If CDPR are looking for ways to improve future Witcher games, this is a must read article on the importance of playtesting.
Link: The Science of Playtesting

I think most game companies already have playtesting down to a science. They release the game. We, the gamers, play it and find the bugs. Within hours of release, we bitch and kvetch and whine on the forums to report the bugs. Within days to weeks the company releases a patch to 'fix' said bugs. Game playtested, scientifically. And THEY got paid, not the reverse.

Yeah, I'm a bit cynical.

So Valve can strap a bunch of testers to machines and basically quantify enjoyment, but they can't so much as update gamers on Half Life 2: Episode 3's status? Fantastic.

Gabe Newell is the real-life GLaDOS, with all the testing and cruelty.

playtesting? hmm...

never ascribe to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence

Regardless of the reason behind it, playtesting is definitely something CDPR (in fact, many developers) can work on.

I'd volunteer to playtest TW3 tbh.

/hinthinthint

(and yes, I know the job is not nearly as easy/fun as it sounds)

Well, we sort of are doing playtesting now...

... minus the free food
... plus admission fee

Cannibalism and piracy, in that order. I'm so pro at solving problems.

And I also want to playtest the next Witcher game. I'm willing to do a lot of things I'll regret later to make this a reality.

If that's the case, CDPR NEEDS YOU! for motion capture...
Link

Aaaaaand the last shred of innocence I had left vanished after watching that.

More on topic: does the kind of testing mentioned in that article actually work? I mean, you can get an idea of what appeals to a wide swath of people, but aren't you basically just dumbing down the product in the process?

Some things are meant to be a bit niche and not work on everyone. It seems like more and more games are becoming bastardized to appeal to the widest possible audience, and maybe that works for some studios, but I'd prefer CDPR to keep on making what they want without giving in to the urge to develop games for the lowest common denominator.

Your last shread of innocence have vanished so many times, I lost count...

Hmmm.... what you say is true, the attempt to appeal to a wider audience has made several games lacklustre, or at least not as good as they could have been.

That being said, I was thinking of playtesting as a tool of fixing bugs/prominent issues, and not as much altering gameplay to maximize pleasure. Some eccentricities / innovations are welcome, but to make a game stand out by purposely making it un-intuitive, not so (not that I'm suggesting that you're saying that).

A balance is needed between those two. To quote Prince Arrington, "It's very easy for us, as developers, to get too close to our projects and fall into the trap of not realizing that our baby isn't perfect. This often leads to poor design remaining poor", and also "Developers work on a project for so long, there's always the potential to lose perspective on what's working and what's not working. Without this form of genuine feedback, developers have a tendency to drink the Kool-Aid and become accustomed to the inefficiencies and flaws of a project, which leads to a failure to explore more suitable paths."

Not to say that TW2 wasn't an excellent game, but there are numerous flaws/issues that you spot pretty quickly. And if you dig around, you can find more (silver sword, for one).

I would like to see CDPR continue what they do best (especially with the branching main plots, choices & consequences, graphics, etc.) but I'd also like to see more rigorous playtesting - no need to be so robust / advanced as companies like Valve. But at least up to a point where new gamers won't go, "Hey, why is the cave wall changing appearance as I walk" (pop-in at max LOD) or "Hey, why did the lighting change drastically when I exited through that gate?"

I kind of think the hint went in the direction that they keep living in denial about female players and just keep forgetting to include women in the testing.

Or I just read that into it because that was what came to my mind when I read about "that wide audiences from non-gamers to hardcore gamers...", but they said nothing about male and female gamers at all...

Okay, I admit, I would not want to playtest for a shooter in any case, because that is SO not my kind of game.

Now, where did I read that there was a new female member at CDPR in the Q&A department? :))

It's down to mutual understanding. I assume most playtesting would be about finding and fixing technical bugs, but when it comes to game mechanics, you really need to understand your playtester.

For example, the dev knows what they want the combat to be like and decide to stand by it. Then a tester complains, hey look, I keep dying in Prologue, controls are clunky, it's really hard. Should they dumb down combat? No. Should they talk to the player and see what the actual problem is? Yes. Most missed the memo that tutorials are accessible from Journal. So, why not freeze the screen in the beginning and make it CLEAR where the tutorials are archived, instead of making the info appear for 0.5 seconds in the middle of a combat sequence? That wouldn't dumb the combat game down, it would only help the players get a hang of it much faster.

tl;dr know what you want to achieve, take your time with playtesters, make awesome games.

It's not what I was hinting at (it was more like "HINT take me in!"), but there's no denial that female gamers are often ignored and developers (or at least the PR department) live by the myth only males play videogames. Luckily, TW2 is a game that appeals to both sexes, at least in my opinion :)

Of course, and we agree on that. The more playtesters there are to squash the bugs, the better.

I was more referring to quotes like, "For us, playtesting is the most important part of the game development process. It's not something we save for the end of the development, or use as a quality assessment (QA) or balancing tool. Instead, it is the dominant factor that shapes our decisions about what to release and when to release it."

So long as playtesters are just dealing with bugs and offering feedback to help the flow of the game or pointing out balance issues (and other minor things like that) and not being used to dictate what gets delivered when, it's all good. When that line is crossed, however, things quickly start to go downhill. Games get streamlined, the artistic vision gets compromised to pander to a larger group of people, and the end result tends to be fairly soulless. I'm sure we've all played a few games that fit that description.