Dragon Age: Inquisition was a PEGI 18 title with a long list of content descriptors — blood, violence, nudity, sexual content, strong language — which meant the certification pass on PS4 was thorough almost by definition. An open world RPG with branching narrative, four-player co-op, and enough content to keep people playing for 70+ hours gives you a lot of surface area to cover. Making sure all of it behaved correctly, across every region and every rating board, on hardware that was still pretty new at the time, was exactly the kind of challenge that keeps you paying attention.
Back in the day, before studios started shipping bugs as features, I worked through the full certification process on the other side of the screen — testing games for Electronic Arts. Certification & compliance, which sounds dry but basically means being the last line of defense before a game hits the shelves: making sure it doesn’t crash, doesn’t cheat the rating system, and does exactly what it says on the box in every region it’s going to land in.
It wasn’t glamorous work, but it gave me something most designers never get: a really intimate understanding of how games break, and why. Every bug report I filed was a small lesson in the gap between intention and execution — which, turns out, is pretty much what design is about too.
