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Click here for part 2!
Controversies of betas.
The confusion that we are participating in a beta, when we are really involved in a public field test, has led to some pretty awful game releases. One of the more recent controversial releases was with DICE’s Battlefield 4. Many of us who participated in the open beta remember the game having a few glitches, but also being stable for the most part. The game was pretty good with only a few hiccups here and there. In fact, besides for a few hilarious bugs like the elevator launcher, it seemed that the game would have a great release and players would generally be happy.
Oh, how we were wrong!
The official launch of the game became a festering swamp pit of problems including:
- desktop crashes
- console freezes
- sound loop crashes
- server crashes
- random disconnects
- character wipes
- my personal favorite, falling through the map
And that is only a few of the bugs for the multiplayer portion of the game, let alone the single player, which had its own game-breaking glitches that made it impossible to complete.
How did this happen?
There are really two primary reasons why this scenario happened and left gamers all over the world asking for refunds.
Of course, the first most obvious reason, and the focus of these articles, is the public beta. As you may recall, we were only given one map to play on during the test. Why? Because Siege of Shanghai is the perfect map to test server stability. It’s big, has room for the 64 player matches, and has one of the bigger, game changing “levolution” events.
However, due to reason number two, which we will discuss later, the dev team could only focus on this one map to see what fixes would be included in a day one patch. Remember, the game had already been sent to manufacturing at this point, so any changes that needed to be made would have to come by a mandatory, release day update.
This constriction left DICE between a rock and a boulder. Sure, the servers were holding up now, but what about the millions of others who would be playing on different maps? How would the servers hold up to the various game modes?
Unfortunately, one of the realities of game development is that the team just doesn’t know how well the product will hold up until it is in the hands of the consumers. They could spend hundreds, even thousands, of man-hours testing server stability in their studio, but a few hundred people playing on the server versus a few million is a whole other ball game. Given that the team was only allowed to field test one map, it is no wonder that the game shipped with so many problems.
Why was the game shipped in what seems like an unfinished state?
Two words: The Publisher.
Click Here for part 4, The Controversy of Publishers and do studios need them?
