QA

Monolith says it is doing everything in its power to fix a bug in Gotham City Impostors that is completely wiping players' stats. A member of the studio's community management team started a thread on the game's official forums last week, asking those affected to post details of the problem. At the time of writing the thread spans 71 pages. More >

The size of save files was not the cause of framerate issues affecting PS3 players of The Elder Scrolls V: Skryim, Bethesda claims. Speaking to Kotaku, chief game designer Todd Howard said that the problem, which reduced PS3 framerates to single figures and was finally patched last week, was in fact far more complicated in nature. More >

Double Fine head Tim Schafer has said that independent developers are drifting away from the "closed" console download services because of prohibitive costs, claiming that patches alone cost $40,000. Speaking to Hookshot Inc, Schafer said that while Xbox Live Arcade and PSN were genuine options for indies when their host platforms launched, the likes of Steam and the App Store, as well as the Minecraft model, are now much better routes to market. More >

When Dead Island was released in North America on Tuesday, Steam players found that they had downloaded an Xbox 360 development build instead of the final product. Deep Silver has already apologised to those affected, and has now said: "Deep Silver plans to announce a 'make up' to North American fans who were affected by the day one PC issues. Stay tuned in the coming days for those details as internal discussions are ongoing." The publisher has also warned that the day-one patch, which fixes 37 issues with the game, may wipe save files. "We have a solution to help regain some quest progress," it said. "When the game opens, select New Game, select the same character as you were using before, and then there will be an option for Chapter Select which will allow the player to jump to the last chapter they were playing in."

European gamers eagerly refreshing their email inboxes in the hope of receiving an invitation to The Old Republic beta will be doing so for a while, after BioWare's Chris Collins said the studio had decided to wait for a new build of the Star Wars MMOG before sending out the invitations. Collins said that asking European players to download a 27GB client, then a few days later wipe their progress and ask them to download the client all over again was "not an experience we want new testers to be exposed to...You have my word that this batch of invites will happen, it may just mean you have to wait a little longer."

Deep Silver has sent out an extensive list of fixes that comprise the day-one patch for Dead Island, the zombie shooter which is released today in North America and on Friday in Europe. Destructoid has the full list, which contains the likes of "fixed enemy reaction to fire," "fixed the infinite respawning of shooting enemies," and "fixed bug causing all inventory to disappear."

Speaking during the latest Iwata Asks interview, Shun Moriya, a programmer at The Legend Of Zelda: Ocarina Of Time 3D developer Grezzo, has revealed that the studio deliberately retained some of the N64 version's bugs for posterity. "The staff members who had played the old game said the bugs were fun!" he said. "We were like, 'What?!' It wouldn’t be fun if your friends couldn’t say, 'Do you know about this?' So we left them in if they didn’t cause any trouble and were beneficial." Anything that might break the game was removed, albeit reluctantly: "If something simply could not be allowed to stand, we begrudgingly fixed it, so some bugs don’t appear, but we left in as many as we could, so people will grin over that."

Activision says two million potential testers signed up for July’s Call Of Duty: Elite beta “in less than two weeks”, but that it’s not too late to register your interest if you’d like a free trial of the subscription service ahead of its full launch alongside Modern Warfare 3 in November. “When the studio head at Beachhead said this would be a live beta, he was not kidding — your participation really can make a difference in how Elite evolves,” writes Activision social media boss Dan Amrich. “And don’t be discouraged by the big number, thinking you shouldn’t bother because they already have enough people — two million volunteers among 30 million Call Of Duty players is a small amount. More would be even better.”

The 3D engine maker is to move into new offices in Brighton which will focus on support, QA, development, training and consulting services. It will be managed by director of support Graham Dunnett, who says of the move: "With its hotbed of gaming development talent, Brighton is the perfect location for the new Unity office as we continue to expand our team and operations in the UK."

Dundee university's Dare Academy also includes courses covering design and testing, under the Dare To Be Digital banner.