Former Fallout 4 QA tester says human testers can push games further than AI, sharing the fun ways he stress-tested the game.
Colin McInerney, a QA tester who worked on Fallout 4 and later co-founded Pedalboard Games, emphasizes the significance of the human element in game testing. He recently shared his experiences from testing Fallout 4, highlighting how he approached the task with a developer’s mindset. McInerney believes he pushed the game’s boundaries in ways no machine could replicate.
“I’d Love To See an AJ Do My Job,” Says McInerney
Speaking to GamesRadar+ at GDC, Colin McInerney said his approach to testing the game was to run RAM tests on the Xbox One, and he ended up crashing the game multiple times by just running around and nuking the entire Wasteland.
“What I ended up doing was: I went into the console and gave myself a billion experience, which put me at, like, level 247. And I walked around with the unique nuke launcher that launched two, and then gave it the add-on that made each nuke launch 10 nukes. So I was running around super-nuking the entire wasteland and found four crashes in a single morning.”
He goes on to say that he’d love to see an AI do that job and calls himself “professionally stupid” in a way that artificial intelligence could never be.
Fallout 4 was recently announced for the Nintendo Switch 2. Learn the release date for the game at this link. That game also recently re-entered the best-seller charts. Read more on that subject here.
What do you think about this fun story from Colin McInerny? Sound off in our official Discord server. Also, don’t forget to sign up for our weekly newsletter.
The Fallout games are some of the worst QA tested games in the industry so if I was him I wouldn’t be bragging.