No game can be considered complete until it has been tested by testers. A poorly tested product will be akin to Gothic 3 - it will be simply impossible to play until a few patches are released.
Instructions
Step 1
A baseline test should show the engine is working. Such a check is carried out at the early stages of project creation, and it involves studying the performance of the game as a whole, regardless of the player's actions. In other words, the main thing is that in the middle of the level you are not thrown onto the desktop with an error message. It is extremely important to test the game on several machines with different hardware configurations (video cards from GeForce and Radeon, for example) and different OS. Priority should be given to platforms from Microsoft, because Unix and Mac have a small and specialized market share.
Step 2
The second stage of testing is focused on gameplay. When the engine is more or less stable, you can spend more time balancing and developing the principles of the game. For example, if you were testing Dead Space, then right now it would be worth starting to sort out various options for weapons and check the usefulness of stasis. If any of the "chips" conceived by the developers does not work or turns out to be useless, it is worth informing them about it. Pay attention also to the passability: the ability to reach the final should be even on the "crazy" difficulty level.
Step 3
Starting from the beta version and later, testing is carried out in more detail. There are no specific priorities now, it is worth looking for all possible bugs and shortcomings in the game. The main value of the tester becomes imagination - you need to try the maximum number of tactics and approaches, use all the offered possibilities and change the playing styles. You will have to make the last changes to the balance (for example, only due to inattentive testing in Singularity, the possibility of "push" was almost unused), and most importantly - determine what player actions the environment is not ready for. After all, a computer is not a person, and cannot improvise, therefore, when it finds itself in an unfamiliar situation, it may begin to behave in an inappropriate manner.
