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We talk all things Quality Assurance with QA lead Gabby Llanillo - DevGAMM Interview

Gabby is QA Lead at Krafton/PUBG Studios but previously worked on QA for Valorant and The Last of Us. Here we discuss the different roles and tasks in the department nowadays.

Audio transcription

"I'm in Gdansk for the DevGAMM 2025 and I'm here joined by Gabby who's going to tell me what's the difference between real QA people and QA people we see in Mythic Quest.
Well, the QA people on Mythic Quest are on TV. No, I'm just kidding. It's quite different actually. We do play games all day, like my mom thinks I do for work.
Mine too."

"Exactly. But no, instead of that, we actually just try to break games and we often find issues and troubleshoot where the issues come from, which is more than half of the job.
And then we report those and make sure they get fixed correctly and that they don't break anything else. So that's kind of the gist of what QA is.
More or less. How would you say QA has changed in the past few years? Because of course we now get games that, for example, are live service, games that are released by chapters, games that are not completely finalized at all and are very glitzy on early access, for example."

"Yeah. I think QA has changed a lot because when I joined QA, I thought it would be joining at the end of the development cycle. Most people test the game after it's already mostly done or mostly implemented.
But I think now they're involving QA much earlier into the development cycle and QA is being asked to raise a lot more risks when it comes to developing new features, especially in live service games.
So I think we're getting more involved and it's kind of just like what software QA actually is, which is much more involved in early development. So I think we're trending towards that."

"Would you say that is good for hiring and for jobs now that we see a lot of layoffs, but perhaps this is a department that actually can look healthier in this day and age?
I think so. In some ways, yes. In some ways, no. Because I think a lot of QA is still viewed as replaceable in terms of every game is going to need QA, but you can always hire for that depending on what you need.
But I do think very skilled, experienced QA and also QA teams or managers that need to build out a team. Yeah, those are getting a little bit more wanted nowadays because more teams want to build secure teams in terms of testing that have really good foundations instead of just throwing on a QA team for a few months at the end of the project and then getting rid of all of them."

"How would you say community feedback in the games that are public before they're released or early access sort of feeds you back into your department or is just someone from above? Is that someone from the team or do you actually listen to community feedback as you go?
I think, yeah, games in early access, but also games that have released like Valorant, for example, we use a lot of player feedback in order to raise issues inside the game and it actually helps us prioritize which issues because before a game is out, you want to fix every single bug that you find because you don't know how much it's going to affect the player."

"But usually it's the bugs that people yell about the loudest that we take a look at first because the players know what's actually stopping their gameplay and ruining their gameplay experience more than us because they're playing the game.
But sometimes bugs and glitches can actually be good for the game because they are fun to share.
Did it happen to you that something weird was going on and then you went like, okay, let's keep this on because this can turn viral?
Yeah, there's a couple things. Actually, one of the things in Valorant was the Widejoy is what we called it, but basically it was a picture of Killjoy, one of our agents. When you Google it, Widejoy, you'll see what I mean."

"There was a bug with the player cards, which is basically what you equip when you're a player. You can basically put on a card and people can see when you're on the match screen what your card is.
The resolution was wrong, so the picture looked very wide and it was just a very zoomed in face and it became a meme in the community that we ended up making a spray in the game of the Widejoy thing and it became a beloved meme.
Yeah, and Valorant loves memes."

"Yes, of course. That's like back in the day when we played GoldenEye and you would have the big heads.
So you mentioned Valorant, of course, your experience in terms of QA, you're a QA lead now, but before we talk present, can you tell me a takeaway you had from both Valorant and The Last of Us or something you learned or something that was made differently, for example?
Yeah, both were very different projects. Of course, The Last of Us 2 was my dream project because The Last of Us is my favorite game of all time."

"My major takeaway there was that you can really drive the quality of a game and the rest of the team will go very detailed with you on that.
No memes allowed.
There were some memes in The Last of Us 2, but not as much as Valorant. But I think just the level of quality and the attention to detail there was so strong.
When you're coming out of a cinematic, if you see the slightest glitch going back into playable character mode, you're like, that's a bug, we got to fix that."

"And so there was such high attention to detail and realism, which I thought was really cool and I learned a lot from that project.
That made you more demanding in the future? More of a tough boss?
Not a tough boss, but have a higher quality level and higher standards because you know that you can achieve that now with the PlayStation 4 at the time."

"In terms of Valorant, that helped me have the player's perspective when it comes to thinking about QA because with a live service game, like I mentioned, there's a lot of bugs and you can't fix everything.
But you have to advocate for the player because they are the ones continuing to keep your game alive like League of Legends for so many years.
That was kind of the player mindset I wanted to adapt again. What would I feel as a player? What do I want improved and what can I do internally to push for that?
Alright, and then as of now, of course, you cannot talk about the specific project you're working on at the PUBG Studio."

"But what can you tell me your work philosophy is and with all this experience, how you feel you're adding to QA nowadays?
Yeah, my work philosophy is pretty similar still to what I had back at Naughty Dog and also Riot that QA is a huge part of the team and I want them involved as early as possible into the development cycle.
What we do goes just beyond testing the game. It's giving feedback on designs of certain features and how the game plays out and I think we're just much more involved."

"And QA is also in charge of a lot of different things like optimization and put a lot of impact on that.
So I think my current team, we're really trying to get the game into as best shape as it can be.
And it's great. Now I'm a lead of, I think like 12 people, which is really large, my largest team yet.
And then I also manage a team of outsource testers based in Poland actually, Qloc. So shout out to Qloc and my team."

"So yeah, it's a bigger QA strategy, but you want to think long term and how you can put your testers on the right things at the right time.
Of course. And now that you mentioned optimization, we didn't touch upon that, but of course it would have been way different coming from The Last of Us, which was PS4.
Then, of course, PS4 Pro and then PS5. But compared to Valorant, which is PC of all sorts and sizes, right? So that's a big difference as well."

"Optimizing a game like The Last of Us 2 for PS4 was a magical feat. People still couldn't believe that it ran on something like that.
And then obviously with Valorant, it's trying to reach the max amount of people regardless of their PC specs.
And so we were always trying to find ways to optimize the game further for players to be able to play it on maybe a slightly less updated machine than what they have nowadays."

"Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Final thing. We started this by talking about Mythic Quest and the conception there is of a QA guy doing their thing.
And you said that, of course, you have to play a lot. You have to try and break the game.
But for people in these sort of events that they are looking for a job and of course QA always is tempting because of course you have to play."

"So what sort of piece of advice would you give them if they really want to work as a part of a QA team?
Yeah, just keep playing games. I'm not the best person to follow that advice because I play just too much in general and I would rather do anything else.
But I think in general, if you want to get into the games industry, having any sort of experience in QA will only help you and not hurt you."

"I think if you want to be a designer, having a very good background in QA and just thinking about what testing implications, like what the workshop I talked about was basically thinking about if you're creating new features or areas of a game and you think about what maybe testing it will be and what it will take to get that to a certain quality bar, that already makes you a much better designer or artist."

"So yeah, I think everybody should definitely try a day in QA shoes and not just playing games.
Yeah, you mentioned something very interesting. The leap from QA to design, is that something that you've seen a lot happening?
Yeah, I've seen QA to a lot of other departments because I think with QA you work with so many different departments already."

"That you absorb, right?
Yeah, and you establish a lot of relationships, see a lot of different parts of the game and then you just have a better understanding of how games work and what might cause certain issues to happen.
So it's just like a really good knowledge base to start out of if you don't have like five games out of college or something."

"Yeah, that actually happened in Mythic Quest. Not that far from reality.
Anyway, thank you so much for your time Gabby. I'm looking forward to playing whatever you guys are working on next.
Cool. Thank you.
Bye guys."

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