Game Testing

 

sourced from the article provided (https://dzone.com/articles/7-different-types-of-game-testing-techniques)

This week's reading task was all about game testing, its importance and the different kinds of game testing out there.

When testing a game you don't just test if the game is working and that is all(even though you should also be doing that), there is more to it. You are testing to see if it has any fun tied to it, if it unique in some kind of way, if it runs on the specified systems and if it reaches the target demographic.

Another important step in game testing is performance testing. This refers to testing if the game will run properly on the specified system requirements put out and there have been instances where some games have gone through this stage of testing but the final product still came out a broken mess.

An example of this is amazon's attempt at an MMORPG through 'New World'.

While the game was in its beta stage of testing, players reported that the game was destroying their GTX 3080 and 3090 GPUs, which are the newest and most powerful GPUs out on the market right now.

You would think that this problem would have been resolved when the game hit live servers but players were shocked to find out that in some instances, the game was still not properly optimised and it could still destroy people's graphics cards which they paid a lot of money for. A link to an article describing the situation can be found here --> https://kotaku.com/new-world-still-bricking-expensive-graphics-cards-say-1847782307.

Another example of poor optimisation is Activision's new hit Battle Royale game 'Call of Duty: Warzone'.

The game has been out for almost two years at this point and it is not fully optimised for some systems leading to huge drops in FPS and causing a lot of lag for players. -->https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/lytora/is_warzone_just_the_most_poorly_optimized_game/. A reddit thread of players displaying their specs and still being baffled as to why this game is so poorly optimised.

Finally, 'Cyberpunk 2077' a game that was in development for 8 years or more and was so hyped up by everyone came out as a broken unfinished mess of a game last year. The game was so poorly optimised that the community went so far as to create an optimisation mod for the game in order to improve performance. You can read more about it here --> https://www.techradar.com/news/cyberpunk-2077-mod-could-deliver-big-performance-improvements.