11 Apr 2010

PT4

Today I got to attend a playtest sesssion at the user research labs.  Over the last couple of weeks we’ve had about 40 folks come in and play our “Playtest 4” milestone build.  We’ve been talking a bit on this site about our progress on the multiplayer side of things, but a lot has been going into campaign in parallel.  Although we don’t test campaign at anywhere near the scale of the multiplayer Beta, we do do our fair share of testing campaign with real users. 

PT4 wasn’t even the first lab test of campaign, and in fact, much of campaign has been playable in rough form for some time now, but for this milestone the team really cranked up the level of polish, with environments receiving lots of love across the board, AI getting smarter, a lot more cinematics showing up, and real mission dialogue getting in for the first time ever - in other words a lot of things falling in to place that make the campaign feel real.  Although there’s a million things left to do in the time we have remaining, PT4 is the first time it felt like a pretty fair snapshot of the game.

Internally it’s very difficult to look at the game with fresh eyes.  When you’ve run through the environment a thousand times you know exactly where to go and how you’re going to tackle the encounters.  So for that reason there’s nothing like seeing people play through the campaign for the very first time with no preconceptions.  Wish we could say more but wouldn’t want to give away any details…

Meanwhile the Public Beta is just around the corner.  The team has been putting serious hours into the Internal Beta, making all sorts of final tweaks so that when it goes out to you all (in less than a month, holy blam!) it’s as polished an experience as it can be.  On that note, off to get my Arena rating for the day.

- Joe

  1. bungieblog posted this