14 DAY TRIAL // Dragon Age: Inquisition is one of the biggest titles of 2014, allowing gamers to explore a large number of locations in the world of Thedas and giving them a chance to spend more than 100 hours on the core story and on side-quests.
The developers at BioWare did not run a beta for the title and handled all their testing internally, but once the game was launched, the company, after providing four initial patches, has decided to turn to the community in order to test the elements that it plans to deliver in the fifth one.
A small number of fans are asked to take a look at the way the core mechanics are tweaked and will then be able to also experience some new features before they are delivered to the rest of the community.
The process might seem unnecessary, given the fact that BioWare and Electronic Arts have a large dedicated Quality Assurance department, but response from the community has been so high that sign-ups closed in a few hours.
Neither of the two companies have said how many players are testing patch 5 for Dragon Age: Inquisition.
It's also unclear whether gamers who are part of the beta are capable of spotting problems that might be visible to more trained eyes.
Halo: The Master Chief Collection ditched player involvement in patch testing
The game which aimed to bring all the big Halo titles to the Xbox One had big problems on launch, and both 343 Industries and Microsoft had to scramble to launch updates for it during 2014 and to then find a suitable way to compensate affected gamers.
In 2015, the focus of the two companies has shifted towards Halo 5: Guardians, but recently the company announced that it was contemplating selecting a small group of players to test an update and make sure that it would not introduce any new problems when it would be launched for the entire community.
343 Industries walked back its plans after a short time and has since been working on its own on the coming changes for Halo: The Master Chief Collection, which will deal with issues ranging from matchmaking to weapon tweaks.
The studio clearly believes that the effort to organize a beta period might be larger than the benefits that could be gained from it, especially for such a big game experience.
The two titles clearly have different approaches to testing and it will be interesting to see what the results are in terms of final quality.
Games might be becoming too complex for their own good
Dragon Age: Inquisition and Halo: The Master Chief Collection are both examples of video games with big ambitions, which offer a lot of content to explore and have different mechanics for the single and the multiplayer modes.
More recently, Bungie also delivered big patches for Destiny, filled with massive changes, but it never explored the idea of public testing and seems to be more focused on reacting to the feedback coming from the community, which could be seen as a form of large group testing with longer feedback cycles.
Modern AAA video games are becoming more complex with every passing year and developers need to improve their Quality Assurance process in order to make sure that the number of bugs stays the same or even decreases.
We might be heading to a future where that's simply impossible to do and where we, as gamers, will have to accept the fact that major releases will come packed with problems and it might take a lot of time for them to be eliminated.