Battlefield 3 Producer Patrick Bach 'Extremely Nervous'
How would you like to get paid to test one of the most talked about video games of the year before everyone else? DICE and Electronic Arts are hiring people to do just that ahead of the release of their first-person shooter title “Battlefield 3″ on Oct. 25.
We went to DICE’s plush Stockholm offices and spoke to Craig McLeod, who heads the team of game testers, and executive producer Patrick Bach, to find out what it takes to test one of the most anticipated games of the year.
So, you’re hiring game testers. Must be a popular job?
CM: We are in the hundreds of responses for this role, and a lot of the applicants say they are willing to take time off their ordinary jobs to come here as game testers for a while. It’s definitely perceived as a dream job for many. For me personally it is.
Playing video games for a living sure sounds like a dream job. Tell us more!
CM: It’s not as people think it is. You don’t just come in here and play games. We work really hard, are very invested in our titles and spend a lot of time working with the development team. There are two layers of testing games. One is to make sure the game is functional, basically making sure basic things work. And then there is the gut-feeling aspect and making sure that the game is enjoyable.
Can anyone become a game tester?
PB: No. An inexperienced tester will find issues that don’t change the overall experience of the game, while an experienced tester will find stuff that actually makes a crucial difference. An experienced tester who has played a certain passage a million times is still able to play a game the in same way as someone who plays it for the first time, and can distinguish what’s important to fix.
But isn’t everything important to fix?
PB: Just fixing bugs doesn’t make a great game. All games ship with small bugs that developers more or less deliberately have chosen to ignore. The big question is which bugs you choose to fix.
It’s correct to assume that you as game testers play a lot of computer games?
CM: I try to get in as much game-playing as possible in my schedule. A normal day, I play three to four hours of Battlefield 3. Outside of work I also play a lot of different games. I want to know what other shooters are doing and what their successes are. And I want to try to bring that back the good stuff from other games to our title and raise our bar. Outside of work I play the Modern Warfare series, Halo and many other shooters. It’s important to understand our market.
What’s the big challenge right now?
PB: Our biggest challenge right now is holding back a bit. Just before this interview I was extremely upset about how ugly our animations looked in a specific part of the game. But five minutes later I realized that I was comparing it to our own standards. Every other game developer would have been extremely happy with that animation.
Please explain more.
PB: There is a definite risk that we narrow down on details that, in fact, aren’t that important to our players. Everyone in the team has been sucked into the idea that this will be the ultimate game. And when you feel that you have to ship a tiny detail which isn’t perfect you feel extremely disappointed. But to be honest, when you look at the game it is pretty cool. You just have to step away from it.
So what are you focusing on?
PB: We are focusing on cutting the bad stuff rather than adding and changing things. Instead of adding ideas, we are removing problems, and that is what our testers are helping us with. We have deleted portions of maps, we have skipped passages in the single player campaign. Everything that doesn’t meet our standards we chop out. A lot of games fail at that, they seem to think more is better and often, that isn’t the case.
How does Battlefield 3 differ from other games you’ve worked on?
PB: We started from scratch making this game. Sure, we took our best ideas from our previous games, but we built the game from scratch and started with a clean slate. For our testers that has meant that they have spent a lot of time doing core testing. That is making sure that basic core aspects in the game, such as running, shooting and hitting, works. These are core things that should work in every game.
What’s the difference when testing games versus testing other software?
PB: Games are actually one of the most complicated areas of software development in the computer industry. It’s not like building an operating system, when you in theory only need to make sure that stuff work and it’s up to others to provide the system with interesting software. We need to consider both aspects. The machine we have built is extremely complicated and while it’s very important that it runs perfectly, the experience also needs to be a lot of fun.
Is it fun for you?
PB: Some days we get really frustrated, when we finally managed to make something work, but when testing it we realize it isn’t fun. Now we need to make sure people in this company to feel happy about closing this project and shipping the game. Many, including me, are feeling that if they only had one week more, we could have done so much more. People seem to focus on what they could have done, rather than on what we have already managed to achieve.
So you aren’t proud of your achievements?
PB: I don’t know why, but I always feel ashamed about the games I’m involved in making. I can’t even bring myself to start up “Battlefield Bad Company 2,” our last game, because I feel so ashamed. I know it is a great product but still I only see the things we could have done better.
Okay...so how close are you to shipping the new game?
PB: Right now we are weeks from being done. The only thing you see when you are so close to finishing is more opportunity. When you have been building a game for such a long time you get bored with the things that you liked so much before, that you feel like changing them just for the sake of it. You agreed with everyone that the line this guy said, the sound of that gun, was perfect and suddenly you want to change it, just because you’re bored with it since you’ve seen it too many times. But just because you’re bored with it, it doesn’t mean it’s bad.
Could you ship the game today? Is it that close to being finished?
PB: We couldn’t release the game today. You can’t just put the bonnet on the car and drive it out of the factory before you have assembled the stuff inside it and know that it works.
Really?
PB: When you make a game you don’t have it shippable every day, and just add on pieces to make it better. At times the game is literally unassembled into various pieces. And that is a hard sell to the executives, who would like the game to be shippable every day and just have us keeping improving it until the day we reach deadline.
Is there something that keeps you up at night, worrying?
PB: We have shown this game to many people, and we have gotten approval from our audience that this is going to be something really special. But I’m still extremely nervous, not about what other people will think, but about how I will feel about the game. My biggest worry is that I will feel bad about the product. For me my job is very personal.
Honestly, testing games must be the best job in the world, right?
PB: Being a game tester is a crucial and important job. It’s not about eating pizza, drinking beer and playing computer games, so sorry guys.
- Source: Jens Hansegard and Sven Grundberg for The Wall Street Journal (September 27th, 2011)
