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Firstly, before we begin, I want to say that I've really enjoyed my time spent in the game. Without revealing anything about the gameplay itself, I want to say that I love some of the things they're doing with R6:E. The R6:S shooter formula is really nice to see expanded upon and lends a great sense of familiarity to the experience, while some of the new mechanics are pretty neat and make me think about how to approach things differently. Overall, I'm very excited to see the full game come out.
But, of course, I'm not here to talk about the game. I'm here to talk about the technical test surrounding the game.
I have been involved in a couple of different private test groups for games (most notably Star Citizen's Evocati Test Flight), and there are a few things you usually tend to see in technical test environments
-First off, the issue reporting. In your average technical test environment, you have a website where you can report bugs and technical issues with the game. These bug reports come with actual forms asking for specific details - things like the steps you did to cause the bug (and steps needed to reproduce a bug), details regarding your technical specifications, intended functionality versus actual functionality, and so on. Once you've posted about a bug online, others are also able to verify whether or not they were able to reproduce the bug following your steps, and thus players and the development team are able to narrow down what's causing the bug and fix it. R6:E has nothing like this - they do have a bug report forum, but there is no form or structure presented for reporting an issue, and sorting through the bug reports on the forum is like sorting through R6's main subreddit by new (i.e. lots of reposts, wild variety in reporting quality, etc)
-Secondly, and further to my first point, the complete and utter ban on pictures and recorded footage. Now, yes, I fully understand the need to ban screenshots and recordings for personal use. Even once the NDA period finishes, there is still a risk that aspects of the final game might not look like the test, and players of the final product might point to test footage and ask "well why wasn't that in the final release?" That having been said, while I understand the concern around this, in my experience recorded footage has proved invaluable as supplementary evidence for bug reporting. If the untrained public (i.e. me) without access to bug testing tools and dev info encounters a bug, it is far, far easier to report the issue alongside a video or screenshot and just say "here's what happened". Yes, you still need to fill out the form and describe what's happening, but videos prove extremely important to highlight the exact timing of certain bugs, capture extra details that the user might not be aware of, and so on. Banning all forms of screenshot or video, even those specifically taken for the purpose of bug testing, is just shooting yourself in the foot.
-Moving on, technical tests also usually have some kind of structure to them. When a test begins, participants are generally asked to test specific functionalities - try to find holes in the map geometry, try to use certain gadgets and see if you can get them to not work, test out specific weapons, things like that. Ubisoft has given us no instructions or indications about what they want us to test - they just dropped the game in our laps and told us to play
-Technical tests are also usually set up specifically to work differently from the standard game. Normally, in a technical test, any unlockables are unlocked from the start, and certain gameplay features which would otherwise temporarily prevent you from picking a certain option are disabled. To take R6:S as an example of what I mean without giving anything away about Extraction, in R6:S players are required to unlock the majority of the game's operators through currency they've earned from playing the game, or currency they've purchased via microtransaction. In Extraction, you would expect everything to be unlocked from the beginning so that players can jump right into testing certain features, but surprisingly this is not the case. This would make sense if Ubisoft specifically wanted to test to see if the unlock system works or not, but players haven't been given any indication of that (as I mentioned in the last paragraph)
-As alluded to above, the game also has some form of a disconnect penalty (as well as something that I can't talk about, because NDA). This prevents players from playing the game (or, at least, playing certain aspects of the game) for some time if they leave a match early. Now, that's... a bad thing to include in a technical test in the first place, but it gets worse. Naturally, as the game is still in an early prototype stage, there are bugs present which can cause players to crash to desktop. When this happens in the middle of the match, not only do players have to restart their game, but when they reenter the main menu they find out that they've been penalized for disconnecting early. Without talking about the gameplay, this seriously hampers a player's ability to test and reproduce the steps leading to the CTD, and thus figure out what caused the CTD in the first place. The only reason it would make sense to implement this disconnect penalty and its repercussions is if, well, we were specifically asked to test the disconnect penalty and its repercussions to see if they work as intended, but, naturally, we have received no indication of this (and it's pretty unlikely that this is what they want us to test, anyways)
There are other complaints I have about how this test is structured, but I don't feel I can talk about what they are without outright violating the NDA. So, I'll try to sum things up.
Overall, this technical test performed really poorly as a test, at least from the experiences of those outside of Ubisoft involved in the test. There has been no real structure to reporting bugs and issues, and our ability to provide evidence for or reproduce said bugs has been hampered by the systems and restrictions Ubisoft has put in place for us
This really doesn't feel like it was a technical test as advertised, but rather a focus test. I don't think Ubisoft wanted us to find and help fix holes in their game, I think they just wanted to get a general feel for how players felt about certain aspects of the gameplay. In other words, it's not a technical test - it's a closed alpha with a fancy NDA to make players feel special and elite
Even with my negative experience surrounding the test part of the technical test, I want to make clear that I still really enjoyed the time I spent with Rainbow Six: Extraction. I look forward to the game's full release, and I think it's going to perform pretty well. I'm grateful that I was able to take part in something exclusive like this technical test/closed alpha, and I'm certainly going to pick up the full game sometime in the future. I just wish Ubisoft was clearer on whether they wanted players to test their game (a technical test), or they just wanted player feedback (a closed alpha)
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