Gaming Signal: Testing Crackdown

Testing Crackdown

Gamasutra has an interesting article on how Microsoft Game Studios tested Crackdown. They cover some of the difficult areas encountered when testing a sandbox game, and how the team, through various means, was able to proceed through those areas. Mostly, it seems that quite a bit of time was used to create custom software tools to help.

I did find the use of screenshots in their problem tracking system to be nice, but the blurb that the Forza 2 team can take that trouble ticket, then open the models directly in Maya to be very cool. There's obviously a lot more that went on in testing Crackdown than is covered in the article. I'm guessing that, really, most of it is uninteresting grunt work. After all, no matter how fun the game, its going to become drudgery to go to the same places and do the same things over and over again to verify bug resolutions. But it pays off when the game is as strong as Crackdown turned out to be.