Vomit And Ginger Candy: Inside The VR QA Process
Climbing a skyscraper for the 25th time in a day quickly erodes the novelty of virtual reality.
For over three years, Attila Kardos was one of the quality assurance testers at PlayStation Liverpool, one of the testing centers of Sony Interactive Entertainment Europe. During his tenure, he worked on first-party behemoths like God of War, Horizon: Zero Dawn, and Detroit: Become Human. But today, heʼs talking about a different type of testing involving a headset and physically mimicking movements for multiple hours at your office desk.
In games like Blood & Truth, where you take a starring role in action movie-esque setpieces, the fun factor of virtual reality quickly makes itself apparent. However, experiences like this can be taxing. A player can stop at any time. A tester doesnʼt have that luxury. It doesnʼt take long for the monotonous physical effort to take a toll. And then they have to show up at work the next day and do it all again.
“Eventually, you start feeling your shoulders,” Kardos laughs. “You feel the extra muscle pain.”
On average, he spent five to six hours a day in VR. He says it was “pretty intense,” to the extent that some colleagues asked management to swap to non-VR projects. Eventually, Kardos got acclimatized to working in virtual reality and recalls the experience fondly. However, during the first two weeks, heʼd often feel “detached from reality” whenever he moved his head around after clocking out from work.
As companies continue to iterate on past foundations or release new platforms altogether, from PlayStation to Apple, VR is constantly innovating. But the work conditions for QA folks who learn the inside out of these technologies rarely are. Game Informer spoke to testers, artists, and
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