Ultimate Game Design : Building game worlds

Testing MMOGs
C H A P T E R 7
With the emergence of MMOGs comes a whole new set of testing requirements. Now
that the consoles have moved online, these titles also provide new testing challenges.
One- or two-player console titles can be tested with minimal hardware (TV, console,
VCR, database). In the world of client/server games, entirely new testing requirements
and challenges suddenly appear.
External testing labs are well equipped to test one- or two-player titles for consoles,
PC, or handhelds. Very few are able to handle testing an MMOG title. This has led
many developer/publisher MMOG builders to rely on the gaming audience itself as a
testing force. Many popular titles allow beta testers (the beta phase in development
immediately precedes the final release of a game) from the gaming community to take
an active role in testing and shaping emerging game content. This method allows
developers to get affordable (free) testing help and expose their game to a wide range
of real-world PC systems featuring a multitude of hardware combinations (video
cards, CPU speeds, memory configurations, and so forth).
This kind of collaboration is also intended to prove to beta testers that the
game when complete is worth playing. It is no secret that MMOG makers would
like beta testers to become game subscribers if the MMOG in question is part of a
subscription model.
Testing MMOG titles thoroughly is a complex undertaking. You are testing not
only game design factors, but also hardware requirements, bandwidth issues, latency
problems, error checking and error correction, server timeouts, and dropped connections.
For our purposes, we’ll focus on some of the game design factors.
Since the MMOG genre is still so new and unexplored, many design issues become
part-time sociology projects. It’s both a fascinating and frustrating view of relatively
anonymous human interaction. Those involved in building MMOGs are discovering
the rules and/or guidelines for developing these kinds of gaming experiences at the
very same time they’re building them! Player-based powers and a player’s individual
ability to impact the world around them tend to take center stage when making
design decisions.
We have simultaneous goals. We want to give players enough power to influence
the environment in meaningful, fun, and interesting ways, but we also want to protect
the play experience of other players. Some players, secure in relative anonymity, go
ape inside MMOGs. They drop all inhibitions. They thrive on trying to ruin any positive
experience another player might enjoy. As designers (and world cops), we have
to acknowledge and account for this fact. Part of our job is to provide a fun, secure,
reliable, addictive, and totally engaging gaming experience. The ability to run
around an MMOG world as a joy-killer will shape and influence (some might even
say dictate) our design decisions.
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Quality Assurance and Play-Test Feedback