Testing our patience

business decisions are goofing up again, yay!

Look I shouldn't have to tell you guys this, but focus testing is dumb. However it blows my mind at times just to see how dumb it can get. I mean maybe somewhere on paper I can see where the idea is nice. You have something really weird and mind blowing, like imagine inventing Portal, or you come up with a wacky asymmetrical multiplayer mode, and reasonably think that you may need to bring some people in to see what they think. You need outside people, and the type that could possibly fund your project and make it a success, so naturally you want them to like this strange new concept. Naturally you'd want to make sure you tune the game to be competent in explanation and mechanics, and see how players react to it. The reality is though, most of the games with that weird style or idea come from a different crowd than the one actually doing these big tests and tracking numbers, demographics, and public interest. Yet they still feel the need to do them, even to the point where the need to focus test a game based on its genre... while it was within range of one of the biggest ongoing genres out there. I mean can you imagine somebody coming in and asking you how you'd react to a post apocalyptic open world RPG, because they don't know if consumers are interested? Well that's actually what happened with Horizon if this article is to be believed. ...Sony, I'm disappointed.

Now the main pull and clickbait to articles like that is the title of "Female leads are risky!" but the fact is its much worse than that. I mean don't get me wrong, its pretty stupid that we can't have teams simply put a female lead in and leave it at that. I've already gone on about that topic in the past though*, and how there's nothing too risky about a female lead in itself, but to be honest this is the least offense committed within this call for testing. I can get the idea that more males play these kinds of games, and that maybe they'll have a slightly better reaction to a male character. Plus well developed characters of any kind could be tested for a positive response, in case maybe people hate the character (like what happened back when they tried to redesign Cole in Infamous 2). I still wouldn't encourage it over just designing one that feels right to the heart of the project and team, but I could at least play devil's advocate and see the good in their idea of testing the protagonist for feedback. Now on the other hand when you put your entire setting on the line, and an exciting one at that, or go even a step further and question the entire genre of play when you already choose a popular one, you're just being stupid. No excuses, you seriously need to go find your head, and screw it back on and hope you didn't do permanent damage to your common sense.

A hero with a bow? Nah too risky, nothing popular has ever done that before.

Well for starters we can say that its wrong to test that stuff because you shouldn't be throwing away great conceptual ideas, like say... robot dinosaurs. Developers should feel confident in their vision, and if it got greenlit that should be all there is to it. You don't throw that down the drain just because 10 of 12 guys you brought in off the street weren't fans of the same exact thing. Some guys like sci-fi, some like fantasy, some hate both, some love both, some love to mix everything up, and then you have many categories and preferences from there and different executions that can please or piss off any of those people. A focus test group isn't going to give you squat, and you're better off just doing whatever you want for the simple fact of integrity. However even with integrity aside, you're better off doing it because there is no key ingredient to a plot setting. People love what they do, and if you put it out there you'll get an audience that gravitates naturally to it. That can be something normal, something lightly fantasy based, or something totally insane, either way there's a crowd for it. Especially if your plot is heavily pushing the idea of robot dinosaurs! However what's even more rediculous without need of explanation is the part where they lumped in the very genre as a risk worth testing on. With horror, or CRPG that might be alright, but we're talking about an open world RPG. You know, the thing that sells a ton whenever Bethesda pops one out since 2006, that thing that countless indies do a sandbox/minecraft spin-off on to try and grab a quick buck, and that thing being called Game of The Year already in the form of Witcher 3. Every year there's a massive RPG game with a big world selling a ton, and a wave of hype surrounding the next few upcoming, and Horizon just became yet another one. So why on earth did that need to be tested!? What's next, are we going to see how test groups respond to color? Perhaps you need to focus test the jumping button, considering how risky it might be to continue with that standard of gaming.

So what's my solution? Simple: Common sense! Its almost too simple. I'm sorry I can't explain some miracle cure, or give you a better testing method, but it really is as simple as using your head. There are two vital genders in this whole world, so no a female lead role isn't anything revolutionary or too much for the human mind to handle. There are enough people biologically, socially, and willingly able to handle that without you putting it on some chart or turning it into a statistic. If anything you get free attention from certain "progressive" press sites pushing a dumb agenda. There is a ton of open world RPGs out there selling without much hate going on over potential over-saturation (and if there was, you publishers likely wouldn't care), so no you're not slaughtering your game by making it one. Robot dinosaurs are awesome, so duh, keep them in and build the world you envisioned. Keep that stuff! You don't need some special camp of approval from total stranger to tell you that an open world game with robot dinosaurs pushed with decent advertising will sell. Chances are that group of people may not even know what they want, or will tell you to build it into what they know and nothing outside of that safe box. That's not a healthy industry standard, and we don't need to continue trusting these people with so much feedback that they determine whether or not its okay to do a freakin' open world RPG game. Instead we need more games like Wolfenstein where they clearly said in an interview from the beginning "no focus groups, we're just making the game we want to make" and it paid off just fine and gave us one of the most refreshing and well made FPS games of that year.

The world could certainly use more games like this

The funny thing to is this all coming from Sony of all companies. One of their most successful and critically acclaimed games in recent times, was Last of Us; a game that was pressured to change by focus groups. and was able to switch around the groups and ignore many people before settling on what they got. Doesn't that say something for them? Doesn't that send a message that maybe focus testing groups have no clue or proper say on how a game would really turn out? The only quality testing that should matter is for that of a highly experimental game, or the general testing phases of a game. Ask people does it live up to its purpose, not what they would have you change because it didn't suit their weird opinions. If you really truly do want to look for that kind of opinion, put it out on the web and grab any meaningful opinion on a truly risky feature from a massive pool of people of the general gaming community. Believe me when I say that doesn't make those results right either, but it sure sounds a lot better than how I hear focus testing being done.

*If you really interested in what I have to say about the issue, its here. However I'd recommend against it at the time of writing this because looking back my writing was fairly terrible, and I have a lot of mistakes to correct. My point is still relevant and stands important in the face of current events, so I'll look to correct things sometime to help refine the presentation of the point, but that'll have to wait. If you want a TL;DR version of it though, its basically this: Female characters aren't a risky move by themselves. Their sale numbers are only scary because they have the rotten luck of being tied to video games that were experimental, uncertain, and maybe even outright badly designed. They flop for the same reason games like Bullet Storm, Brutal legends, or Stranger's wrath flopped... and no there was no girl on the lead role or box cover of those games. They were simply weird, people didn't trust to spend big money on them, and marketing wasn't there to help 'em out. So no dice.