Industry Musings 11/14

I love beta testing, and not just because I get the opportunity to play new releases and, as a result, feel like a member of the greater industry for the span of a weekend. From a producer's standpoint, beta testings are a great way to get your game out to your target audience and get collect initial reactions. And the earlier the better - the sooner you can get your game out to the public, the sooner you can collect feedback and iterate.

This past weekend I had the opportunity to beta test (read: play in exchange for feedback) Bioware's upcoming SW:TOR. For the most part the game felt like a re-skinning of everyone's favorite Blizzard MMO, but there's abosolutely nothing wrong with that. While the gameplay is straight up Warcraft (albeit with SW awesomeness), it's Bioware's signature story experience that really sets everything apart. I found myself rolling new characters just to see how their origin stories differed from that of my main.

The gameplay was choppy and there were some weird glitches here and there, but that's to be expected in an older code build. Probably the coolest part about the testing experience from a producer's standpoints was the integrated tester feedback feature. At the completion of larger story missions the game would present me with a short questionaire requesting feedback on the gameplay experience to that point. I have no idea how much data these automated info requests generated for the TOR team, but there must just be piles of it. By carefully processing this data and prioritizing, the team will be able to make more informed decisions about what features to focus on as time winds down before release.

So yeah. Get your game in front of people outside of the project group early and often for candid feedback. Game development is necessarily iterative and the more information you can generate for your team the better you'll be able to meet your consumers wants, needs, and expectations in the time allotted for development.