Future Total War Games: Public Beta?

[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