Brink beta and my pov

(SockDog) #61

Campaign mode.

(PSG_Mud) #62

…

SC2 Beta had massive amounts of failure with balance. Proxy reaper rush, auto win basically TvP. Just as an example.SC2 might of presented a nice game, but, that doesn’t mean their method of beta testing was perfect.

Problem with Beta testing is that the critical points take along time to be heard with mass testers(diamond in the spam analogy), and with little amount of testers may never be heard. Blizzard tried to find a medium, with closed beta.

So, how do you successfully do a beta these days where everyone is happy?

Create hype with a closed beta, accessible only to media sources, and marketing resources. Brink does not have the must buy hype CoD has, but, it does have a selling value to people who want to explore something new. Inviting veteran players or anyone in the community will have extremely biased views, sometimes negative because the newness is to much for them, which ultimately can hurt the game promotion.

I see Brink being popular as the Portal game, something that really wows players that want something revolutionary, and different. Portal should be an example, on the goals SD wants to reach.

SO, To the point… with marketing resources.

You want to get into beta? Add Codes to newly released Bethesda games, to allow beta access. For example, You buy the game Fallout:New Vegas, it comes with a free beta code for the future with an estimated date on when people can activate on it(Check back Spring 2011 to get activate your beta code). The idea is to gather outside sources into the beta and game itself, similar to portal, instead of catering to the SD community demands. That is a good thing to have(demands), but only when your community outweighs your target audience in numbers.

Portal did so well because it was brought into the light by other notable games. Portal by itself didn’t have a reputable name, and probably would of taken along time to sell well without them. Use Bethesda as a resource to other game communities. Use steam as another resource. A decent steam promotional sale will do wonders for your sales. Use whatever you can get your hands on that allows you to reach into a community and say, hey, check us out. They will come to play your game, if there is someone inviting them to play your game.

(sahilio) #63

Would really be nice to have some sort of Beta or Demo considering the near 1 year delay.

(3run) #64

There has to be a demo

(ehrw) #65

Tonight I dreamt that I played brink. Something is near!

So does SD got any updates for us? Pretty please!

(Apples) #66

I’m afraid there wont be any beta, trust me I asked poulpy, aka paul teh octopus!

(tinManz) #67

No beta means no productive development from actual potential buyers.

And that’s just no good :frowning:

(LyndonL) #68

Or No (open) beta means no little kiddies coming in and screwing up a game by demanding stupid things, and negatively promoting the game.

(Hayekz) #69

New poster here,

There are a lot of good arguments for and against an open beta, but from my experience a closed beta does give you certain problems especially if you only allow access to an already enthusiastic fan base. This has happened in previous games where a majority of the closed beta testers declared the game as “perfect” when it clearly wasn’t from a neutral point of view. So there is that issue, the closed beta testers really have to be honest with the developers.

And the problem with the open beta has already been mentioned, that it could give the game a bad reputation before it even makes it to the final version. It is inevitable that Brink will be compared with other shooters, and no matter how clearly you define beta for a lot of gamers, they don’t understand what a beta is and will just see it as the finish product a lot of the time.

So what do you think? I liked the idea of closed beta first, iron out most of the problems and balance issues followed by an open beta where the game play mechanics are going to closely reflect the actual release.

On the topic of players attitudes in games(such as l4d, cs, cod etc), thats just a side affect of every online game and internet usage in general, you wont be able to get rid of the problem, the only way you can try, is if you have a strong enough community that deters that sort of behavior but as soon as the game gets popular it becomes almost impossible.

That said, I really like the look of Brink, and I’ve been waiting for an original looking FPS to come along for a long time now

(ehrw) #70

[QUOTE=Hayekz;233029]New poster here,

There are a lot of good arguments for and against an open beta, but from my experience a closed beta does give you certain problems especially if you only allow access to an already enthusiastic fan base. This has happened in previous games where a majority of the closed beta testers declared the game as “perfect” when it clearly wasn’t from a neutral point of view. So there is that issue, the closed beta testers really have to be honest with the developers.

And the problem with the open beta has already been mentioned, that it could give the game a bad reputation before it even makes it to the final version. It is inevitable that Brink will be compared with other shooters, and no matter how clearly you define beta for a lot of gamers, they don’t understand what a beta is and will just see it as the finish product a lot of the time.

So what do you think? I liked the idea of closed beta first, iron out most of the problems and balance issues followed by an open beta where the game play mechanics are going to closely reflect the actual release.

On the topic of players attitudes in games(such as l4d, cs, cod etc), thats just a side affect of every online game and internet usage in general, you wont be able to get rid of the problem, the only way you can try, is if you have a strong enough community that deters that sort of behavior but as soon as the game gets popular it becomes almost impossible.

That said, I really like the look of Brink, and I’ve been waiting for an original looking FPS to come along for a long time now[/QUOTE]

Very well written. Totally agree.
They are very secretive with their plans about a beta for now. A few weeks back I heard they were talking with Bethesda about it. Hopefully there’s some plans going on

(tokamak) #71

Take the google aproach. A compromise between a fully open and closed beta is a highly ‘exclusive’ beta, where each beta-tester sometimes receives a few invitation passes everytime the developpers want to take the project to the ‘next’ round.

(ehrw) #72

I really like this way. Really cool way.

The downside with this is with time people will start selling invites. Also not good :frowning:

(tokamak) #73

I ehm… I actually bought my Gmail adress when it was still in a very early beta phase…

Really, if people are willing to pay to get into the beta then you know they’ll be dedicated testers and won’t treat it as a demo.

(the_madman) #74

I would like to pre-order it, but all (but one) of our computers run Linux exclusively, and Widnows Vista on the main desktop computer is more than my nerves can bare.

I’d like to beta test it, though, because I’m good at finding stuff that’s broken, explaining how it’s broken and what the possible/ideal solutions would be, 'cause I beta test loads of open-source software all the time and am myself a, “developer in training”. :frowning:

(Nail) #75

“Really, if people are willing to pay to get into the beta then you know they’ll be dedicated testers and won’t treat it as a demo.”

nope, lots of people have more money than brains

(SockDog) #76

Invites don’t increase the quality of any beta tester. They’re distribution not selection.

With Steam, SD/Bethesda may as well set up an official Brink Test group and then just randomly issue beta keys to members. Hell if they wanted some selection criteria I’d wonder if Steam would allow them to mine some user data for own/played games of similar genre on Steam.

(LyndonL) #77

[QUOTE=Nail;233103]“Really, if people are willing to pay to get into the beta then you know they’ll be dedicated testers and won’t treat it as a demo.”

nope, lots of people have more money than brains[/QUOTE]

Confirmed… (although I must admit I do approve of the actions :tongue:)

(tokamak) #78

And you want to select the beta testers exactly how?

(Apples) #79

Once again, gief beta to mapper / modders only, these guys are in beetween the pub and the comp community, and they usually know the games mechanics enuff to find the broken things easily, indeed its a biased sample of the population, but every sample is biased anyway, go for the less biased one…

Peace

Ps: I’m not modder / mapper of any kind.

(SockDog) #80

I said invites were a distribution not selection method.

I like Apples idea. I think giving closed beta access to mappers, modders from various games would be of most benefit to tweaking the game design and some balance issues. Gamers IMO are rarely capable of seeing past their own needs and shouldn’t have a great influence on design.