The developer of the Outer Worlds told the bizarre story of how they fixed a certain bug in the game.
The essence of the Outer Worlds as an RPG means that the game allows vastly different styles of play and accommodate different choices of players, which inevitably means that certain things may be out of order.
Developer Obsidian prepared for it, and in the final game this dynamic nature created no issues, but one bug, in particular, eluded the team until an unexpected saviour helped them fix it. Obsidian's QA lead Taylor Swope told the story of a big bug patched in patch 1.2 in a long Twitter thread. The error caused the game to believe that, despite being alive, NPC companions were dead.
The gist of the bug was that, for some players, a companion quest would be marked as Failed in the quest log, with the reasoning that the companion was dead -- despite the fact that the companion was very much alive and well (2/18)
— Taylor Swope (@_taylorswope) December 12, 2019
The bug led to the failure of their side quests because the game presumed them dead. This is important for a number of reasons because companions in The Outer Worlds can't actually die. This of course not in the permadeath Supernova mode. The bug actually appeared during testing, but QA couldn't reproduce it because they didn't know what triggered it.
"It involved investigating the location of every script and line of code that might make the game think a companion was dead," Swope said.
“The only logical culprit was a bit of scripting that runs when a companion's health reaches zero: if they're in the party, it waits for combat to end and revives them; otherwise it marks them as dead ‘for real.'” But companions weren't dying in combat since the script's job was reviving them. Instead, developers suggested that companions may be dying out of battle. “The only place in the game when a companion is present but not in the active party is when the player is on their ship,” Swope explained.
This, of course, introduced another dilemma. How can the ship's companions die when they are "undamageable," could it be due to fall damage? But that didn't seem like the cause after all. In his Tweets, Swope says they considered even the most ludicrous ones.
My personal fav was "what if a companion is standing *right* where a cow spawns in during a random event and they're launched into space"
Was genuinely bummed when that theory didn't pan out (12/18)— Taylor Swope (@_taylorswope) December 12, 2019
After testing out many theories regarding the cause of the bug, they found the cause. However meantime they also lost their hope of fixing it before the release of the game. The bug was due to the game's interpretation of NPC's actions.
Swope explains that game counted climbing up a ladder as two separate actions for the NPCs which bypassed the control mechanism. Therefore, when the player started to talking to another NPC, the NPC climbing up will not cancel climbing. Consequently, the infamous bug occurs. This was resulting in desperate landscapes as following scenes.
So, if someone started climbing a ladder and the player entered a conversation before they stopped, they wouldn't be able to exit the ladder, and, well…. (18/18) pic.twitter.com/xcduTy4d12
— Taylor Swope (@_taylorswope) December 12, 2019
Obsidian Entertaiment published the 1.2 update to Outer Worlds to all players between 10th and 13th of December. The update includes many bug fixes and settings.
