Inside the Vault: QA lead Andrew Scharf

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Brother None

This ghoul has seen it all
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The Bethesda Blog has a new Inside the Vault with QA lead Andrew Scharf. Why him? He's working on Fallout: New Vegas is why.<blockquote>What games have you worked on?
I was the first person in QA to be hired after Fallout 3’s release, so when I started I mainly worked on the Fallout 3 Downloadable Content. This worked out perfectly for me, considering I had just finished my first playthrough at home and was itching for more content. It was pretty awesome to think that for a game I had spent countless hours enjoying at home as an end user, I was now playing an active role in the development of additional content.

Shortly after working on Broken Steel, I was brought on to lead the testing of Medieval Games, one of our externally developed titles published by Vir2L Studios. Currently, I’m the QA Lead on Fallout New Vegas.
(...)
What would you say is your personal favorite game of all time?
I’m a huge fan of the Interplay/Black Isle RPG’s, namely Fallout 1, 2, and Planescape: Torment. I can’t even begin tell you how many times I’ve replayed those games over the past 10 years. Other than those games, I’d say Diablo 2 and System Shock 2 are also favorites that I find myself coming back to every couple of years.</blockquote>We stopped posting Inside the Vault on NMA a while back because, well, they're not interesting, and it doesn't seem like that's changed, so I'm not sure yet if we'll keep updating these if all they have for us is QA people and producers.
 
Let me get this straight: the New Vegas lead QA guy is someone hired a year ago whose only experience is with the notoriously faulty-at-release Fallout 3 DLCs?

I'm not one to wail on irrelevant peripherals, but...wow, that's a bad billboard.
 
I like how no one at Bethesda is talented to actually do something.
I think a selection of "Inside the Vault" extracts could actually show this, and it would be its only interest.

-Graphic artists have no style and just know how to do sub-standard copy-pasta generic stuff. I would like to see one name in the team with a good port-folio that sticks out.
Their graphic department really culminated with Morrowind and at the time it was really above the average, so I wonder what happened.
-Writers and quest designers have clearly a problem with plot consistency, plot depth, writing quality, and basically just not boring the player.
-Animators are clearly not quite the shit.

As far as we can tell from their buggy engines, their programming department is not the brightest gem in the market, yet it may be the less shitty part of their games.

So what have we left ? I guess their PR department is pretty good.
 
Arr0nax said:
I like how no one at Bethesda is talented to actually do something.
I think a selection of "Inside the Vault" extracts could actually show this, and it would be its only interest.

-Graphic artists have no style and just know how to do sub-standard copy-pasta generic stuff. I would like to see one name in the team with a good port-folio that sticks out.
Their graphic department really culminated with Morrowind and at the time it was really above the average, so I wonder what happened.
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I'd say Morrowind's art direction was lackluster at best, though. A generic, grey, bland style for as far as I can tell.
 
A bit too retro for my tastes but his stuff was very nice. I would place the blame the modellers instead as it seems they have no clue how to model power armour.
 
Oh crap, if this dude is gonna be responsible for bug testing, then NV is pretty much bound to be bug-heavy.
 
I worked in a QA department in a games company previously…guess what… it’s a shit job. It’s like watching 20 people prune a tree for months on end (it’s not always a pretty sight), and considering Bethesda’s reputation for ultra buggy games they have their work cut out for them. Andrew Scharf sounds like a nice enough person but he is not the QA head honcho, it’s a pity Bethesda’s going to rip this guy to pieces with New Vegas. Let’s not forget in all fairness it’s only been the last couple of years that the original Fallout games have been almost bug free (that’s due to the invaluable efforts of the modders).
 
Wow pretty weird that he is a QA lead when he just got hired.


...but at least he likes the right games : ).
 
Arr0nax said:
I like how no one at Bethesda is talented to actually do something.
I think a selection of "Inside the Vault" extracts could actually show this, and it would be its only interest.

-Graphic artists have no style and just know how to do sub-standard copy-pasta generic stuff. I would like to see one name in the team with a good port-folio that sticks out.
Their graphic department really culminated with Morrowind and at the time it was really above the average, so I wonder what happened.
-Writers and quest designers have clearly a problem with plot consistency, plot depth, writing quality, and basically just not boring the player.
-Animators are clearly not quite the shit.

As far as we can tell from their buggy engines, their programming department is not the brightest gem in the market, yet it may be the less shitty part of their games.

So what have we left ? I guess their PR department is pretty good.
Click to expand...

Exactly, somehow they got a sub-par game from a series that casual gamers aren't that familiar with to get extremely popular, sell well, and win a crapload of awards.
 
Arr0nax said:
I like how no one at Bethesda is talented to actually do something.
Click to expand...
They have some kick ass concept artists though.

By the way I would not go so far to call "everyone" there a person without talent. Its hard enough for a usual programmer/worker to get in the buisness anyway. By the way thats why you have project leaders, consultants and supervisor. Those should be the people with "skill" explaining their team what the game should achieve and what "they" should do. Your minions can be very creative and talented if you guide them well which of course works better with smaller teams, explaining your team of 80 members your vision is already hard enough to bring them to visualise this vision acuratly ... is almost impossible.

Issue with many development teams today is, they are actualy sometimes to big I think. Comparing a few really well made games (if you want as early like C&C and even earlier with Sim City 1!) people did those games with a minimum of people, relatively small budged and limited hardware. Still they managed to make great games. With many times enough awesome gameplay. The focus was a different one. Not every game tried or wanted even to be a "block buster" title with 2-3 million sales. Novadays it seems like every title HAS to be a best seller as its either win or die. With a team of 80 people, horrendous expensive marketing AND investors that want to see at least 200% of their original investment back its somewhat understandable. Just look at the X-Com games, every "new" game has seen a "biger" team working on it and every "new" X-com title just went further and further away from the true X-Com experience and in the end it also didnt even had much success (well that can happen when you alienate your fanbase ...). Similar situation with Commandos ... and the last game they released ... surprise, was a "shoter". Cause yeah going from top down to 3d shoter ... awesome.

I sometimes think what would have a few people achieved if they had in that time the same resources available like today, millions of dollars, a big team. Imagine C&C1, Fallout 1 or other games how much awesome content has ben cut out cause they simply had no more time and money left. But today? They have a lot of options and still games get more and more limited. Dragon Age has 18GB in size and still the dialogues are compared to past RPGs very limited cause you simply cant write novels AND record them, well not yet. I doubt a game like Planescape tourment with its wall of text would work in the same way.

I am sure there are talented people working for Bethesda. But the person in charge lacks the skill to either motivate those people OR he has no ambition to do so. I mean if your boss is telling you to do something you can be the most gifted person around, if he wants you to make shit ... you have to make shit ... :P
 
This is why I hate executives. "Oh, I'm sorry BethSoft writers, you can't possibly have more time. What's that? You have a glaring plothole for your ending and need more time to fix it? Well, I'm sorry, but you've got to make that fourth quarter release somehow."
 
Paul_cz said:
Wow pretty weird that he is a QA lead when he just got hired.
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There's a reason for this - he knows what he's doing. I was in a couple of classes at Virginia Tech with Scharf, he's a bright guy. Chances are New Vegas is gonna have some downright horrible bugs, but I bet he'll catch 95% of 'em before they ever leave the door.

EDIT: And yeah, first post here, I felt it was important enough to register to make a comment. I'm usually a horrible lurker.
 
King Lemming said:
There's a reason for this - he knows what he's doing. I was in a couple of classes at Virginia Tech with Scharf, he's a bright guy. Chances are New Vegas is gonna have some downright horrible bugs, but I bet he'll catch 95% of 'em before they ever leave the door.
Click to expand...
This implies a lot of other QA guys are incompetent. Also, if he's so great, what's up with all the bugs in the DLCs he QA'd?

Being 'bright' isn't good enough to do a good QA job, otherwise we surely wouldn't have so many insanely buggy games.
 
I think that questioning his experience (from his first QA job on FO3 DLCs to being QA lead on New Vegas???) and many of the bugs that the games were shipped with is fair but I think that the root of the problem is Bethesda's loathing of the design and planning phase. I'm also not sure how much of a priority Bethesda makes debugging, it wouldn't surprise me if they didn't devote many resources to it, especially given their post release support of their games.
 
I blame the internet for buggy games.

Seriously.

Years ago when the internet wasn't around, or wasn't that widespread, you never got buggy games, because it was so much harder to get patches out to the community. Now developers just assume that every gamer has the internet (probably a safe assumption), so if there's anything wrong with the game they can just fix it later... Whenever "later" might be... sometimes months, years, or never.

But hey, I'd still rather have the internet and the occasional bug, than be sans internet.
 
King Lemming said:
Paul_cz said:
Wow pretty weird that he is a QA lead when he just got hired.
Click to expand...

There's a reason for this - he knows what he's doing. I was in a couple of classes at Virginia Tech with Scharf, he's a bright guy. Chances are New Vegas is gonna have some downright horrible bugs, but I bet he'll catch 95% of 'em before they ever leave the door.

EDIT: And yeah, first post here, I felt it was important enough to register to make a comment. I'm usually a horrible lurker.
Click to expand...

Does Va Tech still try to intentionally fail students the first semester to see how tough they are?

I almost went there. They really liked my Math SAT scores(prior to calculator introduction, now it should be a piece of cake) and tried to pitch the Whole "Dirty Dancing" movie was filmed nearby aspect to me in their brochure.

Maybe if I were making a sequel called "Down and Dirty Dancin': To the Window to Wall...."

but pitching "Dirty Dancing" sets to a person that was planning on studying Theoretical Physics?

Disturbing fact: The day the young kid mowed down 30 + classmates I could not fly out S. Carolina due to the wind So I ended up driving away from there and very close to Va Tech while the guy was going postal.
 
Sander said:
King Lemming said:
There's a reason for this - he knows what he's doing. I was in a couple of classes at Virginia Tech with Scharf, he's a bright guy. Chances are New Vegas is gonna have some downright horrible bugs, but I bet he'll catch 95% of 'em before they ever leave the door.
Click to expand...
This implies a lot of other QA guys are incompetent. Also, if he's so great, what's up with all the bugs in the DLCs he QA'd?

Being 'bright' isn't good enough to do a good QA job, otherwise we surely wouldn't have so many insanely buggy games.
Click to expand...


I found out that most of the people I thought were "bright" were simply very good at short term memorization and absolutely clueless at any theoretical aspects of anything mathematical or scientific and worse yet, they got A's then couldn't remember simple trig equation answers like sin^2 + cos^2 = 1( This is a person who is the daughter of my PHD High school Physics teacher. I shudder to think that she's now an "engineer". Her father was ashamed of her because he knew she just memorized everything.


Moral of the tale: Many of these so called bright people fall on their faces because they cannot memorize a solution that does not exist. They have to put in the effort to create one and herein lies the rub.
 
Myron Rolle said:
Let me get this straight: the New Vegas lead QA guy is someone hired a year ago whose only experience is with the notoriously faulty-at-release Fallout 3 DLCs?
Click to expand...

i was just thinking the exact same thing... this is why we aren't assured quality.
 
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