Video Gamer is reader-supported. When you buy through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Prices subject to change. Learn more
Ubisoft intends to wrap up development on its games earlier to add more polish and improve testing, CEO Yves Guillemot has said, in a move that will hopefully see fewer buggy releases from the publisher.
“What we see more and more is that we need time to do even more polish than what we do today,” Guillemot said in the latest issue of MCV. “We were tweaking Watch Dogs right until the last minute, we changed some things right at the end. So what we have decided to do is finish the game earlier so that we can test things more and more and change a certain number of parameters.”
Ubisoft has been heavily criticised for releasing ‘unfinished’ titles in the past, most notably with Assassin’s Creed 3.
But to help speed up the development process, the publisher will also begin reusing assets in future titles, Guillemot says.
“Going forward we should reuse more things,” he added. “Today, we will create a car in one studio, and we don’t reuse that car in any other games. We need to make sure we can reuse items that people won’t care about. That is one direction we can take to optimise the investment.”
Ubisoft isn’t the only publisher that has pledged to put more effort into polish, of course. Last month, EA CEO Andrew Wilson told Kotaku that the company had “fundamentally changed the development process” for its upcoming titles, and that it is “asking teams to be finished earlier”.
“We’re… changing the way we test our products,” he said. “Does it work? Zeroes and ones. There’s a fundamental test. Does it do what it’s supposed to do? QA? Is it fun when it’s doing what it’s supposed to do? Scalability? Does it do what it’s supposed to do at scale? And usability, can a user get it to do what it’s supposed to do and have fun with it with their friends and at scale? It’s a completely different test and QA construct in the company, which includes betas that are much, much earlier in the process, like Battlefield Hardline.”
Source: MCV | Issue 796
