Outdated internal documentation and Fandom Wiki
I’ve been debating myself on what the next post should be, and I’ve ultimately come to the conclusion that perhaps some background in how we worked as QA testers for Fallout 76 would be appropriate. So in today’s post we’ll talk about dealing with the game’s documentation or lack thereof. Documenting the game mechanics, rules, and design choices is something we all know should be done, and that it should be done with due diligence for “those who come after.” After all, if another team picks up the development, how will they know whether a premium item should be tradable or not, or if some old event plans should disappear when dropped from the inventory? These are, of course, two hyperbolic examples from dozens of things that people would like to know in the future, whether they be new developers or, in our case, QA testers. It has often been the case that we were tasked to check whether nothing broke in the old content when some mechanical changes or loot tables were introduced, and we had no idea how the content should work. Things like public events get changed, patched, and sometimes even streamlined, so the initial documentation rarely matches what can be expected. Not all changes appear in patch notes, so this adds even more confusion when it comes to testing. Questions arise, and when there are around 50 testers, some of whom see the game for the first time, it's difficult to explain to each one what they’re supposed to do. This is where the real heroes of this post come in—the editors and contributors to the Fallout Fandom Wiki. Our access to the outside internet at work has been, and often still is, very limited. For safety reasons and to prevent leaks, most websites are blacklisted. Luckily for us, the bright star that is the Fandom Wiki was always available to us, saving many hours of work by having everything documented in a clear and cohesive way. You wouldn't even believe how much easier it is to coordinate people while testing quests or public events with a simple link to a wiki article. I found myself reading the wiki while looking for specific enemy spawns, or when that wasn't enough, I’d read up on the NPC IDs from the wiki to spawn them right there and then. Yes, the information like NPC ID or item ID can be found using the built-in command console, but it's way faster to just copy and paste those from the wiki and into the proper command. So to sum it up, documentation is nice to have while working on a product, but in time it can become obsolete, and on such long running project like F76 the information might be lost to time, which is nobody’s fault. I’d like to use this post to give my honest thanks to everyone working and documenting those things for the Fandom Wiki; without you, I and my colleagues would never be so efficient in making the game the best it can be without their contribution.
