Quality Assurance Revisited
 

With less than two months to go and disks having to be pressed, shipped, etc., I'm wondering when the code has to be locked down, and by extension, how much time is left to test the game.

One issue always forgotten in the hype of marketing, E3, etc. is that historically on the next-gen systems (even under this team's watch), the game has always released with major bugs that require major patches to fix.

Now before someone posts with "well, all games have bugs, etc.", I'm NOT talking about the little niggles that could be improved or polished. I'm talking about the major issues that any one person catches within a game or two. Stuff that makes you wonder "how in the world did the developers not address this?".

Examples from the past: no fatigue, excessive fumbles/interceptions, robo-QB, penalties on every extra-point attempt, franchise stats that are broken, etc. (I'm sure there are others I'm not remembering right now).

It's become such a consistent pattern with every release that, IMO, it appears as if we're getting the beta in August and the "final" release in December after the 2nd patch (and in at least once instance, a 2nd patch still didn't fix the issue they claimed it did). People pay good money than to be getting a beta in return.

So my hope is that EA implemented SOMETHING to implement an effective QA procedure, because heretofore, whatever process they did have in place has not been working. When they release a beta, they're not doing themselves any favors.