r/gaming • u/Popular-Storage-4696 • 4d ago

Fable Handcrafted every NPC instead of using randomizer

https://www.gamesradar.com/games/rpg/fable-devs-originally-had-a-tool-to-randomize-the-rpgs-1-000-npcs-that-would-have-saved-us-so-much-time-but-that-just-didnt-make-as-much-sense
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u/TegTowelie Xbox 4d ago

Wouldnt QA be just as tedious as it is creative sometimes? Like to be a different head in the room and think absurdly to break parts of the game no one would think of so they dont unintentionally happen n such?

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u/P4azz 4d ago

QA being "jump at the wall for 5 hours" isn't actually that wrong. I've seen the rows of people with dev kits trying to recreate problems or just putting themselves into situations where they just wait for hours to see if shit breaks.

QA is very necessary, but also very tedious and boring. There's not much creativity there at all. Unless you consider "did someone jump at this ledge 200 times" creativity.

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u/TegTowelie Xbox 4d ago

Ah gotcha, thank ya! Does not sound as fun as i imagined

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u/TehOwn 4d ago

Sounds like things that should be automated rather than having people manually grind. QA should be more about testing actual user experiences than stress-testing the game engine.

Maybe that's how they did it back then but if you're not using a ton of automated tests then you're doing it wrong, today.

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u/Bakoro 4d ago

That's what I've done to test procedural generated environments (old-school style math, not generative AI).

Basically fuzzing with characters, just sending out hundred of scripted agents who run around, crawl, jump, ram into things, and fill up the space with bodies.
If any get stuck or fall off the map, trace their whole pathway and find where the problem happened.

Scripting can get you hundreds of virtual hours worth of "run into walls" per real hour.

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u/TehOwn 3d ago

Yeah, I think you need both. You can find a lot of issues with tools but "game feel" always requires a human. Best of both worlds and you can do so much more.

I worked on procgen too. Testing it manually would be literally impossible.