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Originally Posted by Gnome Eater No real outrageous answers there from Smed, he did take the easy way out on answering why WoW beat the everliving fuck out of EQ2 though.
Smed, one question I am very curious about which you may or may not be able to answer. WoW was in semi-public Beta for well over 9 months, with a very intense number of testers, and it contributed in large part to making the game very polished and virtually bug free at launch.
Do you feel that this has changed the attitude of the MMORPG industry towards the publish or die mentality? The non-hardcore MMORPG player quite simply won't put up at all with gamecrashing bugs/non polished UI, and quite often in the past, products that were not tested nearly enough were thrown out early, with the idea of 'we will patch it later'.
You already answered that you several times asked to hold back a title to polish it even further, but never EVER to nearly the extent that Blizzard has. I was in the StarCraft original beta, and that game took fucking FOREVER to come out, it was delayed over a year I think, and spent that entire time in beta tweaking unit balance, but look at how well it is doing now.
What I am saying in conclusion in - Do you feel that any other game will follow in the footsteps and have a 9+ months beta with loads of testers, or publishers still won't let you do this even after seeing the economical benefits? |
I think it's going to be game-by-game. Blizzard's beta was great.. it helped them polish the game and it also helped them on the technical side (remember this was their first MMO). For us 9 months is probably too long.. I think the ideal # is closer to 3 months of closed beta and 3 months of open beta. We would likely go longer on a Playstation 3 MMO (if such a beast was in fact in development
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It can really help to build awareness of a game and get polish ready. One thing I will say about Blizzard's beta is that they got WoW very well balanced day one which is something I really respect them for. I think we managed that with EQ2 as well.
Smed
