Epic Games says it's "serious" about using fan feedback gathered from today's Gears of War 3 beta to improve the final game - and it's not just a publicity stunt.
Speaking to CVG ahead of today's Xbox Live beta launch, executive producer Rod Fergusson admitted gamers' expectations of how polished a 'beta' should be have changed over the years, but he thinks Epic has got the right mix.Asked if the Gears 3 beta is as much about getting the game back in the spotlight after its lengthy delay, Fergusson replied:
"No, we're really serious about getting feedback, that's the big thing we're going to have. We're bringing in administrators from our community to help out with the feedback, we're going to be doing all kinds of stuff.
"We're looking at trying to get surveys set up and all this sort of stuff and if you looked at our Facebook poll for picking the maps we're trying to interact with the community.
"The thing for us is that beta is a changed word now," he added. "Back in the PC days betas were pieces of crap that you'd put out in the community for them to give you feedback and were very small.
"That's how Counter-Strike got built, right? It was beta for how many years before they called it the real game? Now days with consoles and the way the customer looks at those sorts of releases, they treat them as demos and not betas."
Fergusson argued there's "no such thing as a technical beta" anymore. "You have to have it highly polished and that's why we couldn't do it before [the delay]," he said.
"We didn't have the time to polish up that early because the thing is for a beta to be effective it has to be early enough in your development cycle that you can actually react to the feedback.
"But if you push it too early you can't get the polish there because your polish comes at the end, generally.
"So there was always this conflict and with the [release date] extension we were able to get both of those things as we had time. We could make a beta we were proud to have that could stand out.
"It's still a work in progress but at least its polished enough that we feel good about it being seen, yet its still early enough in our dev cycle to actually listen to feedback and say 'this weapon sucks', 'this map sucks' or 'matchmaking sucks'... whatever its going to be, we can react to it."
0 comments:
Post a Comment