Thank you for your interest in joining the Beyond Skyrim: Cyrodiil Quality Assurance team!
To help us learn more about what you can bring to the team, please follow the instructions below to submit a formal application. Once your application is received, we will contact you via email if we think you will be a good fit.
The Process: The application process requires you to test a sample quest and dungeon, looking for the types of bugs/issues you might encounter during an actual QA test. QA testing is a very broad task. As you might know, Skyrim is a buggy game which results from it being a very large game where many systems interact with each other. You might encounter bad pathing, misplaced assets, lighting problems, subtitle errors and much more. Quests can be broken in many ways. Doing the quest in an order that the designer didn’t intend, using gameplay mechanics to break various parts of the quest or not behaving as the quest tells you to are common ways to find errors.
Reporting bugs: When you report a bug, keep in mind that the purpose of the report is to tell the one fixing the bug what exactly to look for, and the exact nature of the bug you’ve discovered. To that end our team separates level design bugs from quest, writing & 3D-art related bugs.
When submitting level design bugs, we use a feature called beta comments. IMPORTANT: This mod is required to use it, make sure to install its dependencies too. This means misplaced assets, physics related bugs, lighting bugs, holes in the level and more. To report a bug, you open the console, mark the object and enter bc “your description of the bug”. When you close the game, you will find a file called betacomments.txt in your game folder. These contain coordinates to exactly where the misplaced asset is. This also includes bugs related to NPCs pathfinding. This is related to something called “navmesh”, which is something that tells NPCs where they can and cannot go - this can be tested by kiting enemies or using a follower.
For other bugs (i.e. in quests), we use bullet point lists to get a report that is as short as possible, but as detailed as it needs to be to understand the bug. For this application, any sort of text document will work. Make sure it’s easy to understand when the bug happens and where it happens (so a bug-fixer can find it and recreate it).
Remember: These should be reported separately. Don’t put dialogue or quest bugs in the beta comments and don’t try to describe a misplaced asset in a bullet point. Remember to submit both with your application.
What are we looking for?
There are no right or wrong answers, and no minimum or maximum number of issues to spot; just let us know what you find! You should play through the dungeon/quest multiple times, since you can’t test everything in one go. The quest has branching options that can result in different bugs, and you should run through the dungeon multiple times as well. We recommend setting up saves at critical junctures in quests and before entering dungeons to save yourself some time.
What we want from a tester is:
1. Attention to detail: As a tester you will be the one making sure the quality we want is there, you have the task of spotting and highlighting things the level designers and implementers might have missed or not thought about. 2. Ability to think outside the box: You should try to play the game not just in the way you think it’s intended, but try to think of different decisions and play styles a player might want to employ. You’re tasked with both breaking the game and with helping the team create a mod that is as enjoyable as possible for everyone. 3. Clear communication: You should be able to convey the nature of the bug you’ve found. Put effort into making your bug reports understandable and efficient. This does not mean you need to write in perfect English, it just means including the information you think is necessary to understand and recreate the bug.
For those testers that are accepted to the team and want to expand their skill set in the future, we can help you learn bug-fixing and acquire some basic knowledge about how the engine functions on your way to becoming a Senior Tester.
Application Instructions:
1. Download QATest.7z and set it up for testing in Skyrim SE. To avoid conflicts with other mods it’s best to use a clean install for this, this will be needed for your testing on the project if you’re accepted as well. For this we recommend to use Mod Organizer 2’s profile system or a different instance of MO2 to switch between the test build and a fully modded playthrough. 2. Install Console Commands Extender, Fuz Ro D-oh and their dependencies. 3. You can start the quest at a new farmhouse nearby Western Watchtower (where you kill the first dragon). The quest will send you to the test dungeon in its plot. 4. Play through the quest and explore the dungeon. Use beta comments, create a bullet point list. Then fill in the Cyrodiil Application Form where you provide a link to a .zip file with your beta comments file(s) and your bullet point list as the work sample. Good Luck!
