Beta timing (Destiny)

by Malagate , Sea of Tranquility, Saturday, February 08, 2014, 06:57 (3941 days ago) @ Cody Miller

Naturally. What I'm saying is, I'd rather the game launch in a state that doesn't require endless TUs and patches to fix and balance. I've had enough with games put out by EA or games like Halo 4 that require over 9000 patches and balances in the first six months to a year to make the thing playable. Beta test it, focus on what's busted early, put out the best, most complete product you can, and then use patches to clean up the bugs and any issues that pop up as time goes on.

I'm sure they will. That's why they have playtesters and internal betas already doing that. Public betas are rarely for what you describe.

Don't forget that new content will roll out. Eventually there will be lots of new weapons, weapon traits, (hopefully enemies) etc. There will be ideas for weapons that exist in ten months that don't exist now, and when someone goes "you know what would be really cool? A bolo-style grenade launcher (a la Bulletstorm) that sends out shrapnel, so there's a small core of highly-focused damage on one target, while doing chance-to-hit damage in an area, and who doesn't love little ricocheting bits of hot metal?", and they throw it in, there will be all kinds of tweaking that goes on to compensate, because no matter how well they bang on it before it goes out, there will still be stuff that pops up once it's in the wild.

From a QA perspective, I would figure the longer the beta the better. More data collected, more time to throw features out and put them through their paces. But with the right level of community engagement, it could be pretty short if they know what they want to test. Specific gametypes, matchmaking functions, tightening screws on the backend, whatever.

~m