Before the release of Divinity: Original Sin II, which will take place on September 14, the developer company Larian is testing the project on real players in their offices. About how this happens and why it is necessary, – App2Top.ru Olga Timofeeva, the head of the Russian office of Larian, was questioned.
Alexander Semenov, Senior Editor App2Top.ru : Please tell us about the purpose of testing. Is it catching bugs on the target audience, a focus test, something else?
Olga TimofeevaOlga Timofeeva, head of Larian Saint-Petersburg: I don’t want to offend anyone, but bugs are still better caught by professional testers.
In this case, the players’ impressions of our game are important to us – how interesting it turned out, whether the scenario is clear, how easy it is to pass, and so on.
In addition, we automatically collect statistics through Steam on the passage of the game by each playtester. This data allows us to “tweak” the game and adjust the balance.
How is this testing conducted? Does 20 gamers get caught up in a room, who then write something in crash reports or is everything different?
Olga: About as you described. Only gamers are not 20, but 8.
In the Larian studio in St. Petersburg, they settled down in a conference room, which now resembles a gaming club of the 90s.
The guys are helped by a specially dedicated studio employee – Ilya, our tester. He answers questions from playtesters, records feedback, starts bug reports. The guys themselves are just playing.
How much will each guest have to lose in the game?
Olga: About 40 hours is the standard amount of the working week.
Will there be an evaluation of the campaign or multiplayer? If we are talking about some individual aspects or moments, please tell us why the emphasis is placed on them?
Olga: We don’t force guests to play multiplayer – after all, people who are strangers to each other have gathered, not everyone likes to depend on someone in battle whom you see for the first time in your life. But if they themselves want to cooperate, we are only “for”.
The guys are trying multiplayer and individual game, keyboards and gamepads, different characters and presets.
The only thing we don’t give them for testing is Game Master Mode, a mode for playing with a master, which we recently presented to the world gaming community.
Before the interview, we talked separately and you noted that in Russia it was decided to increase the test from a week to a month. Why?
Olga: Not only in Russia. In all the studios where we conduct such testing, that is, in Ghent and in Quebec, too.
Initially, it was planned to test for 8 people for 1 week. But we had so many applications that we decided to give more people the opportunity to take part in this test. Now we have 4 teams of playtesters in each studio with 8 people in each – already 32 people.
How many applications were there in total?
Olga: We had about 160 applications. Mostly from St. Petersburg, a little from Moscow. We really appreciate this attitude of our fans towards us – they were ready to take a vacation at work and buy tickets from Moscow to St. Petersburg to get to our playtest. It was very difficult to choose – I wanted to invite everyone.
When I hear about such a volume of testing, with tracking how they play, I am very surprised at the willingness of people to then view and analyze this array of information. These are huge volumes! And the game is coming out in September. How realistic is it to eliminate all the shortcomings seen in such a period? Isn’t it better to arrange such testing six months before the release?
Olga: Well, we have scripts and a special program for analyzing statistics. We change a couple of lines of code and get the data in the section we need. And we process complaints and suggestions from players in real time, right in the testing process and immediately pass them on to programmers, scriptwriters, artists.
We are doing this now precisely because the game is coming out in September! Because the game, which had changed before, at some points changed, shrunk and expanded, has now taken its final form.
The 
game has been in early access since September last year. You probably also collected data from the first players, their feedback, based on it, changed the game. Why, if it is possible to measure everything remotely through the Steam version, conduct such tests additionally?
Olga: All this is true – both feedback was collected and the game was redrawn, but there is one “but”: only the first act of the game is in early access, and the whole game is much bigger.
Clear. Thanks for the interview.