Playtesting EA SPORTS™ F1® 23

Here at Electronic Arts Playtesting, we give you, the player, a voice in the development process, helping ensure our games are always made with a Player First mindset. In this article, we take a look into the role that Playtesting had in the latest installment of the high-speed F1 series, which dropped in June!

To learn more, we spoke to Gavin Cooper, Creative Director for the Codemasters F1 team, and Alistair Wood, Senior User Experience Researcher at Electronic Arts Playtesting.

Hey Gavin and Alistair. Congrats on the launch of F1 23! The game seems to be a huge hit! Gavin, could you tell us what is your favorite improvement from last year’s game?

GC: I’m gonna cheat and add two. F1 World has been a massive design challenge, so seeing it finally make it out into the wild and find its audience has been so satisfying. At the same time we’ve made some massive leaps forward with handling, including Precision Drive for controller technology, and that’s made playing the game in general that much more fun.

If your core moment-to-moment gameplay isn’t top-notch then it doesn’t matter how big or interesting your modes are! Thankfully, this year’s handling is up there with the best in Codemasters’ F1 history, and that’s helped players enjoy every part of F1 23.

What’s the relationship like between Codemasters and the Playtesting team?

GC: It’s been great! It’s also still very new, so it’s a relationship we’re looking to grow and improve over the coming years. I think they’ve been very open and accommodating about figuring out how they can best support us on F1 23, and I hope in turn that they’ve found us to be enthusiastic about what we believe they’ve brought to the project. Communication has definitely been key, and having points of contact on both sides has really helped us to stay informed about what each of us need in terms of driving the Playtesting schedule. What do you think Alistair?

AW: It’s been really positive right from the start. The Codemasters team have been super engaged with the Playtests and really focused on better understanding their players. The way they’ve approached Playtesting through the entire process has really helped us run successful Playtests, which has allowed us to provide quality insights, helping the team create a game that really represents the players. They've been a fantastic partner from defining the questions they want to ask, providing technical assistance to get the game set up and running in the Playtesting labs, and probably the most important part, taking onboard player feedback and finding solutions to any issues. One of the best things has been how Codemasters is now looking to engage with Playtesting even earlier in the development process.

How different is the approach to Playtesting at EA vs. how it was before Codemasters joined the EA family in 2021?

GC: We’ve hosted internal user testing on previous projects, but we were limited by not having a dedicated resource to run it. Having people who are passionate about user testing, and making it their primary focus clearly makes a massive difference.

The fundamental philosophies between what we were trying to achieve in previous years aren’t too different from what the Playtesting team did on F1 23 - they just did it better, with more knowledge and expertise, a dedicated Playtesting lab, better quality of Playtesters, and they were better at summarizing the results given that they weren’t directly part of the game development team, helping remove any bias.

What happens to the feedback after a Playtest?

GC: Typically the first step is to interpret the results. For the anecdotal stuff, I always bear in mind that Playtesters are good at identifying problems, but aren’t necessarily the ones responsible for the solution. Plus there’s a lot of less anecdotal stuff, more numbers that help us figure out where issues may be on aggregate. My first step is to take the feedback, figure out how much of it is evidence of issues we suspect we already have, and then how much is new. From there, we decide how much of the feedback we want to react to (we don’t always react to all of it - some of it may be deliberate, in that it serves a specific function that's required by the rest of the game. Or we may suspect it to be a function of how the Playtest was set up or hard to quantify clearly enough to generate concrete actions).

After that I work up a “hit list” of fixes/changes with accompanying design specs. We have a kick-off with the relevant teams, and figure out with them and production where we can make best use of our time and resources. Those proposed changes then get added alongside our other tasks, usually with a bump in priority. As the work gets verified, we look to confirm the changes in a future Playtest, to ensure they’ve had a positive impact on the experience.

Do you have a specific example of how Playtester feedback had an impact on F1 23?

GC: One of the bigger issues with F1 World was simply that it's a big, complicated area of the game, with lots of new navigational challenges and concepts for players to wrap their heads around. One of the tests showed that players were getting sidetracked and not finding their way to certain screens in the early hours with the game, which led us to add a "shortcut element" to the Activities screen. This was a simple addition, but it let players quickly access the Garage, the Compendium, and the Goals screen when they had things they could do there. After we made those changes, we saw that players engaged much more with those gameplay areas.

Were there any stand out moments from the Playtests that jump to mind?

GC: One of the really nice bits was when we did the story testing. For story, it was primarily a difficulty test, to identify any spikes in Braking Point’s event progression. But given how close we are to the game, it’s challenging for us to have an objective view on: “is the story compelling?”. So to see the feedback coming back from real players, much earlier than on previous F1 titles, was really exciting (especially given it was overwhelmingly positive). To be able to relax a little bit on that, and feel confident that we had something good, a story that people enjoyed, was really reassuring.

AW: One of the things I’ve loved about Playtesting F1 is when we have a session with long-term fans of the game. You can tell how passionate they are about F1 from the minute they walk in wearing their favorite teams' merch! It's always really impressive to see them start the game, turn off all assists, and fly round the track like it's nothing.

Is there anything unique to F1 Playtests when compared to other titles? What are some of the challenges that you came across?

GC: Probably one of the biggest challenges is finding appropriate players, given that the game has a very broad skill range. Finding players who can give us both the views of our most skilled veteran players, and also the views of someone interested in the sport, but new to the game, is generally pretty tricky. Having access to the Playtesting Community definitely made the process more robust than having to rely on a smaller, less representative database of Playtesters.

F1 is massively popular across the world and growing every day - were you able to Playtest in other locations or just in the UK where Codemasters is based?

GC: We were actually able to Playtest F1 23 in both the UK and in the US, which let us get more coverage than we would have been able to otherwise. The nice thing was that this all “just worked”, which is credit to the Playtesting team’s flexibility.

F1 23 is just one of the many titles that you, the players, have influenced! Stay tuned for many more examples of how you help us to Inspire the Future of Play. Massive thank you to all our amazing Playtesters!

- The Electronic Arts Playtesting team