Treyarch: There are no 'bug free' games

February 8, 2011 11:20 AM PST

by Don Reisinger

Players hoping for games that have no glitches will continue to be disappointed.

Speaking with Videogamer, Josh Olin, community manager over at Treyarch, a wholly owned studio of Activision and the developer of Call of Duty: Black Ops, said that no matter the game or developer, video games are prone to bugs. And there simply isn't a way right now for studios to effectively eliminate all those glitches from their titles.

"It is unfortunate that those [bugs] have to exist at all," Olin told the gaming publication. "In an ideal world, we would love to ship a completely bug-proof game. I can't think of a single developer in the world, though, that could achieve that."

Since the release of Call of Duty: Black Ops, gamers have been experiencing annoying bugs when playing the game online. The issues have been especially noticeable on the PlayStation 3 and PC versions of the titles, gamers have found.

In response, Activision has released several updates to the title over the past couple months. The fixes have attempted to address issues with players respawning near an enemy, killstreaks, and freezing, among other annoyances. However, on his Twitter account, Olin is still fielding complaints from disgruntled gamers who are experiencing problems playing the game.

After the bugs started cropping up last year, Olin took to the Call of Duty forums to explain how the company's patching process works. He said it takes Treyarch about two weeks to collect a "comprehensive list" of bugs that need to be addressed. The developer then spends the next week testing its fixes, and then another week waiting for console makers to approve the update. The full release typically takes two to three days.

Olin is also trying to make gamers aware of the plight Treyarch faces in trying to deliver a high-quality experience. He told Videogamer that "just a single hour of gameplay" by online players accounts for more gameplay than the Treyarch team "could put into quality assurance in a lifetime." He went on to say that gamers are doing things in the title that the Black Ops developers "could never predict or think of."

Online play is integral to the experience of playing Black Ops. In fact, Activision revealed last year that the average gamer plays the title for about 87 minutes each day. In a little over a month after it was made available, Black Ops was accommodating more than 600 million hours of gameplay.

The success of the online experience in Black Ops was just another feather in the cap of Activision, which announced that the game generated more than $650 million on its first day of availability and more than $1 billion in just six weeks.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13506_3-20031026-17.html?tag=cnetRiver

I only read the headline so....

THIS JUST IN:

Dogs have four legs...more at 11

while its true that most probably all games have bugs many of them such as Uncharted 2, MGs4, God of War 3, and others do a really good job of hiding those bugs. Other games such as fallout new vegas pretty much make the bugs obvious to any person who plays the game.

Sure all games have some issues but some games are better at being more stable than others. Fallout 3 and New vegas are examples of unacceptable tech issues.

They need to take notes from games like Mario Galaxy, Metal Gear, and even Halo. At least they don't let the more noticable bugs get away. Other dev. never attack the issues their games experience; they always try to cover up thier problems and messes with more and more patches. It be better off just re-releasing the game after its been fixed. That way the issue is fixed permanently.

What would happen if somebody 10/20 years from now, manages to find an old copy of on of their games but their 360 or PS3 is brand new with none of the updates that person would be plagued with all kinds of problems.

All exclusives.  Go figure.

well its not as bad as new vegas on ps3 were if you decided to team up with the power gangers and you stay around when the ncr attacks its completly unplayable because the framerate dropps to <5 frames an second.

ha! tales of symphonia has no bugs man none.

They should go and play some MGSIV.

People don't ask for bug free games, they want games without major, game-breaking bugs and day 1 patches. Black Ops also has far too many bugs when you consider CoD3, CoD4, CoD:WaW, CoD:MW2 and CoD:BO are all built off the same engine (albiet with different iterations of the engine). As such i do not think that it is unreasonable to expect developers to of removed most the bugs by the 5th game especially when CoD appears to be working backwards as from my experience each game has had more bugs...