Originally Posted by headkase Originally Posted by

20 years ago when games were released they had to be perfect because there simply was no Internet to push patches, the only option would have been to mail back your original disks and wait for them to mail you updated ones. Obviously that would not be acceptable and almost never happened. Those computers back then had a great advantage however: the hardware in them was identical for every machine. So, in the developer's play-testing if it worked there they could be assured that it would work everywhere. Today, there are simply so many different possible combinations of PC hardware that it is impossible to test every configuration. Seriously, impossible. In play-testing the most common variations of hardware are tested and once those perform very well, and it's release time, a title is launched. Once it is launched feedback starts to come in from the real world, configurations that simply couldn't be tested for in advance. Once the developers have very specific bug reports from this wider testing then they can go and look in their code for those exact consequences and perhaps find a cause. Then the magical patches begin to flow which fix those really, really, weird system configurations that simply couldn't be tested before-hand.



The above is the general situation, not specific to Bioshock Infinite but rather a common scenario faced by all developers.