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Forum - View topicEP. REVIEW: Quality Assurance in Another World
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Key
Moderator
 Posts: 18428 Location: Indianapolis, IN (formerly Mimiho Valley) |
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This was also one my top two debuts of the season (along with VTuber Legend), and my evaluation of episodes 2 and 3 is mostly in line with James': not as good on the execution front, but still offering plenty enough good ideas and story elements to make this series a priority view each Friday.
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Greed1914
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Yeah, the first episode has the advantage of the weird things clicking into place once the premise is revealed, but it's still an interesting idea overall. I also like that Haga is trying handle things through a combination of relying on how thoroughly he tested things to know what should happen, but also being extremely cautious because the bugs that were present, and whatever damage the other testers have done, mean he can't be completely certain.
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Otohiko
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This was one of the more interesting premieres this season. Could go anywhere, but it did actually set up some real character stakes in this, and even with the utterly ludicrous dragon designs - there was some real weight and impact to what was happening. This is a show that's taking itself seriously, and not in a bad way.
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Covnam
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Enjoying it so far. It's interesting that there are testers from other companies stuck as well. Presumably (at this point at least) Tesla did the evil AI thing and figured out the best way to get the game debugged was to just not let anyone leave until they've finished their jobs.
I wonder how their bodies are holding up? (if time outside the game flows at a similar rate...) I'm curious how events get reset. Do the testers have to manually trigger them or is everything just on a cycle? If Haga's friends are still conscious that's a pretty horrifying living hell they're stuck in. Hopefully that one stuck in the infinite loop can't feel pain too O_o Though I'd say invincibility letting you get killed and resurrecting you is a bug in and of itself, or just a bad description. |
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Greed1914
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Recent developments do have me wondering about the larger picture. In episode 1, Haga says he has done a quest multiple times to try to arrive at a different outcome, so it seems like NPCs can respawn. But Lu can't and Haga was surprised that Nikola did, even though I think she had before. Maybe it was because Nikola came back sooner than usual? There may be different types of NPCs, and quest givers are different. Despite being in a bugged village, Lu wasn't T-posing like the rest.
Fixing the bugged village so fast does confirm that the devs didn't abandon it, so I'm left to guess that it is either that whatever happened to the testers was something they haven't been able to safely fix, or alternatively, they died in reality, and they are being left alone because only their minds remain. I'm leaning towards the second one since I don't think that letting them run around introducing more errors would help with finding a fix. |
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Gina Szanboti
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The question I had about Lu was how, in-universe, she could be alive in that situation to begin with, since it seemed like Isora was the first to encounter her (and I suppose she would behave as if that were so, no matter how many times actual players discovered her?). Isora had to go out and get and prepare food for her, so by all rights she should've long since starved to death were she alone and unable to leave her bed. That aside, what was supposed to be her function as an NPC? She didn't really offer any side quest to Isora. Most players who could normally leave the game wouldn't stick around to tell her stories, which sort of seemed like the episode was suggesting was her role in provoking player-generated content the game's AI could use. I can't say I understood it (and I'm explaining it so poorly, I don't blame anyone who can't figure out what I'm getting at). |
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Key
Moderator
Posts: 18428 Location: Indianapolis, IN (formerly Mimiho Valley) |
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Agree with James that the English simuldub for this series is a strong one. I have been following it almost exclusively.
There is a third distinct possibility: some kind of time dilation effect, like what transpires in SAO during the Alicization arc. But that explanation has just as many holes as the others. There do seem to be a lot of inconsistencies here, but at least the series isn't ignoring that aspect of the story entirely. (See The New Gate.) |
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Thesarum
 SubscriberPosts: 506 |
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I was leaning towards "have died in reality" and the dev team just don't want to tell them. Option the fourth: The meta AI is intercepting and suppressing the "we can't log out" type bug reports. Though this option, like all others, includes a lot of holes. Like: wouldn't the devs have noticed that nobody had logged out for a whole year, even in the absence of any bug reports? |
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Aerdra
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We still don't know how player death works in this game, and even Haga says he doesn't know, strangely enough, even though he's a play-tester. It looks like we're finally about to get some answers.
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Aerdra
Posts: 427 |
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I didn't expect that all the debuggers from Asobing would be dealt with all at once; I thought it was going to be an ongoing plotline, with each of them taking turns as villain of the week or something.
The previous episode explained how the game uses seemingly pointless routine events to hide loading times. Haga and Amano exploit this feature to trap the Asobing debuggers in a loading bug. The story continues to do a great job letting Haga defeat enemies using debugging skills and knowledge (not overpowered cheats). I thought we were finally going to learn about how player death works, but no. And this episode only raises more questions about how NPC death works. |
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Greed1914
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It seems like the next problem will be finding more testers. The company that Haga knew about has been handled in one go,
One thing I like about this show is that it foreshadows Haga's solutions in a way that makes it believable that he has some advantage without being overpowered. Honestly, I think the biggest threat for him may come from someone who is like him in that they took the time to learn how the game works, where it has flaws, but is also willing to use their debugger stone at the opportune moment. |
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Greed1914
Posts: 4615 |
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Maybe the NPCs in this new village are more finished than others, and this sort of unscripted response is how they are supposed to work in the final product? The guards at the castle could only react in ways responsive to being a loading screen, but the ones that Play-Ing was using for their amusement tried to leave because they clearly understood what was coming. Lu was capable of forming attachments, though I guess it's possible that was in response to Amano completing her quest.
Then again, Haga mentions that this village has a name that sounds like it's from a different game, so something could be off about the whole thing. |
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quentntarantado
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Apologies, but the series is a bit of a letdown for me. So this person is a debugger of an online VR game.
That reminds me a bit of SAO, which I disliked. I was expecting something like "How a Realist Hero Rebuilt a Kingdom" except instead of economics, it's quality assurance. "Quality assurance (QA) is a lean approach to quality management as it involves all employees in the quality process. QA focusses on empowering all staff to check their own work throughout the production process, rather than relying on quality controllers to inspect the final output." So I was thinking of manufacturing. Instead it's programming, and it's more like Quality Control, you build it and you check for flaws. Quality Assurance is planning from step 1 to prevent flaws the first place. Please excuse me, just my opinion. |
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Eilavel
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I am enjoying the show but I agree that it is kind of aimless in a big picture sense and thus under pressure for each sub arc to really deliver all the interest by itself. Fortunately, its been essentially a success at this so far.
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Gina Szanboti
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I'm not a gamer, so bear with me if I say something really ignorant.
I'm not sure how to put this, but it seems like there's something really off in how this is working. I think normally, the whole game doesn't run unless a player enters an area that triggers the game to run where someone is actually playing. We saw that in the evil debuggers getting caught in a loading sequence when they left the castle. But with the current arc, the game seems to be running full time. What Yamanaka did to Gaydle isn't something that was originally scripted for the NPCs, so they shouldn't have any more storyline written for that. And yet they had a whole thing about what happened with Gaydle after Yamanaka left, with NPCs being killed by him and frustrations growing until they became homicidal. All this seems to have occurred without any additional player interaction, which means the game was still running in that area as if someone was actually playing there. So basically, I'm not sure what to think about this.
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