QA normally do everything manually, with 0 automation I can see some games taking more than 500 testers to go through all possible paths. Especially in live service games like Apex.
I worked briefly on a AAA game and my team had 2 dedicated american QAs for the feature that knew everything there was to know and tested happy paths/made docs, and there also was a building of testers in Ukraine that tried to break the game in a myriad of ways and filled general bugs.
At some point in alpha we had around 500 bugs filled in jira, and this was only one game mode.
I worked briefly on a AAA game and my team had 2 dedicated american QAs for the feature that knew everything there was to know and tested happy paths/made docs, and there also was a building of testers in Ukraine that tried to break the game in a myriad of ways and filled general bugs.
At some point in alpha we had around 500 bugs filled in jira, and this was only one game mode.