ROLE: QUALITY ANALYST & LIVE OPS

FIFA Ultimate Team is an additional feature of FIFA 14 that allows players to build – in the form of cards – their own team from real world players and then compete. For the first time, and Xbox exclusive, players can get famous players from the past when acquiring Gold Packs in the game.

As a Quality Analyst & Live Ops, I was responsible for ensuring that there were no bugs in the game by creating new testing scenarios, while also supporting Live Ops. As this was the first FIFA game for the new gen of consoles, it was also of great importance that the different platforms would only offer the features designed specifically for them, which brought extra challenges and more advanced testing scenarios.

CLIENT

EA SPORTS
FIFA

DATE

April '13 - December '13

TOOLS

Excel, DevTrack, Juice, Xbox Neighbourhood, Sony Target Manager

GAME OVERVIEW

FIFA 14 was the 2013 release of Electronic Arts’ FIFA video game series, developed by EA Canada. The game was released for PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, PC, PlayStation Portable, Wii, Nintendo 3DS, PlayStation Vita – as well as next-generation systems PlayStation 4 and Xbox One – and on devices running Android and iOS operating systems.

The PlayStation 4 and Xbox One versions of the game featured a new game engine called the Ignite Engine. This features both graphical and gameplay enhancements over the previous game engine. Improvements include advanced AI to make players react more like real human beings, “True Player Motion” to create more realistic movement from the players, and more enhanced realism for environmental features such as weather and the crowd.

FUT is an additional feature of FIFA 14. This game mode allows the player to build their own Ultimate Team of soccer stars by earning, buying, selling and trading players and items within the FIFA community, which they can then use to compete in tournaments and divisions over the internet. Players and other items in this mode take the form of cards, which are obtained through buying packs or from buying directly from other players through the auction house.

RESPONSIBILITIES

Quality Analyst + Live Ops 
FIFA Ultimate Team

For FIFA 14, Ultimate Team added several new features, such as Chemistry Style and Online Single Match.  As the game is primarily online and heavily focused on real money transactions, FUT Store purchases were constantly tested to guarantee its functionality. I was responsible for  creating testing scenarios to reproduce bugs; writing and regressing these; and ensuring that all patches were released without issues.

New Gen Testing 
Playstation 4 & Xbox One

For the first time in a FIFA game, FIFA 14 was developed to target the new generation of consoles. I was assigned to the New Gen Team and had the responsibility of checking if the features designed exclusively for the new gen would work as intended, and wouldn’t carry over to the old gen. Console Carryover functions and Xbox’s Legends feature were very important to be tested as well.

EXCLUSIVE XBOX CONTENT: LEGENDS

The Xbox One and Xbox 360 versions of FIFA 14 feature exclusive FUT content called “Legends“. When purchasing Gold Packs, players can randomly acquire famous players from the past, such as Ruud Gullit, Dennis Bergkamp, Pelé, Patrick Vieira, Gary Lineker and Freddie Ljungberg.

As this feature was intended to be offered as an exclusive for Microsoft players, it was critical that everything no aspect of the Legends content would make it into to Playstation versions.

We went through many testing scenarios in which we would buy Gold Packs over and over again in order to test how often the player could get the famous player’s cards, and if its attributes would work as intended.

This exclusive content was a huge success with Microsoft’s fan base, and a big reason for some of Sony’s audience to make the move to Microsoft.

NEW GEN CARRYOVER

Also as a result of the transition to the new gen of consoles, another feature introduced in FIFA 14 and FUT was the Carryover functionality. The Carryover allows players to take their FIFA 14 Ultimate Team full roster, tournament trophies, in-game items, FIFA Points, and in-game currency (coins) to the next generation.

All changes made in their FIFA 14: Ultimate Team would be reflected across both consoles (e.g. Xbox 360 and Xbox One) so fans would be able to compete with their squads on either console.

In regards to FIFA Points (the game’s Hard Currency), the player was allowed to make a One-Time Transfer only, from FIFA 13 to FIFA 14. This was a very tricky scenario from a QA point of view, as we often found situations that the player wouldn’t receive the correct amount of money once the points were transferred. From a business perspective, any errors would need to be checked to verify if the claim was real, so finding any bugs was critical. Very complicated set ups were also in place to allow us to test this transfer between consoles, checking team cards, club items, seasons division scores etc.