Treyarch: There are no 'bug free' games
Under fire about bugs in Call of Duty: Black Ops, Activision studio Treyarch says no developer can create a completely bug-free video game.
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.