Future Total War Games: Public Beta?

[Colovion]

Now that the Total War games have gotten to the scale and the amount of fans as they have now would it be unrealistic to have a public beta? Kind of in a similar kind of format as Warcraft was, as the Age of... series does with their public Alpha and Beta and so on. I just think that if something like that was done that I lot of these little bugs would have been caught pre-release. I mean there's only so much the Devs can test when they're furiously working to develope core issues instead of looking at the smaller bits to see if they work properly or not.

Thoughts?

[Tamur]

I think this would be great if CA were to use it early and often. There are a couple of dev houses, one of whom is based in Florida USA who churn out an endless stream of... err, where was I?

Anyway, there are some developers who use public betas as slightly extended publicity stunts near the end of development. If a public beta were with serious intent, it could really benefit the end product. However, doing one is such a high-level decision that, even if the entire community got together and asked for one, it wouldn't make any difference to the development process. That's a very internal matter in most software houses.

[barvaz]

Public Beta’s are nice, mostly for the players who get the chance for an early taste of their highly anticipated games.

Public Beta’s are mostly useful when you want to test scenarios that are difficult to replicate by in house QA, this is more apparent in massive multiplayer games. Things like server load, game balance, economy, chat systems etc. Games that are mostly single player or multiplayer with limited amount of players will benefit less from a huge amount of testers and often create a more logistical and administrative overhead than it is worth.

Frankly, most of the bugs found in RTW don’t require thousands of gamers to discover (and reporting the same bug over and over again), they were easy enough to find by a good team of QA people playing the game through. I am willing to bet that the majority of bugs and issues that are annoying people and pop up on the various forums repeatedly were known to the developers at release time.

- barvaz