Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown

Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown (TDUSC) is a MMO racing game offering a realistic driving experience. It is a complex game as it proposes an ambivalent immersion between cruising and racing through a multiplayer open-world and challenging racing tracks.

I joined the project in 2021, I already had a sensibility for racing games as they were a great part of my childhood. Still I had to catch up on the most recent references and the Test-Drive license I never had the chance to try.

This is for now, the most complex project I had the chance to work on. The design of a game is not only about creating a product, but a multitude of tools interacting in a virtual world with its own rules. What I've learned at Renault Vision on driving HUDs was an asset, but yet a small part of what defines a Test Drive experience.

a. To design a Gaming experience.

To Challenge the user is good sometimes ... As a UX designer, our first goal always is to remove frustrations. But the design of a game is nothing like a product that responds to a need. A game is something you interact with for pleasure, not a work tool or an app, you have to create and maintain a desire to play. There is a special relationship between the player and the game, through satisfaction and challenge.

Game designers are the ones who create and maintain this subtle balance. Therefore, UX in video-games is not only to create the most powerful tool. Since we address a player, a user-centered design also means knowing when to challenge it. With the game designers we create a balance between frustration and pleasure, that must also match with usability, and accessibility.

b. High scale Design System in a virtual world.

As said earlier, in such big games, creating an experience does not mean to design a single product, but a multitude of "products within the product" that are all parts of a different bigger world and story than ours.

A coherence of interaction within a product is the goal to achieve as a UX designer, but it can be even more complex in a game, where each interface has a different purpose/location. They are all unique and conceived by different designers and artists from different specialties, but are a part of a bigger picture and must remain coherent in it.

Game UX designers have to develop a design system and models of interactions that remain constant while being used with different controllers, in variable situations at different levels of the game.

a. Make the team know the player.

The first steps are always to identify personas that define the players you’re designing for. What are their strengths? Their needs? What are they used to? How to challenge them? …

As a UX designer, one of the managing roles is to maintain these personas in all team member’s minds, as it is easy to lose focus and start designing what you would love to see in a game. A bit of Design evangelism asserts that each team is not designing for itself, but designing for the players. As soon as that mindset becomes a reality, it really helps the production to envision problems in a user centered way and focus iteration loops around actual player's needs.

b. Test and confront the design and the designers.

Is there still a need to develop further the importance of testing in the design process ? Playtests are the best ways to make sure that a feature is affordable and how it can be optimized in next iterations. From unconstrained playtests aiming to analyze the global behavior of players, to feature oriented playtests. Several hand-books and guides exist to easily adopt the best practices.

But going further than the technical aspects developed in these guides, the tests also are tools to help maintain and vulgarize the user-centered design process. It confronts the designer's vision to a scientific and rigorous reality. Not only a validation of features (realized by the QA’s) UX tests are useful to refine the personas and are regular reminders for artists and designers that “ even if we too are players, we do not design for ourselves.”