How quality control and playtesting work?

[Wade]

Does anyone know how big gaming companies perform quality control / playtesting of their new games that are under development? Especially when it comes to big games like Starfield in which millions of dollars have been invested.

For example, couldn't Bethesda hire for some small fee or even for free 50 or 100 ordinary players (not fanbois!) for remote playtesting of Starfield at various stages of development? They would surely get feedback like "this aspect of the game is not good", or "this is boring", etc. And then they would have a chance to change a lot of things and the final version of the game would be much different and better.

I have the impression that all important decisions regarding the development of Starfield were made by only a few people - Todd, Emil, etc. without any testing or external evaluation by potential players. It seems to me like a lot of improvisation that didn't end well.

[SpeedFreak1972]

In bgs case .... it doesn't

[Darth Revan]

i dont know what or if at all bethesda does something in this ragard but some big companies use focus group tests for thair games.

however those focus group tests do not always result in a better game as we can see quite well with ubisoft games for example.

[Wade]

There are thousand, if not millions of players who would do remote playtesting for free.
So I don't understand why during those 7 years of development they didn't involve people in playtesting, for example every year they could have do one or more playtests to see if what are they developing is good or not. In this way you get very useful feedback, a chance to discard bad ideas and implement new, better ones.

[Wade]

Originally posted by Legatus Lucanus:

i dont know what or if at all bethesda does something in this ragard but some big companies use focus group tests for thair games.

however those focus group tests do not always result in a better game as we can see quite well with ubisoft games for example.

Maybe they're doing it with the wrong types of people? I'm sure that if they hired 50 casual players who play open world games on Steam for playtesting of Starfield, they would get clear feedback that the game concept and core mechanics are not good, to say at least. You don't need to be Einstein to come to that conclusion.

[bunny de fluff]

I don't know how to tell you this, but I don't think they cared. If they did care to play test the game properly, we would not have this discussion right now. Not only they didn't care, looking at the patches (hah) that came out these few months, I can see they still don't care. Should tell you everything you needed to know, just look at the patches.

This game looks like it cost twenty thousands to make, not a dollar more.

[Bunker]

ask chat gpt. it's accurate

[Darth Revan]

Originally posted by Doc Mitchell:

Originally posted by Legatus Lucanus:

i dont know what or if at all bethesda does something in this ragard but some big companies use focus group tests for thair games.

however those focus group tests do not always result in a better game as we can see quite well with ubisoft games for example.

Maybe they're doing it with the wrong types of people? I'm sure that if they hired 50 casual players who play open world games on Steam for playtesting of Starfield, they would get clear feedback that the game concept and core mechanics are not good, to say at least. You don't need to be Einstein to come to that conclusion.

that depends on the randoms they hire then though and even more important how much the devs are willing to listen to thair feedback. it is often seen in game development that feedback is simplay ignored as well or that the feedback only leads to minor changes.

like for example player feedback for skull & bones said that boarding should be more interactive, now in the latest closed beta they made boarding more interactive by letting you press a button 3 times instead of how the boarding worked prior to that which i highly doupt is what the players giving that feedback wanted.
(though to be fair if they would make what players actually want which is manual boarding fights like in AC4 black flag with a proper fighting system and such it would cost a lot of money to develop and at least months of development)

but getting feedback like you suggested is always a good thing, thats why focus group tests exist in the first place. :)

Originally posted by bunny de fluff:

I don't know how to tell you this, but I don't think they cared. If they did care to play test the game properly, we would not have this discussion right now. Not only they didn't care, looking at the patches (hah) that came out these few months, I can see they still don't care. Should tell you everything you needed to know, just look at the patches.

This game looks like it cost twenty thousands to make, not a dollar more.

bethesda was always slow with patches and fixes, thats just how bethesda works.

but 20.000 dollars? that would not even cover the cost of the vosiceacting let alone the localization in different languages the game offers.