Rykan
Member
It's probably worth noting that a Playtester is not like a QA employee. Basically, they ask you to come to the Dev studio and play through a build of the game. I just checked and the playtest was in October of 2008, so about 5 months before the game came out.So what's the procedure to become a playtester? Or qualifications requirements?
Getting in was fairly easy: They made a post asking for playtesters on their official forums (Could have been the website, I'm not sure) and asked for your top 5 favorite games. I send the message and I was in.
I was invited to their (previous) office in Amsterdam and played through the game in 3 days. They actually keep track of every single stat in the game. Afterwards, there's a 1 on 1 interview about your experience with the game, what you thought of it, followed by a group discussion with the other playtesters.
Developers were actually in another room watching our progress. We heard cheers when the first players beat the game.
I like to believe some of my feedback made it in: There was no ammo restock at the weapon racks in the build I played, so the gun you start with (the M82 Assault rifle) was fairly useless because it quickly ran out of ammo and you had to get the Helgan gun instead. I was glad that they changed this in the final release.
Also, we got pizza.