The memoirs of a (ex) Tester -The Final Katana

The Playstation version had already been released months earlier so this round of testing was to make sure it was looking good on windows. This involved playing through it several times, a lot of times actually. In fact I played it so many times I could play the thing blindfolded. Even now the sound of that battle victory music makes me shiver.

To test a game well you need a plan, one that makes sure you cover everything and also serve as a convenient get out of jail free card if a problem occurs. A test plan,(which is a checklist of things do and look at) servers this purpose. Most test plans are written specifically for the individual game by the lead tester before testing begins although there are some generic ones knocking around. Depending on the game and the lead tester it can range from “check all objects in the first room” to “Make sure the left chair has all four legs connected and can be picked up” in levels of detail.

The vast majority of test plans are split into sections depending on the game, e .g. for Thief 2 they were split into levels while for Championship Manager it was leagues. These section of the plan are handled by one tester. Primarily so they become an “expert” at that one area of the game. This makes sense but does make testing repetitive. All of those stories about testing the same part of a game for hours on end are mainly due to this practise.

There isn’t much to say about testing a game that was to all extensive purposes complete by the time you take a look at it. But sadly that isn’t true of the next game I was assigned to test was the exact opposite, Daikatana.

This game has reached a legendary status which is normally reserved for such gaming greats such as Halo, Mario and Sonic. The only thing is that this game remembered for being so bad that it took down a games studio. The game was actually pretty well hyped when it was first announced. John Romero was one of the few bankable gaming names at the time and his studio, Ion Storm was flush with cash and had hired some excellent talent. It all went sour quickly though I guess the tide of public opinion turned when John Romero started a misguided ad campaign to promote the game which including the infamous “John Romero make you his bitch” poster. Making fun of your demographic has never been a viable marketing strategy.

It was clear there was something wrong after a few months. The game kept getting put back and then they changed graphical engine midway through the project because it looked better. When it turned up at the Eidos office for testing however there was a lot of excitement. Just about everyone had a look at it and tried the multiplayer. The general consensus was that it was ok but nothing special and to be fair it was, as long as you didn’t play the singleplayer campaign.

The whole story of the development of Daikatana has been told so many times it is probably possible to do a second by second reconstruction of it so I don’t need to go into it here. Suffice to say, testing it was hard work with some builds being almost unplayable.

To this day I maintain that it would have been an average game if they had just took that stupid sidekick feature out, this alone was responsible for the more frustrating bugs. You needed to have both of your sidekicks with you in order to complete a level. The only thing was that it is a bit difficult to keep them around when they are constantly falling down pits or getting lost. The one thing I would like to say at this point is this, we knew.

We knew about every crash, every graphical glitch and even every clipping issue. The team at Eidos worked very hard in testing the game and they found a humongous amount of bugs. The programmers too worked hard to fix them but in the end they just ran out of time, ironic considering how much it had been delayed. My two assistant managers even bravely took a stand and tried to delay the release due to the sheer number of bugs we were finding. That fact alone shows how bad we thought the game to be. Ask yourself this; I played the whole game through literally twenty odd times. Do you really think I somehow missed all of the glaring issues present in the game? After release I would read on forums about how QA had messed up and how we didn’t do our jobs this kind of uninformed claptrap really hurt my feelings to put it mildly

On the same note, shortly before my time at Eidos they released a game based on the movie Braveheart.. Once it was released members of the public wasting no time in making their feelings known about the bugs present by phoning up Eidos and asking to speak to Clint, the lead tester (I assume they got his name from the credits). He would be subjected by a barrage of abuse as he had to deal with customers taking out their frustrations on a QA guy. This is the reason why reception won’t transfer your call to a tester at Eidos anymore.

The Playstation version had already been released months earlier so this round of testing was to make sure it was looking good on windows. This involved playing through it several times, a lot of times actually. In fact I played it so many times I could play the thing blindfolded. Even now the sound of that battle victory music makes me shiver.

To test a game well you need a plan, one that makes sure you cover everything and also serve as a convenient get out of jail free card if a problem occurs. A test plan,(which is a checklist of things do and look at) servers this purpose. Most test plans are written specifically for the individual game by the lead tester before testing begins although there are some generic ones knocking around. Depending on the game and the lead tester it can range from “check all objects in the first room” to “Make sure the left chair has all four legs connected and can be picked up” in levels of detail.

The vast majority of test plans are split into sections depending on the game, e .g. for Thief 2 they were split into levels while for Championship Manager it was leagues. These section of the plan are handled by one tester. Primarily so they become an “expert” at that one area of the game. This makes sense but does make testing repetitive. All of those stories about testing the same part of a game for hours on end are mainly due to this practise.

There isn’t much to say about testing a game that was to all extensive purposes complete by the time you take a look at it. But sadly that isn’t true of the next game I was assigned to test was the exact opposite, Daikatana.

This game has reached a legendary status which is normally reserved for such gaming greats such as Halo, Mario and Sonic. The only thing is that this game remembered for being so bad that it took down a games studio. The game was actually pretty well hyped when it was first announced. John Romero was one of the few bankable gaming names at the time and his studio, Ion Storm was flush with cash and had hired some excellent talent. It all went sour quickly though I guess the tide of public opinion turned when John Romero started a misguided ad campaign to promote the game which including the infamous “John Romero make you his bitch” poster. Making fun of your demographic has never been a viable marketing strategy.

It was clear there was something wrong after a few months. The game kept getting put back and then they changed graphical engine midway through the project because it looked better. When it turned up at the Eidos office for testing however there was a lot of excitement. Just about everyone had a look at it and tried the multiplayer. The general consensus was that it was ok but nothing special and to be fair it was, as long as you didn’t play the singleplayer campaign.

The whole story of the development of Daikatana has been told so many times it is probably possible to do a second by second reconstruction of it so I don’t need to go into it here. Suffice to say, testing it was hard work with some builds being almost unplayable.

To this day I maintain that it would have been an average game if they had just took that stupid sidekick feature out, this alone was responsible for the more frustrating bugs. You needed to have both of your sidekicks with you in order to complete a level. The only thing was that it is a bit difficult to keep them around when they are constantly falling down pits or getting lost. The one thing I would like to say at this point is this, we knew.

We knew about every crash, every graphical glitch and even every clipping issue. The team at Eidos worked very hard in testing the game and they found a humongous amount of bugs. The programmers too worked hard to fix them but in the end they just ran out of time, ironic considering how much it had been delayed. My two assistant managers even bravely took a stand and tried to delay the release due to the sheer number of bugs we were finding. That fact alone shows how bad we thought the game to be. Ask yourself this; I played the whole game through literally twenty odd times. Do you really think I somehow missed all of the glaring issues present in the game? After release I would read on forums about how QA had messed up and how we didn’t do our jobs this kind of uninformed claptrap really hurt my feelings to put it mildly

On the same note, shortly before my time at Eidos they released a game based on the movie Braveheart.. Once it was released members of the public wasting no time in making their feelings known about the bugs present by phoning up Eidos and asking to speak to Clint, the lead tester (I assume they got his name from the credits). He would be subjected by a barrage of abuse as he had to deal with customers taking out their frustrations on a QA guy. This is the reason why reception won’t transfer your call to a tester at Eidos anymore.