Halo 3 in its final stages of testing
Bungie seems to be up in arms to drive out all the bugs they can find before Halo 3‘s release. Leading a team consisting of more than 100 testers, Harold Ryan is bent on making the highly anticipated game live up to its promise.
Ryan served as test manager before for Halo: Combat Evolved and Halo 2, so you can be sure he knows what he’s doing. He’s also been playing the Halo series with his son for five years now, so it’s also a rather personal thing for him to make the quality exceptional for this game. Ryan explains:
With 100 testers in the building, [if] you can find a bug one time, 8 million people are going to find it a hundred or a thousand times a day. In my opinion there’s no room to let that bug you only find once go, and that’s really the model we follow. We have a system that logs every single crash the game ever has and we investigate and fix all of them.
With the countdown nearly up, the hype surrounding the game needs to be justified. And this puts a lot of pressure on his shoulders and the testers, especially now with the increased anticipation from the announcement of the 4-player co-op.
So with his team of 100 in a bunker-like hardware store in Kirkland, Ryan is looking for every bug he can drive out and every crevasse he can squeeze more features into. He talks about the drive for quality for the game:
There was a lot of internal pressure on ourselves, certainly pressure I put on myself, to keep the quality bar and what was it that made it so popular that made everybody like it. A lot of people can tell me what they like about it — polls, marketing and P.R. stuff and the fans certainly are very vocal, a big fan group tells us what they like and don’t like all the time — but internally it’s hard to say, what did we do that made them like it that much? And so the real pressure is, first, making something that we’re happy with again.
Halo 3 will be out on September 25.
Bungie seems to be up in arms to drive out all the bugs they can find before Halo 3‘s release. Leading a team consisting of more than 100 testers, Harold Ryan is bent on making the highly anticipated game live up to its promise.
Ryan served as test manager before for Halo: Combat Evolved and Halo 2, so you can be sure he knows what he’s doing. He’s also been playing the Halo series with his son for five years now, so it’s also a rather personal thing for him to make the quality exceptional for this game. Ryan explains:
With 100 testers in the building, [if] you can find a bug one time, 8 million people are going to find it a hundred or a thousand times a day. In my opinion there’s no room to let that bug you only find once go, and that’s really the model we follow. We have a system that logs every single crash the game ever has and we investigate and fix all of them.
With the countdown nearly up, the hype surrounding the game needs to be justified. And this puts a lot of pressure on his shoulders and the testers, especially now with the increased anticipation from the announcement of the 4-player co-op.
So with his team of 100 in a bunker-like hardware store in Kirkland, Ryan is looking for every bug he can drive out and every crevasse he can squeeze more features into. He talks about the drive for quality for the game:
There was a lot of internal pressure on ourselves, certainly pressure I put on myself, to keep the quality bar and what was it that made it so popular that made everybody like it. A lot of people can tell me what they like about it — polls, marketing and P.R. stuff and the fans certainly are very vocal, a big fan group tells us what they like and don’t like all the time — but internally it’s hard to say, what did we do that made them like it that much? And so the real pressure is, first, making something that we’re happy with again.
Halo 3 will be out on September 25.
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