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Open Question: How much is a beta allowed to suck?
SammyF
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I recently came across a thread a few pages back about a game that is currently in open beta, and the OP was complaining about...well, let me just quote him. I don't want to derail the topic into the virtues and vices of a specific title, so I'll quote just enough to give you the gist:
And so on. This was the first response he got back:
Now it should be noted (and was, in subsequent responses) that the game in question was an Open Beta for a title that is due to be released within the next 3-4 months, so many people expect that this title should be code-complete. Others are obviously willing to give it a little bit of leeway because it has a Beta label attached to it. For me this begs the question: how much is a game allowed to suck during closed beta and/or open beta before you'll give up on it completely? How much does open beta playability reflect on general release playability? Has anyone ever seen a game with a sucky open beta that still did well when it was released later?
Discuss.
I DLed the beta Friday night and finally got the patches installed yesterday morning... oh boy.
I did all the tutorial stuff and whatnot and when I finally got playing I found the pace to be ridiculously slow and the controls completely unintuitive. . . The collision detection. . .was dogshit, as I'd have minute-long standoffs with opposing players, just going "HUGH!" as we lunged at each other without registering blow. The camera-switch system also feels weak. . .
And so on. This was the first response he got back:
Hm. I think that's your problem right there.
Here, lemme make it bigger.Beta
Betas, are by definition, incomplete, buggy pieces of shit.
Now it should be noted (and was, in subsequent responses) that the game in question was an Open Beta for a title that is due to be released within the next 3-4 months, so many people expect that this title should be code-complete. Others are obviously willing to give it a little bit of leeway because it has a Beta label attached to it. For me this begs the question: how much is a game allowed to suck during closed beta and/or open beta before you'll give up on it completely? How much does open beta playability reflect on general release playability? Has anyone ever seen a game with a sucky open beta that still did well when it was released later?
Discuss.
SammyF on
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That said, once a game gets to a public open beta and the game's release is in fucking June (yes, I know this is from the MGO thread), it's not going to be far off from the final version. I've participated in several betas, and these didn't change too radically at all to retail. Squashing bugs and fine-tuning balance? Yeah. "Incomplete, buggy pieces of shit"? If it's an incomplete buggy piece-of-shit in open public beta, it's probably going to be an incomplete buggy piece-of-shit at gold master. People like bandying about the "it's only beta" as an excuse when it should not be.
So basically, like Accault said. Collision detection should be done, as should most anything mechanic wise.
I've always thought Betas were for changing numbers. Like X weapon does 14% damage instead of 16% damage, things like that.
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Not that it wasn't buggy when it came out, but Star Wars Galaxies didn't even have a skybox until the week before the game was released. They were included in the 0-day patch. It's a beta, shit changes.
edit: see, Kor is wrong. That's not always the purpose of a beta. People need to get out of this mindset, because you're just setting yourself up for disappointment.
Monoxide said it. Right there, what he said.
Beta is not synonymous with demo. A beta can be used as one, but more often than not they're intended for stress testing and general data gathering. Arguments that a public showing should be polished are moot in the face of development issues that require large populations prior to taking your customer's money in by the bushel.
If it's a buggy piece of hog stew, it's probably not going to stay that way. Nevermind when the release date actually is. Of course, there are exceptions, but you're better off taking nothing more than the broadest of impressions from one. Polish will be shown off when the product actually releases, not before.
I would agree for the most part. I'm not a game developer, but when an application of mine goes out into "beta", the major functionality should be there and working. The beta is to shake out small bugs and test the major stuff to make sure you've accounted for all the requirements, and for the eventual customers to see how the end product should behave. So yeah, beta code should be 95% of the first release.
Again, development of an MMOG is a lot more challenging (was it an MMOG? Op didn't say), and chances are you have thousands of people who may or may not be your customers hammering and nitpicking at your code in an open beta. Typically game developers are scrambling to make changes constantly right up until release. I think a good bit of leeway would be allowed, but that's up to personal preference.
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Not only do I love pitting moderators against one another, but I think there's potentially an interesting point here to be made. When people pan an open beta, is it the gamer's fault for "setting himself up for disappointment?" Or is it the developer's fault for not taking into account the fact that many gamers are naturally going to assume that the code they're seeing in open beta is going to to look like the code at release?
While true, typically devs want to use an open beta as a form of advertisement. Since word of mouth owns all really.
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Games that have open to the public betas are doing so in order to increase their test base and results to better facilitate those three tasks.
There is the marketing angle, but in general devs do it because we need the data. Unless it's a project we REALLY want to work on, most devs are ready to be done with the game by beta. So unless the publishers come back and say we HAVE to do an open beta for marketing, we really don't want to because we're all really frickin' tired by this point and don't want to have to do more work because the publishers say so..
Like personally it worries me that Age of Conan is gold but open beta doesn't start will May 1st. That sounds like to me either a horrible fucked up launch like Anarchy Online which makes me think of the term "everything old is new again" or it's going to have a large 0 day patch.
But Metal Gear is a unique case at times the game has enough issues to say man did anyone even play this before putting it out to public (certain lag issues and weapon balance). Then they release something as awesome as sneaking mode and you go holy shit this is badass.
If thats what they want it to be. It isnt typically the case though, more often they are trying to debug features, stress test etc.
It's only a question of degree.
Plus I think it might complicate the larger question since the title is exclusively a console product and I don't know enough about how good the console will be at patching after release, and don't particularly care since I don't own that model anyway.
For an open beta if negative comments are any worse than, "This is cool but a few things could be tweaked here and there." or "I hope they have more servers for the actual release.", then the devs have set themselves up for some negative word of mouth.
Since MGO is just a bonus for MGS4 this might not be as huge a problem as it would be for a stand alone game.
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I have participated in a few betas. Dark Age of Camelot, Call of Duty 4 MP, and some other random not-worth-remembering ORPG. DAoC was complete trash, CoD4 was damn near perfect (and almost 100% representative of what the final product turned into), and the last one... well, I don't even remember the name, so.
I also have participated, on my own, in some "unofficial" betas. Ones that weren't open to the public. I actually had more fun with those, and I found the incomplete nature of those games to be intriguing.
On to the point, an open beta shouldn't really be something unplayable, or broken beyond belief. If some features don't work, that's fine, so long as the major gameplay isn't FUBAR. If, through some other broken piece of the game, the major gameplay IS FUBAR, that's half the point of a beta - work out the kinks.
The good rule of thumb is that if it's a PC game beta, expect it to be a horrific descent into madness, ESPECIALLY if it's a game you're looking forward to. If it's a console beta, expect it to be playable, if not complete. Anything less, and you're probably justified in pitching a fit over it being broken, ESPECIALLY if it's a part of a pre-order process.
Just my point-oh-two.
The sooner it is the less sucky it is allowed to be before you throw up your hands and say 'this game is going to blow'.
No. Alpha is where you integrate as much as possible, to hopefully have everything intergrated and "mostly" functionnal before you reach Beta. Full debugging starts after you reach the Beta milestone.
I'll agree that you can't expect a beta to be flawless and without major issue. But if you release an open beta you should expect customers to be turned off by the game if your game runs like shit and core gameplay doesn't even seem to be functionnal.
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At this point I think the majority of people see beta and think demo, and that means its a pretty terrible idea to do an Open Beta if your game is an unfinished pile of suck.
It also makes matters worse when free trials aren't readily available on launch and the only sort of "Demo" experience your going to get is the beta.
But is that really true any more? I mean, with the extremely open public betas Fileplanet offers, you end up with a large amount of people who are playing your game. Just because you say "This is not indicative of the final product" does not mean that people won't still judge it.
Enemy Territory: Quake Wars didn't do very well, and part of the problem was the shoddy first beta, that a lot of people played.
I think that if game companies are going to be doing a large public beta, it's in their best interests to ensure the game is as polished as possible. Their primary focus during that beta should be to fine tune balance and such.
Now, the definition of a beta has been muddied in the past decade or so by a lot of frankly amateur developers entering the business, especially in the MMOG market. They will sometimes attempt to make sweeping changes to the features or code of a game in 'beta', meaning that they generally did not actually think through the functionality of that code or feature. Things like adding skyboxes should not be happening a week from the gold press of the software in question; if the software is still that volatile, it is not finished. A great many games these days are thrown into 'beta' when they are still in the alpha (or hilariously even pre-alpha) stages of traditional software development. This can be due to any number of things: available money drying up, publishers wanting to attempt to cash in on software they have little faith in, office politics and original lead programmers leaving, any number of things.
There's a lot of bad software development going around these days and I wish it wasn't the case, as it sets a bad example for those entering the industry. To answer the original poster: a "beta", especially a beta open to the public, should be feature complete and generally indicative of the product you will find at launch. A few crash or rendering glitches that can be corrected? Acceptable early on. If the developer is promising that the release will have three times as many weapons, texture resolutions ten times higher and you'll be able to glomp-hug your teammates and the release is a week away... then you aren't really playing a beta.
If you heard about a game and thought it might be interesting but want to play it first before making any decisions, and hey it's free so what the fuck, closed beta tesing is not for you. At all. Not even a little bit. Fuck you, the purpose isn't to play a free game for awhile, go do something else.
OPEN-betas are a different beast entirely. Given how they're viewed but the people they're intended for (you know, everyone) they should be pretty close to the final product as they can be. So while they ideally shouldn't be expected to be bug-free by any means, word of mouth is obviously a huge thing since, ya know, open so you really want to have damn near everything you can working well.
So...uh... I guess point being don't judge a game by a beta but if you're a dev be damn careful when you decide to put out a beta since it can hurt you far more than it helps?
I think this highlighted bit's incredibly important because it mentions the fileplanet offers, which I hadn't considered before. Particularly when it comes to the subscriber-exclusive offers (Age of Conan open beta is limited exclusively to Fileplanet subscribers), because participating in exclusive betas is a marketing tool for Gamespy/Fileplanet, you have people who are paying money to participate in your beta.
In my opinion, these "exclusive" open betas where people are paying someone money to participate are not allowed to suck. At all. It's one thing when you host a relatively unpublicized beta and some folks see that as an invitation to play the game for free, but when you're publicizing it on Gamespy and money is trading hands, people have every right to expect that they're getting their money's worth.
And I wonder if this use of the "open beta" as an explicit marketing tool and a premise for a financial transaction hasn't irrevocably blurred the line between "work in progress" and "exclusive sneak-preview" for the industry at large.
Yeah. Anyone who played the game at release (or now, even) can tell you that that game was rushed out way before it was even close to being done. Most of the big problems with the game (skill trees, huge memory leak, repetitive locales) were still present in the game upon release.
Anyhow, from that experience, I've learned that you can't work miracles in a month or two. If a game is still in a sad state that close to release, chances are good that it's going to release in a sad state as well.
I think you answered your own question in a way. You said if a game sucks in beta, it probably wont be much better in the final product. If your using a Beta to gain some insight into how the finished game is going to turn out, its essentially a demo even if that wasn't your intent when you decided to help test or whatever.
Closed beta of course is a different story, but I still wouldn't be surprised if the majority of people read "Closed Beta" as "Exclusive demo".
I hold by my comment quoted in the OP. Betas are, by and large, meant for bug fixing, feature tweaking, and game balancing. If you go in there expecting a nice complete game with perfect controls, perfectly balanced gameplay and no bugs, you are stupid and dumb.
In any case, I played a few games of the beta for MGO and I had fun and got pissed at the same time. First off, the camera doesn't feel right. There was some lag issues as well, but this is true with almost any online console game as well as any beta game. Controls were annoying at times, it seemed that I just couldn't get it to do what I wanted it to do when it came time to attack someone, which led to my death and the end of me playing.
Now, I've not played in a lot of betas, but I expect this to be the case with a lot of betas. A lot of bugs that need to be worked out, and people just getting pissed off at the game. Hell, isn't that the purpose of the beta? To piss off the consumer as much as possible so that you know what not to keep in the game? I think that a lot of what I didn't like about the game will be fixed in the release, or at least hope so. But in the end, it was said early in the thread but I'll say it as well, beta =/= demo.
I'm not saying that a Beta should be the exact same thing as a Demo, but I think for allot of people thats what it is. Its an opportunity to try out the game before its released and decide if its something to get interested in.
Mantis, I guess my point is that the majority of people are stupid and dumb and that developers should take that into account.
Well the thing is you aren't reviewing the product. The thing is that with a game like MGO, even if there are a lot of bugs in the beta that piss me off, I will probably get the release because MGS series has always been high in quality. Let's say for sake of argument this was a no name game and I played the beta and I ran into this problem and this problem and blah blah blah. It made it unbearable and pissed me off a lot. I swore I would never buy it. Well the actual game gets released and because I, and other gamers, got pissed off over those bugs, the developer fixed it and in the reviews it points out that those were fixed and that it's "flawless" now. Knowing this will make me want to buy the game because aside from those bugs, I enjoyed it a lot.
That's what I'm trying to get at, and I hope the above paragraph did a decent job of getting my message across.
I agree with everything Monoxide said if closed beta is attached to it. In an open beta I feel the major gameplay mechanics should be near 100%. The graphics, content, actual balance, and even FPS/performance doesn't need to be retail ready in an open beta. The thing developers need to keep in mind, though, is that most open beta players tend to treat the beta as a demo for the full product. Just look at al lthe people in the AoC thread wanting an open beta so they can try before they buy.