Obsidian claims video games' bugs are inevitable

Roby Atadero from Obsidian has recently visited the University of California Riverside and made a speech for the students regarding the undying topic of video games' bugs and their inevitability. It's common knowledge that modern games are full of bugs - minor and major ones - and there's almost nothing to be done in order to avoid them since developers require additional time and resources to address the issues, whereas publishers stick to strict deadlines.

According to Atadero, bugs are often categorized by developers depending on whether they break the game or not. Critical issues are being addressed firstly and serve as a primary objective for studios across the world - Roby identifies them as the "A bugs". You can't ship a game where players will encounter impassable challenges due to poor bug-fixing process. Yet, there're examples of video games that host a variety of game-breaking bugs, though those are often the ones you won't play anyway.

Then there's a number of less major bugs - so-called "B bugs" - that are better to be resolved by the game's release - but could be left for patching afterwards. The third category of bugs is even less demanding in terms of developers' attention:

Then we have our C bugs which are mostly cosmetic or annoying like "Hey I went into my inventory and didn't see my sword for half a sec." Like if that ships no one is going to cry. You still want to fix them but when you have a limited amount of time you categorize them and the goal is to get through all the A bugs and as many as B bugs but if you don't - which generally you won't because you'll find more bugs with the product than you can fix.

Heavy Day One patches do not guarantee the bug-free experience because there's another side to bugfixing story. As Atadero notes, fixing a bug can result in having even more bugs, so the process is almost infinite and the desired state of a perfectly made video game is pretty much unachievable. Publishers often rush the video games' releases and developers work under heavy time pressure to address as many bugs as they can.

In conclusion, Atadero said that games always - like literally always - ship with a huge number of bugs. Many of them are being ignored in favour of critical ones, and Rody stated that we might just look at the Fallout 76 example to believe this is all true.