Bethesda Softworks Inside the Vault Q&A

[GameBanshee News]

Bethesda's latest "Inside the Vault" feature profiles Kevin Kauffman, who worked as QA lead on Knights of the Nine, Shivering Isles, and now Fallout 3.

What other games have you worked on?
I took over lead QA duties on Oblivion shortly after it launched. This included most of the downloadable content, Knights of the Nine, and the Shivering Isles. I’m not sure people know how much work goes into QA’ing a game after it is already out the door. We spent a lot of time after Oblivion left the building, looking through forum posts, responding to email, and going through tech support records to get an idea as to the overall quality of the product we released. In fact, we still get several daily emails about issues with Oblivion (and Morrowind for that matter), and the support forums are still quite active, so that aspect of the job really never ends.

Prior to working at Bethsoft, I worked for a private testing house that had several contracts with various “not so awesome” development companies that shall remain nameless (let’s just say that I played my share of TV show tie-ins — “My Two Dads the Game”, anyone?). It was there that I honed the testers’ greatest trait — the ability to keep it interesting. I played some truly bad games there, and in true stereotypical QA form, I played them over and over and over again.