Focus-Testing Breaks Games? Assassin’s Creed Designer Speaks Out

Over at Tom Chick’s US-centric videogames journo forum, Quarter to Three, one of the ‘gameplay programmers’ for Ubisoft’s latest big-hitter Assassin’s Creed answers a few criticisms of the game.

It’s all very good-natured and generously spoken but one section in particular is interesting. In responding to the criticism that the guards’ actions in the game are inconsistent (i.e. they will attack your character with swords if you bump into them but leave you alone if you start beating up a suspect for information right in front of them) he argues that some of these problems were introduced by the game’s intensive focus-testing.

“The idea is that as long as you don’t draw attention to yourself in a given situation, guards won’t notice you,” he explains in the post. “If they don’t notice you, they won’t figure out you are an assassin. Doing things like sprinting, or galloping flat out, is guaranteed to draw people’s attention, thus they will notice you are an assassin. And ultimately, being an assassin is pretty much a kill on sight offense.

”Now, the problem, as I see it, is that we nerfed the living shit out of guards before we shipped, because of focus tests. Guards were a lot more consistent before, because if they reacted to you in any fashion (i.e. noticed you), they would attack. If you bumped them, or jumped around in their presence, or punched someone in front of them, they’d attack.

”Playing the game now, it’s easy to see the holes that were opened by those changes (like the fact you can just start beating the shit out of an interrogation target in front of guards and they won’t care).”

It’s interesting how responding to focus-testing (whereby players of varying abilities, experience and demographics are invited to play a game and leave feedback for various aspects of the build) can frequently spoil the systems deliberately created by a design team who have already carefully weighed all of the options already. I know of several games that have faltered and even completely imploded at the focus-testing stage (usually titles that enjoy a US publisher who seem to place heavy stock in the process) because they didn’t score well with certain audiences in key areas.

It’s an interesting tension (between a game’s management who want the game to appeal instantly to the kids brought in to play test and the design team who, while wanting constructive test data, probably don’t take too kindly to fully-fledged game design direction from non-professionals. Indeed, take a look at David Jaffe’s furious live-blogging of a focus test session for PS3 title ‘Calling All Cars’ for an uncensored view of one designer’s reaction to the process.

There’s probably a happy medium in all this but, while everybody’s entitled to an opinion, publishers would do well to remember that not all opinions should be valued equally.