As I covered in an earlier Blog about a lecture we had, play testing is an amazing way to see if your game is getting the core experience of your game across and to weed out any bugs, problems or oversights in the game. A lot of the tine you are just too close to the project to see some of these things.
Barclays Eagle Labs:
Our first chance to properly playlets was when we went to the Barclays Eagle Labs event, here we saw a lot of interest in making an open world game and people curious to see what would fill this massive open world. (this is a polite way of saying that the world felt empty and barren which to be fair it was at that point in development).
See the video below to see a pay through of this point in development.
Uni Wide Play-test:
We had another big push on playtesting with our next build of the game on the 13th of may which was a day where we pushed for as many people to play the game as we could that hadn't seen the game so it was unbiased.
we used google forms to gather anonymous responses so the testers didn't feel like they need to worry about what they have to say, these are the responses we got. the feed back we got definitely inspired different changes in the game thought development.
here is a video of one of the play-tester and capturing both his gameplay and his reactions this is key to checking every aspect of how they play the game and how they want to explore and interact with the world.
we kept up playtesting internally and with others in the studio to make sure we weren't slacking but form then on it was all verbal feedback and pointers on what to improve.