern game runs on a PC during development. iteration time is much much faster (faster hardware plus less locked down plus same hardware as all your debug tools). Actually making a finished PC game ready for distribution is a much larger task.
So, yeah I think a PC version is very likely, but this specific thing doesn't make it any more or less likely.
I feel like that post is still in the PS360 era, where UE3 had widely known texture pop-in issues that were far more apparent on PS3.
UE4, either because of current gen hardware or whatever, to my knowledge doesn't have this issue.
UE4, either because of current gen hardware or whatever, to my knowledge doesn't have this issue.
It was a rhetoric question. I know the answer is "wasn't flagged as important enough".
But to me personally, it's unthinkable to ship with such a glaring visual issue, so I'd like to know the reasoning behind that decision.
*Why* it was deemed not important, considering we had multiple threads all over era, reddit, twitter and pretty much everyone seemed to have noticed the issue.
Right for sure, I just can't recall seeing that message on too many games that never had the counterpart available at some point, I could be wrong about that though. I'm mostly going off the fact that basically all ff games make it to PC one way or another. Especially in the last few years.
Exactly! It's a minor issue in the grand scheme of things. The console can run the game perfectly fine as evidenced by all other aspects of this game. First of all, this issue probably popped up very late in the dev cycle. They would then have to make a choice between further delaying the game and most likely porting it over to PS5 (which would take up even more time), or just roll with it and release the game anyway. Obviously the second choice is the better of the two.
Saying it's "unthinkable" just leads you further into the "I dont' actually understand game dev" territory that you were claiming to not be in.
OP
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This was answered in that long, detailed post responding to yours. And also it's strange to say you understand game dev but then say it's unthinkable to ship with this issue.
FF7: Remake is a great game with great production values but technically it's run of the mill (minus these weird issues). It's largely a corridor 30fps game, I doubt it's pushing against any serious hardware limits. This is very likely a human error or final build scripting error of some kind.
It makes you wonder if SE is even more underprepared to other devs though.
Don't get me wrong, this stuff ain't important and there's other stuff that should be worked, and safety and WFH measurements are more important, but other japanese seems to manage just fine WFH. Monster Hunter World or Nioh 2 for example have been delivering new updates with new content and QoL. It makes me wonder if SE is behind in WFH measurements than even other japanese devs, let alone western devs.
Thank you.
As a QA guy in the corporate software world for the past 12 years, I can absolutely relate. All software has bugs, even the ones that look rock solid to the user. Some small bugs are tricky to fix and can cause much more catastrophic problems by fixing them. I played the game for over 100 hours and platinumed it. The game never crashed once, and very rarely had any bad framerate drops. For a game with no day one patch or anything, its amazing. The only issues I really saw was some of the 3d geometry had some texture streaming issues(like the low qual door to the apartments in the beginning), which for all we know, they tried to fix it quickly before launch but discovered it caused some weird issue that would crash the game, or cause the geometry to disappear or flash or some other shit. Who knows.
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Considering the number of issues the company has had over the last two decades, I wouldn't be surprised.
Or, I have a much higher standard than the average publisher and often disagree with the triaging process.
My lead of QA for example would have never accepted to waive such a bug.
So I'd like to understand the reasoning behind the low priority which, considering the online response, was the wrong decision.
I don't think it was answered. Maybe I'm just failing to properly express myself. What I'd like to know is the train of thought that led to that decision.
Yes they would have if other bugs had been more of a priority and they couldn't get to this, especially during a global pandemic. I'm a web dev, and no project is the same. Some times small issues like this make it trough, other times they don't. Many reasons why and if you did have the experience you claim you would know this.
Your posts really are not helping your cause... the responses to you have been perfect.
Note that Japan never went on full lockdown, all games companies were never forced to enable smart working for their developers, so it also boils down on how they handled the situation and what were their priorities.
Also Square Enix forced the smart working only on April 8, when they found one case of COVID in the office https://www.jp.square-enix.com/company/ja/news/2020/html/1dd84643046bc2ce9780c8b03ba33134.html
it's an interesting thing to think about. put it like this: an engine can't do any magic here, it's literally just another bit of code running on the hardware -- the game is the engine; the engine is the game -- so if the game asks for more textures than the actual hard-drive can provide in a reasonable amount of time (either because you're just asking for too much too late, or it's busy reading other stuff at the same time), there isn't anything , say, UE4 can do about it other than twiddle its thumbs and wait.
so this is where the responsibility shifts back to the developers. short of loading every texture in the game in on a loading screen or at startup (fantastic options imo, shame about HD development and open world games :( ), we kind of need to accept the premise that these textures will have to be loaded in on the fly. _when_ textures are loaded in is entirely on the developer, not the engine. an engine may try to help you by automatically doing some things, but at the end of the day, it doesn't really understand the layout of a level or when an arbitrary script is going to spawn an object. it can only try its best to respond to the things the game asks for.
so, i guess my point here is that UE4's implementation of texture streaming isn't a terribly novel thing -- given the same scene with the same textures, short of a engine and data-set that can magically predict designer intentions and player actions, the results would be comparable (or worst! you may end up with stuttering instead) on any other engine.
Probably these reasons:
1) The game was in development for 5-6 years already
2) Was already delayed once
3) Some texture issues is something that most gamers aren't gonna notice nor care (ie, not gaming enthusiast forums). Game crashing, or bad and frequent framerate drops or game breaking progression bugs are a much bigger problem. Probably why this was deemed not a huge bug
I mean, I guess you would have to consider which bugs were presumably higher priority and fixed instead.
And I don't think the game's reception was impacted all that dramatically aside from people going "huh, there are some weird texture bugs here and there", which is better than big PSA threads all over the internet about game-breaking bugs and the like.
I honestly think it's nothing more complex than them honestly thinking this wouldn't get such a huge online response. They probably estimated that this wouldn't be such a big deal. Evidently they thought wrong, but mistakes happen and hindsight is 20/20 and all that.
They were not wrong, the average player isn't anywhere near as bothered about this as the people who are on this forum.
The game has gone gold before March 4, way before pandemic started hitting japanese game companies.
Pandemic has nothing to do with their decision to ship with this bug.
It's not UE's fault, it's devs fault for not fixing that bug or whatever it is. They don't get to shift the blame.
Maybe they weren't able to find the problem in time, and that sucks, but don't blame the engine. You are supposed to work around the engine's capabilities, and if it didn't do whatever you wanted it to do with some textures, you try to find a solution, not "just ship it lol"
Maybe they weren't able to find the problem in time, and that sucks, but don't blame the engine. You are supposed to work around the engine's capabilities, and if it didn't do whatever you wanted it to do with some textures, you try to find a solution, not "just ship it lol"
Even if that's true then the rest still stands. Every project is different, we don't know the issues that came up or why, and this small issue of a few textures not loading in was likely not priority because they were fixing stuff that would have impacted player experience more.
Also, now they are affected by it, so posts like "still not fixed" need reminding.
Yep, this sort of stuff isn't good enough from a QA point of view no matter when it happens. I mean that door texture in the first hotel.....It's just right in your face and very early. It leaves an impression and just instinctually, you go looking for other issues so you know you aren't going mad and hello, you find a treasure trove.
This is a realistic post. Counterpoint--One of the biggest selling points of this game is its fidelity/presentation.
While this is not a bug critical to the basic functionality of the product, this is a bug that causes critical issues with delivering one of the main selling points of the product.
So while your assessment is likely correct from a software development standpoint--It was still a decision on the part of QA/Leadership to ship the game with these issues intact. Personally, I would have marked this as a high priority/critical issue in your example.
Which brings back the fact this is a developer problem. It's either they did not prioritize this as high as they should have or the developers did not have the time/resources to resolve the problem. Naughty Dog, for instance, surely hits bugs like this during development but they don't ship their games with them.
Either way, this falls on Square Enix for failing to deliver on one of the selling points of the game. Whether that is due to a miss in project management, build, or testing, we will never know.
"Treasure trove", hardly, lol.
Yes, it's a little off-putting to see a texture here and there not load in. It's hardly some massive issue.
also, fwiw, the rage some of you feel toward these textures is almost certainly dwarfed by the rage of the artists at square when they were told the door was doing to ship looking like that
I mean, it's a visual bug, I can 100% understand why they didn't give higher priority, and I can 100% understand the people bothered by it which are not happy SE still hasn't done anything.
And surely pandemic may have impacted the way they allocated the resourses after the game has gone gold.
It's just didn't feel correct to blame everything on Covid-19, I can respect their decision (which I may not agree with, each individual has their own priorities) even without an excuse.
Not the same issue as the texture load in. Much more likely to be a conscious decision due to budget or technical constraints.
...but it is not.
No one is blaming it entirely on that. They're suggesting people be realistic about a small bug and the current state of the world.
It's really not subjective, lol. A small texture load in issue is never going to be "critical" or prioritize over actual game breaking issues.
I mean, yeah. That wasn't what I was saying.
Depending on the business requirements for a product, you may elevate priority of some bugs over others. For instance, again, Naughty Dog isn't shipping a game with broken textures like that. That would hurt their reputation in delivering extremely high quality visuals.
That's all I'll say on that. At this point we're debating what Square Enix's internal requirements/QA/project management process is, how they classify priority levels in QA, and what they had marked this bug as in QA. Which we can only speculate on. Not worth spending time on. :)
And still... it would never be a critical bug, even for ND. ND might have a better or different development process that means they catch more of the minor issues before release, but that doesn't change the fact this would never be a "critical issue" for anyone.
Yup, this is the most likely explanation lol. They just ran out of time to fix the non priority stuff because they had bigger / critical things to fix before their "going gold" deadline.
Any other non game breaking / low priority stuff like low res textures can be worked on / fixed post launch in a day 1 patch or shortly after. Of course we know what happened globally.
Those skyboxes arent high res enough, did anyone download them?
Based on the field of view (which is very narrow) and the portion of skybox visible, they'd need to be 16-24k pixels wide, minimum. 32 would be the safe resolution to use.
I cant believe that people thought they textured the door like that on purpose. how was it anything other than a memory issue?
they didnt optimize their working process because the next installment is for next gen where none of this will be an issue.
Based on the field of view (which is very narrow) and the portion of skybox visible, they'd need to be 16-24k pixels wide, minimum. 32 would be the safe resolution to use.
I cant believe that people thought they textured the door like that on purpose. how was it anything other than a memory issue?
they didnt optimize their working process because the next installment is for next gen where none of this will be an issue.
I've been enjoying the game a lot. The non-loaded textures and other visual inconsistencies comprise a very small part of it. They're more of a fun meme to me than anything else. Nothing super impactful or gamebreaking, just enjoyable to poke fun at until they eventually patch the game. Cloud's shitty door is hilarious.
As an ex-QA, we've been taught that unless said graphic issues hinder the user gameplay (ex: important item graphics missing , weapon not appearing, enemies missing texture, etc) then the bug cannot be flagged as high or critical. The bug in here at best is medium, and lead either flag it as Will not fix, fix in day one patch/later patch.
This is a very minor bug. During final days, devs are much more worried by real bugs that stop progress, break quests, delete savegame data, etc.
