A couple of weeks ago i was lucky enough to recieve an email from mythic entertainment inviting me to partake in the WAR (Warhammer Age of Reckoning) beta. Now, unfortunately, i can't tell you any more than that because of the NDA (None Disclosure Agreement).
MMO (Massively Multiplayer Online) Betas are a bit of a mixed bag in my experience. The purpose of a Beta in an MMO game is to play as much of the game as possible reporting everything you find wrong with the game from text that is miss aligned to game breaking holes in the world and hardware crashes.
However, a lot of people just see them as a chance to play the game for free. They run round, complain when things don't work and never submit a bug report for the entire duration of the beta. Partly this is due to a lack of tools to do this. In past betas i have played you would need to hit print screen to take a screen shot, log out of the game completely and then write a complete bug report which then needs to be emailed or posted on a forum. For people to report everything they see, while it's fresh in their minds you need in game tools to do this. That way even the people who just want to play for free can just open the tool, write a few sentences and carry on with their game while contributing to the process that they agreed to when siging up for the beta.
I've played a few betas in the past at various stages from open beta which is generally a stress test for the final build, through to early closed beta where some of the content hasn't even been finalised and released. And then there have been games like Neocron which were released in a worse state than some of the early betas i've been involved in, anyone play that game? It had loads of potential but should have undergone better testing before release!!
Anyone reading this have any thoughts on betas they have been in, which were good ones which were bad ones? What made them that way? Obviously you can't talk about current betas because of the NDA's that companies use so keep the comments to past games! Hopefully my PC will be fixed soon and i can get back to the WAR!
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I am allegedly taking part in the testing of a PC flight sim title, yet despite receiving a late night phone call from one of the directors in the US (which seemed to serve like an interview), I haven't been told to do anything yet.
The new game is being built on top of an existing flight sim game, and I have been given a download of this to familiarise myself with the base functionality--but I've heard nothing on the actual new game yet. I think it's been about 4 months now and no word.
The developer forums I've been granted access to also seem a little light on posts. I wonder if my help is still needed.
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