Todd Howard is the VP of Bethesda Studios. He has been with the company for 20 years and has been a major part of 2 of the industry’s biggest open-world franchises. Bethesda and Howard never believe in stopping. Their ideology has always been to keep going forward and never stop creative conversations.
Bethesda abstains from practicing one thing that all the Studios prefer: perfecting their games. Todd Howard has very strong opinions against doing focus testing on games; he believes that the variety of opinions he gets from within the studio is more than enough for him.
Todd Howard, on abandoning the norm
Todd Howard and Bethesda have a unique approach to making a game. There’s a permanence and a tangibility in their worlds, especially in games like Skyrim and Fallout, where the scope of interacting with the world keeps expanding. They focus on an individual shaping their own stories in the world of their creation.
Howard sheds further light on the magic behind making Skyrim and Fallout with a small team of just 100 people. He said:
Well the people have been there a long time, that’s the main thing. There’s no magic. Work together for 15 years, then it happens. It’s the same group that made Fallout 3 and Skyrim pretty much. We’ve added eight more since we made Skyrim, but that’s it.
There is one industry norm Howard has always stayed away from. He believes:
Oh and we do not focus test our games and never had. People ask why we don’t and I say, ‘I have so many opinions in this studio, I don’t need any more!’ We really debate everything – and it’s a good debate. That’s why the games turn out well – it’s not me, it’s not this guy, it’s the collective. Together we figure out what we want.
Excess of anything is bad, and Howard believes so too. He is absolutely against the idea of focus testing his games, as he believes the opinions of his peers are more than enough to work with.
What is Focus Testing?
The purpose of Focus Testing a game is primarily to understand the response it is getting. It focuses on areas of player preferences, reactions, and concerns that are eventually addressed accordingly during the further development of the game.
Focus testing is a critical phase of a video game that helps gather valuable insights to improve the gameplay and optimize the user experience. It allows developers to collect qualitative data on various aspects of the game, including gameplay mechanics, graphics, user interface, learning curve, and overall player engagement.
All in all, the major purpose of focus testing is to increase the universality of the game and make it optimized for the larger public while staying true to the idea and concept with which it began, and the reason a lot of organizations do this is that it provides them with a large pool of opinions to work with that eventually aid in the development of a game.
