Valve Playtests

Rock, Paper, Shotgun have an interview with David Speyrer, the project lead for Valve's Episode 2, in which he makes a couple of interesting points about their development and testing process,

We absolutely saw in Episode One, through our Steam stats gathering set, there’s a strong correlation between a spike in player deaths and players quitting and not picking the game back up.

There were ways of attacking that final fight we hadn’t considered in the design, but became obvious when we watched play-tests. We would have to watch sometimes four play-tests or so on a map before we’d see patterns start - like there’s a whole class of player who doesn’t know about any of the alt-fire.

Personally I thought the difficulty curve increased dramatically for that final fight. I found very little of the alt-fire ammo and it took me ages before I realised I could run the hunters down. Once I'd figured that out it was a reasonable fight. I found the inconsistencies between what you could and couldn't destroy with the car quite confusing. For instance, if you can destroy a Hunter by running it over, then surely you should be able to knock a Strider's leg off balance? Wrong. Also, in the earlier training section where Alyx and I first meet and repell the Hunters, I don't remember any suggestions to use the alt-fire method. I had to blast those devils with regular ammo. It took ages! It wasn't until much later in the game that I found out about the more effective ammunition, and that was just by overhearing a training aside by an NPC.

Great game though!