Obesidian entertainment Accepted Fabled is a major technical achievement for roll-playing game studios. Although the company has experience like 3D action RPG fallout New Vegas And Outer world, Accepted The fictional world of the company’s isometric pillars of -estunity series brings to a large -scale 3D world. Like your predecessors, Accepted The players allow the decision to make a round of decisions in gameplays and dialogues that intersect everyone and shape their journey. Mix those branching options with the progress of the game First person’s match and animationAnd you have an extraordinary complex game at risk of launching with a dangerous number of bugs.
But this did not happen. Accepted Launched for important praise, Is not as a game with some critics “Esoteric“As Osidian’s old old titles. The studio’s reputation for Baggie Games was so notable that at the 2025 Game Developers Conference, David Benefield, the chief of Obesidian QA, briefly mentioned it in his presentation on Osidian’s reform in his QA workflow.
What are those improvements? According to Benefield, Osidian has since released the previous decade (2016 ( Atrocity) Reorganization of your QA department to work more closely with the rest of the studio. QA examiner became QA analyst, and only instead of running tests on the creation of sports AcceptedThe QA team began working with the designers of all stripes to review their work in the Obesidian’s narrative equipment and unrealistic engine, spotting anyone to hit the “Commit” button before hitting the “Commit” button.
This process may look duting – but if you want to increase your QA team, Benefield said that you can boil the process on a phrase: “Train your QA team, whatever you are training your designers.”
Osidian QA examiners reached Atrocity Tale equipment
The year journey of the year to revive the CA department of Osidian began developing CRPG in 2015 AtrocityCommunicate Atrocity The separate premiere is accompanied by pictures of the characters in the ‘pose “that depicts their emotional state. Originally these poses were to be established by the story team working in the Obesidian narrative equipment, but according to Benefield, that team was trapped to create Quests and content for the game, and working on implementing poses was falling behind the schedule.
Applying these pose was not a complex process, requiring working hours and hours, and the QA team had bandwidth to take work. But they started realizing with access to the equipment Burden He had never seen or tested out of the implemented materials.
He said, “We found lines that were never tested, or, in some cases, the lines you could not even reach as a player due to the bug,” he said. “Sometimes they used to be complete search branches, small and big, hidden inside these files that until you stumble it as a player, or it was documented somewhere, you would not know that this is also, which means … QA (log) without we do not know that bug was present.”
Image via Osidian Entertainment/Paradox interactive.
The advantage was a tester at the time, and when he was implementing the pose, he saw a possible game-breaking bug tied to the reputation system of the game. In the early hours of the game, players demand from various factions such as “The Disfailed” and “The Scarlet Forest”, to increase the reputation, ends in a scene that will cement their initial loyalty. The scene examines the player’s reputation with each faction, which is calculated by numbers that go up or down depending on different options. Whoever has a better reputation with the group player will determine which scene plays and how the game moves forward.
Because the profit was working in the story tool and could see the number value and the narrative node route, he did mathematics and found that it was possible for the players to create an accurate set of options that would end with the same reputation values with each group. This was not an intended result, and the player would not be able to pursue the story.
He showed the bug under his leadership … who congratulated him on his initiative, but he said that he could not file a ticket until he re -introduced it in a build. It took him two hours to test his principle and resume, and the fix took 30 seconds. He said, “I was personally disappointed to see that I have found such high-seriousness, but the cost and time to reproduce it would prove to be more than time to fix it,” he said.
Fortunately, the obesidian heard his response, and after that Atrocity The status of his QA examiners was competed for QA analysts (as well as increase in their salary) and made a process to review the search and dialog node trees for analysts before going to the build.
Extension on in-tool test Accepted
Benefits went a few years away from the Obesidian to work as a manufacturer in Nexon, but was hired back as QA lead in the company. AcceptedWhere he began to implement this process more strictly. AcceptedConversations were not larger or more complicated than nodes AtrocityBut now the QA team had to track animation, audio and other gameplay bugs that came with the first person’s competition and animated conversations.
Quickly using a sample interaction with a businessman Accepted It checks that if a specific party member was present, the profit showed three ways that a mistake in the story tool could have a bug in the game. If a designer created a node where a “bark” (a line that occurs without a dialogue UI) is an infection in a complete dialogue sequence, the conversation breaks down. If a designer forgets to identify a speaker while setting the node, or the speaker was removed after making the file, the conversation breaks down. And if someone forgets to keep the “red” talk node (which ends the conversation) at the end of his sequence, the conversation breaks down. “Dozens of” times came when making these three insects AcceptedAnd they are to spot “very easy” devices, if they are reported from inside the game.
Image by Bryant Francis.
In the process of catching these bugs and other logic brakes, the test team began to present the scripting errors more advanced (calling profit “fun”), spotting them into sports data and fleaging the story designer. This saved time for both teams as the story designers now knew the root cause of the bug instead of being told symptoms. “It also saves the QA time by finding a higher bug-perpetuate than at the same time, they will spend testing materials in the game.”
This process was not limited to the in-house examiners of the obesidian-the external examiners of the service provider Qloc were also given this level. The examiners of both companies became so efficient in working with narrative equipment that Benefield started thinking – if they also applied this process to unrealistic blueprint?
Obesidian’s unrealistic engine designers hugged while working with QA
After enough time with this new process (and a healthy holiday break), Benedield began to draft a pitch for the rest of the studio. “If analysts know these devices so well, and they know the game so well, then they are only one piece that they are missing, how trigger, how, trigger volume, and blueprint work on the unrealistic side,” they argued. “So what if we got that information too?”
The pitch triggred a bit of “Emposter syndrome” in the beneficial. When he first joined the obesidians, the company’s org chart kept QA away from the rest of the design team, and there were not a lot of professional overlap between different ends of the company. There was no compulsory division, as you can find in other game studios (this was the tail end of an era where some companies refused to speak QA with teams outside their department), but it was not what you call a close relationship. Although the departments have become close for years, the lower part of the organization was still the gendering speaker to see the QA as the glands.
Luckily – and benefits stated that it is one of his “favorite parts” to work in the obesidion – a number of designers quickly became heated to consider, and was ready to give it a shot. This created the “joint analysis session”, where examiners and designers stepped through a discovery while reviewing the flow of information in the unrealistic.
Image via Osidian Entertainment/Microsoft.
“As they pass, the designer calls every trigger and script used on the discovery, literally draws them to a shared screen for an analyst and to ask questions,” the Benefield said. “We also record these so that we can be very brief about our notes and can really focus on what is on the screen.”
“Because QA is only seeing how it plays, it (designers) gives it the opportunity to ‘wait, it should do what it should have done, I did not realize that it is a bug.”
These meetings run for an hour (if a discovery takes more time, many meetings are scheduled). Sometimes insects were so clear that they could be fixed on a call.
Bringing QA and design together improves morale
According to Benefield, Obesidian designers loved these sessions. The bugs were squashing, QA learned more about the material required to test through traditional means, production continued more efficiently, and perhaps most importantly that it was a major boost for morale.
“I did not see it coming, but it was very noticeable for everyone and everyone adjacent to these sessions,” Benedil remembered. “People were enjoying them. (Designers) felt much better about their Quests after being defeated during the joint analysis session.
Even after these sessions, designer and QA analysts were more comfortable to reach each other with questions and comments.
Osidian made many other improvements in the QA process while making AcceptedBut they came back to the main exercise of training examiners on devices used by all designers.
Although the team still used the classic “Black Box” test, which was to examine the organizedly emerging bugs in the game, this “white box” method brought happiness and cooperation as to what a piece area could be in sports development.
As Benefield has concluded, how do I get it to work by adding the mentality of “how do I get ‘,’ We are allowing these people to work closely with each other, and we get a better product in a short time.”
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