Developer Oxide Games has posted the latest video dev diary for its upcoming grand strategy game Ara: History Untold. This entry is a bit different in that the dev diary's host, Steven Bell, chats with Oxide Games QA Analyst Zai Jeffries about testing this upcoming game, and how to test a 4X strategy game in general.
Jeffries states that in testing, you have to find what he calls the "golden path" in a game, where a player is most likely to go. He stated:
You can never really know 100% but you can take a good guess at it and one of the first ways to do that is by just before testing, play a little bit. Play for an hour, see what you did naturally, and then talk to the other people on my team and say, "So did you do this? Did you do that?" And if they did, it's like, "Okay so this is on the golden path." These are the important features that everybody is going to have to hit and interact with at some point, so that guides where our eyes are going.
He also talks about specific aspects of testing in Ara. One aspect of the game is the option of creating procedurally generated maps. Jeffries states:
One of the most important things to do in Ara, not just Ara but in all QA in general is to go outside of your comfort zone. Play the game in a way that you wouldn't normally play. It doesn't mean you got to play bad. It just means that you do something slightly different, and you're doing that because when each of these maps are different, using a consistent or the same strategy for everyone is only going to expose a smaller part of the game . . . so you want to do something in a variety of different ways.
Ara: History Untold is currently set for release on the PC sometime in 2024 via Microsoft's Xbox Game Studios. You can join the Ara Insider Program right now to play pre-release builds for the game. Oxide announced recently that a new technical alpha test is slated to begin "soon" and you can learn more about how to participate on the game's Steam page.
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