Pascal
Luban
Game designer & creative director, freelance
28+ years of experience, serving game developers and publishers
My blog
Training the game designers of tomorrow (Part 5/5)
In the final part of this series of publications devoted to the training of game and level designers, I address a little-taught aspect of the game design process: Playtests. However, they constitute the best quality assurance for the gameplay of a game.
The playtest paradox
Today, everyone agrees on their importance. And yet, many studios do not pay enough attention to them!
The reasons are multiple: Lack of time to organize playtest sessions, lack of know-how, but above all, lack of vision of the project managers who, most often, have never had the opportunity to benefit from good playtests. You have to have tasted the playtests to really understand their potential.
What makes playtests so relevant, so effective, is that they must be conducted with players, that do not belong to the development team and representative of the audience you are targeting.
You also need to follow a good methodology. The latter is not complicated but it is not always known or well understood.
But if these two conditions are met, the playtests will have a significant impact on the project. They make it possible to improve the game system, to adapt it to its audience, to make the game more understandable, to improve onboarding and long-term retention, to refine tunings, to balance them. for multi-player modes, to build a more “readable” and richer level design.
This is why game and level designers must be aware of their importance, must understand how to integrate them into their work and must have the skills to implement them if the need arises.
Case study
To illustrate the impact of playtests on the quality of a game, here is a concrete situation that I experienced during my mission on the multiplayer version of
Splinter Cell - Pandora Tomorrow.
The multiplayer mode of this game was developed at the Ubisoft studio in Annecy while the single-player mode was the responsibility of the Shanghai studio. I joined the Annecy team to set up and manage the playtest structure; It was only later that I also became lead level designer. However, I continued to take care of the playtests in parallel.
This multiplayer mode was absolutely unique because it offered asymmetrical gameplay: The two sides did not have the same gameplay.
The players from the attackers' camp, the spies, had an infiltration type gameplay: They could hide in the shadows and move silently, climb all over the place, they had access to specialized equipment, they used third-person view for a better understanding of their environment. On the other hand, it was very difficult for them to kill their opponents.
Players on the defenders' side, the mercenaries, had access to first-person shooter-style gameplay: They had an impressive arsenal, detection equipment and mines of all kinds but they were slow and they could only use stairs and floors.
The victory conditions were simple: The attackers had to neutralize X consoles on Y within a limited time and the defenders had to prevent them.
The equipment was plentiful and all had real value. Tuning these gave us a lot of trouble and without the playtests, we would never have succeeded.
A good example is the smoke grenade, one of the attackers' accessories. This grenade could only be thrown at the feet of the attacker who activated it; it had been designed as a means of defense in the event of an encounter with a mercenary. Once on the ground, the grenade produced a cloud of smoke which blocked the visibility of the defenders and slowed them down if they decided to pursue the attacker.
Faced with such powerful equipment, the defenders had "counters": With the gas mask, they could pass through the cloud of smoke without being slowed down and the thermal vision allowed them to see their target through the cloud. That said, as players could only carry four pieces of equipment in their loadout, not all defenders systematically equipped the gas mask. As for thermal vision, the narrowness of its cone of vision limited its use when facing a target moving in a zig-zag pattern.
The smoke grenade was therefore a popular accessory for attackers because it was effective in the event of a chance encounter.
But we realized, during playtests, that the attackers had found a new use for this defensive accessory: Making it easier to take objectives.
To take an objective, an attacker simply had to hack a console while remaining around for a short period of time. This delay was short but the operation was very dangerous because the defenders were immediately informed of the attacked console. And since, the attackers did not have a lethal weapon, they became a target.
But, as our maps were mainly interior, access to the objectives was via corridors. Our playtesters then quickly realized that they could seriously slow down the arrival of defenders, and therefore take the objectives, by throwing smoke grenades into the access corridors!
There was no question of removing the slowing effect associated with smoke grenades because the latter was greatly appreciated by the attackers, but these grenades must not unbalance the game in favor of the latter.
The solution was to play on the “lifespan” of the smoke cloud but finding the right setting proved very tricky: A few seconds too long and the smoke grenade unbalanced the game, a few seconds less and it became almost useless to the attackers !
The right setting, down to the second, was finally found after numerous playtest sessions where experienced players played a good hundred games with different settings.
For the record, the multiplayer mode of Splinter Cell - Pandora Tomorrow was a huge success. It was also present in the following two opuses: Chaos Theory and Double Agent. For my part, I continued my mission at Ubisoft Annecy until the end of the development of Chaos Theory.
Good practices
Explanations on the organization of the playtests would require a full publication. Based on the principle that a game designer is above all the “client” of playtests, its recipient, I will share some best practices for you, the beneficiaries of playtest sessions.
Use playtest sessions to assess specific aspects of your design
Today, many teams seek to implement short and iterative development cycles: Design - development - test - design modification - development - test - Etc.
With this in mind, use playtest sessions to assess your work in progress. This means that it is you, the game or level designer, who must inform the playtest manager of your needs in terms of player feedback. This will allow him or her to adapt the content of playtest sessions to the needs of the moment.
Generally speaking, playtest sessions that follow an immutable, standard protocol are not of much use.
Attend the sessions
By attending the sessions yourself, you will be able to observe the playtesters. You will see the choices they make, their hesitations when faced with a menu, their good or bad use of features, their difficulty in using them, their navigation patterns in a map, etc.
But, above all, you will see what they DON’T do. A game or a level designer imagines the behavior of the players but they play as they want and often do things that were not anticipated. By observing their behavior, we understand much better what players expect from their game, which will make it less frustrating and more engaging.
And, of course, you will be able to ask them your own questions.
If you settle for debriefs from the playtest manager only, you will miss these valuable lessons.
Encourage your project management to organize playtests
Finally, if your project management is slow to put playtests in place, a situation I witness frequently, push them to do it... and insist! Resistance in this area is significant... and I know what I'm talking about.
Remember that if the game design is not satisfactory, you will be the one to blame. Playtests will allow you to identify weaknesses in your gameplay or levels and remedy them before it is too late.
The final word
In France, we are fortunate to have excellent schools training in the different professions present in a development studio. Having had the opportunity to work with young game designers from these schools, I was able to appreciate the quality of their training. But I wanted to share with you lessons resulting from my experience in the field.
Even today, I am learning.
The human being is an eternal apprentice.
Thank you for reading my posts.
