EU4 game testers

[Johan]

Now I am not making any excuses, but I just want to explain what testers actually do.

Testing a game and Playtesting a game is something that is rather different.

A lot of the time spent by fulltime employees, both at Paradox and and our testing partners involves pure testing.

These include the following and much more.

• Going through design document and compaing to the game making sure everything follows the design.
• Verifying that something the developer said was fixed is fixed.
• Make sure save/load does not break when you do X.
• Trying to reproduce crashes.
• And a lot more technical "testing" tasks.

 

[Johan]

Can you explain what happened with the release?

Yes.

As the game grows more and more complex with interlocking features and numbers, it is far easier to miss balance issues.

And the more permutations you have the harder it will get.

Lets say you have a development team of 10 people, they are "done" with all the development, and just have a polishing and wrapping up. Thats when you decide, we can sell this game, and set release dates in stone. That can be 2 weeks or 10 weeks in advance.

Then you need to wrap on balancing. If you are lucky, you have about 10 testers that can playtest everyday, and give balance feedback. Lets say they get two days per campaign, and then spend a day testing functionality while the developers rebalance.

How many nations and combinations do you cover in that amount of time? And then doing it all again when numbers change? With the addition of things like policies, mission trees and unique mechanics for lots of nations there are so many relatively common styles that can break the game easily.

And if something is deemed "this is maybe too easy"?

That is the hardest part.. Is it too easy due to experienced testers, or do we need to improve AI.

When you end up in this situation when its a few weeks before release, and you have to send a version to the press, and wrap up for outlets, then you just ship. You have no option.

 

[Johan]

I think most people here would agree this isn't on Q/A (alone). Could you perhaps tell us about the process regarding releasing a new patch like you did on the forum with Imperator : Rome?

I'm curious what we could do as community to reduce the amount of bugs still in the game or things being out of balance. Are there things on developer side that would help to release a more "stable" built on release? Because this seems to be a bit of a pattern with PDS lately. Would you say getting more time to test the release build would work? More budget / focus on removing these issues. Getting earlier input from the community. etc etc.

Or is there simply too much pressure to release a new DLC at a set date? I know that once a date is set, the date needs to be followed for marketing purposes, but surely there are things that could be done.

Most Gamedirectors would prefer using beta-patches regularly. The problem is when we release DLC it is just not possible. If we have committed to a date, its locked in.