Junior Member
Hey guys just want to give you a big thank you for making me apart of the closed alpha squad. My question is will campaign be available to try out for us because it's got me on the edge of my seat to the point I'm falling off lol if not then I'll still do my best for you and for the players. Alpha squad let's do this! HOR HONOR!!!
Member
Community Manager
Member
That's extremely disappointing. I guess I have to hope there will at least be a co-op/solo bots mode available to play test. Looks like I got excited for nothing. Well, at least I know multiplayer, the mode I'm never going to play, will be bug free. Considering how many games are released with problems (even ones as simple as basic spelling), I really am quite shocked and a little bit concerned.
Generally speaking closed alpha/betas have always been for bug testing while public/open betas were for stress testing. If there were going to be bugs, they would be in the campaign portion of the game where you have complex objectives, scripted events, dialogue, etc. Not nearly to the same extent as multiplayer. Obviously the concern here is not spoiling the story, but countless studios in the past have done this successfully (even going back to the days when studios actually released game demos). This could be achieved by something simple as showing half a random level (like they did at E3).
At the same time, every bug I've seen in games recently have been campaign related and are almost always looked over (because their too busy looking for CTDs to do quality control as well). The biggest of all being most prevalent in the past few years. That being the one that if you listen to a character talking while facing any other direction than the direction the speaker is in, the audio gets softer to the point that if you have your back to the character you can't hear them at all. And yet I've found this in so many games it's unbelievable.
Thus this is either a show of complete and total confidence in their own team at finding every last typo, mismatched subtitle, or glitch in the dialog where the dialog gets clipped off by half a second (or more) or a cause for concern. A game can run smooth as silk and look pretty as a Rembrant, but if you get sloppy on the basics you might as well be an indie game.
At the same time, there is a tad bit of lunacy in doing a stress test in closed beta form. If you only invite, say, 200 people in to that beta for the test and determine "Our game runs great! Lets release it!" when three thousand people pick the game up and the servers crash on release day (which, by the way, has happened several times in the past few years), then the backlash will be astronomical.
Either way, it will be interesting to see just WHAT they are doing this test for if not to bug test and not to stress test. Guess we'll have to wait till 3pm ET to find out. In the meantime, I am completely dumbfounded and will hope their confidence does not disappoint.
