It’s a lengthy and arduous journey to go from concept to finished product in the video game industry.
One of the steps is making demos or betas so that there can be feedback for the developers. People that play it — whether at conventions or within the developer’s controlled environments — can be a good determiner of what works and what does not. The more people that get a chance to play your game, the more problems and bugs you can find so that you can fix them pre-release. So by that logic, the more people that play your game the better, right?
Well, apparently EA never got the memo with Medal of Honor: Warfighter due to release on October 23.
On Sept. 21, EA announced a multiplayer beta for Medal of Honor: Warfighter for Xbox 360 players only.
“Xbox 360 players will be able to try a new multiplayer mode called Hotspot," says IGN's associate news editor Andrew Goldfarb. "Player will team up using the game’s co-op Fireteam system, playing in pairs to win.”
But if cutting out the PC and PS3 wasn’t bad enough, there are bonuses tied to downloading the beta as well. Goldfarb says “Anyone who downloads the beta will also get one hour of double XP when the full version of Warfighter launches.”
Here is what confuses me about this whole thing. Wouldn’t it be best for EA to release the beta and stress test their multiplayer servers so that people can easily jump into a multiplayer game on launch?
I have been the victim of games that did not do any public betas of any kind and their multiplayer modes were filled with latency issues and bugs. The example that comes to mind immediately was Gears of War 2 and Gears of War 3. The former did not have a public beta and the multiplayer was broken at launch.
In a recent reddit.com "Ask me anything" segment, Cliff Bleszinski – design director for the Gears of War franchise – answered the question, “What do you think is your biggest industry related failure, and why?”
Bleszinski replied, "the online launch of Gears 2 and the fact that it barely worked upon launch."
"It broke my heart,” he says.
On the other end of the spectrum, Gears of War 3 released a public beta prior to launch and the multiplayer was smooth as butter upon release.
Am I suggesting that all games with multiplayer need to have public multiplayer betas? No.
But, it certainly helps with the end product. Medal of Honor: Warfighter is not the first game to have an exclusive beta. I seem to remember Ubisoft releasing an Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood (the first game in the series to have multiplayer, mind you) and EA’s own Battlefield 3 exclusively on the PlayStation 3 but was then released on 360 for a short amount of time.
This is probably all related to behind the scenes deals or something between the companies but it would benefit the developers, publishers and consumers to get your unfinished game to as many people and machines as you can.
Follow me on Twitter @MaroonandGamer and send me an email at shfawcet@asu.edu
