Image created using 138 tracked players over 10 days after the release, for a total of 8,765,149 points or about 1200 hours of gameplay.
If you play videogames while connected to an online service, there’s a good chance someone is paying attention.
At Ubisoft, we have a set of tools called DNA which use anonymous tracking data from multiple sources in order to allow us to examine telemetric data of how players are experiencing our games. We are able to track players in both production, and in post-launch. Production tracking is used to give insight on the game in progress of being made and allow designers to adjust the gameplay between playtests. Post-launch data is used for a wide variety of things: improving the game with a patch, helping to orient expansions and downloadable content for the game, and to advise the creators of the next game in the brand, or even other brands.
The technology allows us to gather and examine the players’ actions via data that is collected while they play. This data can either be viewed on a map overlay, or in a table, depending on the type of information. See below for two examples of playtest data, while the above image represents real players in post-launch:
Pointmap:
This image is a heatmap of all of the failures of the playtest participants in Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood, in the fifth mission of Sequence 5. The mission was subsequently made a little easier. (Legend: Points go from green to red based on density.)
Kills Table:
This table shows the number of kills done by the playtest participants in sequence 4. It allowed us to confirm the design intention that players should use the counterattack less often, in favour of the new combo system.
In playtest, we use the above information to gain previously impossible insight into the way our players are experiencing the game. The information presented is extracted and analyzed by members of the Playtest Lab team, and delivered in a report to the game developers.
In post-launch, we are generally more interested in aggregated information that groups together the millions of players in a simple easy-to-understand visualization. For this we use a tool we call DNA-Live, which allows stakeholders real-time access to a wide variety of metrics updated daily and representing every single player connected to an online service. For example here is a chart showing economic data for Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood.
This shows that the economic system in Assassins Creed Brotherhood was very well balanced.
Game telemetry is providing playtest analysts and game designers with an incredible new source of information we can use to improve our games. We are all very excited by the possibilities tracking has to offer us.
In future blog posts I will further discuss the technology that allows us to collect and display the information, give some more examples of its use on AC games as well as some others, and look a little into the future to see what new developments will allow us to further improve our video game telemetry tools.
UPDATE: The second article has been posted HERE.
Thank you! As always, all questions and comments are welcome.