Devil Dogs Testing CoD4:MW on PC

I’ve spoke about Kleenex testing in the past, but for those of you unfamiliar, Kleenex testing is essentially when we pull just a random gamer from the community / street / local game shop / forums, invite them to the IW Studio for several days, and allow them to play through the entire single player (and sometimes multiplayer) of the game. We do this throughout development.

Why do we do this? Well, It’s really a great asset when your developing the game as it allows you an honest, unbiased, outside perspective on the game. We’re not looking so much for bugs and glitches, that’s what the QA (testers) do, this is more for feedback on the gameplay and fluidity of the game.

We have a camera set up in the room that records their reactions, as well a direct feed of what they see on the screen to two TV’s in the designer’s department. This allows us to sit around, watch how they react to certain moments in the game, if they get lost or confused at sections of the story, don’t notice Voice over that tells them what to do, and get an overall gauge of how the game plays for you guys with a non-developer eye.

Throughout the process we sit down with the player to gather feedback, found out what they thought of certain aspects of the game, and hear anything else they have to say on how we can improve the game.

For a while now, almost daily we’ve been bringing in guys to test on the PC version of the game, recently bringing in a handful of US Marines to get their time testing out the PC version on Minimum Specs. For you PC guys, you know this is great news, as we’re gaining momentum on zeroing in on some official min specs for the final release.

In addition to the extensive kleenex testing we’ve been doing on the PC side, we’ve been heavily testing the multiplayer portion of PC around the office. We had a massive game going (about 64 players) on one of the smallest maps we had. It was insane. I admit, that one was just to see what happened, but we also loaded up some mods to test out some of the mod support functionality, PunkBuster support, and other PC specific features.

In closing, next week we have some hardcore COD2 PC guys coming by from the Shock’N'Awe clan / servers to wreck havoc on the PC version of the game and help us kleenex. Lots of PC focused stuff happening right now around the studio. I’ll keep you guys posted.

In other CoD4:MW PC news:
Game Riot - Infinity Ward talks competitive CoD4:MW