THE OPEN BETA BLUES

Boy, did funcom drop the ball with this one. With the highly anticipated release of aoc, I was looking forward to new video’s, glowing reviews and walkthrough guides for the first 13 levels. Instead, I got heated debate about how the game is unfinished, instancing sucks, and only high end pc’s can play it.

This was disturbing news indeed, then the news that the open beta was actually on an older client started creeping to the forefront. Of course, being the logical person that I am, I couldn’t not believe this and dismissed it as just a rumor. I mean what kind of marketing genius purposefully releases a buggier game client to the people who are going to be giving the first widespread glimpse of the game. Surely an experienced mmo developer like funcom would have lessons learned from past games and not do that. Boy was I surprised when it was actually confirmed to be the case.

It made me lose a lot of confidence in the people behind the game. At the very least , if you are going to do something like that. Please leave the NDA up, and in full force. I cant help but to wonder with the mish mash of players, pc’s and expectations if removing the NDA for this open beta was a mistake.

Granted with the game approaching its release date, it is very troubling that the need for a NDA is even present.

Perhaps companies should make an effort when conducting open beta’s to inform the player’s what type of information they are trying to gleam from the test. Players need some type of baseline to measure the type of gameplay they are seeing. For instance, if they are lagging heavily and have no idea whats going on. Versus, lagging heavily and knowing that the city has a max pop of 300 but there are 700 currently in game. At least with a small bit of information, beta testers would be more open to understanding why they are getting the results they are saying.

As far as I’m concerned the open beta news has been a disappointment, but I will take it with a grain of salt. I wont be picking aoc up on opening day, but I do still plan on giving it a shot. As long as the release reviews are descent.

Has the open beta given anyone else second thoughts?