14 DAY TRIAL // The Gears of War 3 multiplayer beta stage which has just kicked off at the beginning of the week is all about getting feedback from players, as Epic Games, the developer of the upcoming title, wants to make sure that the new game will satisfy the legions of Gears of War fans.
Epic Games promised to release Gears of War 3 this month, but delayed it at the end of last year, instead opting to announce that a multiplayer beta stage will be released in order to make up for the delay.
Now, the multiplayer beta has been launched for owners of the Bulletstorm Epic Edition, so Rod Fergusson, the executive producer of the title, has talked with CVG about the purpose of this test phase, and how it's all about getting feedback from players.
"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."
Fergusson went on to emphasize that gamers perceive beta stages as glorified demos, not like actual work in progress builds of the respective game.
As such, if a developer wants to release a beta stage, it needs to polish it up, as many gamers will believe that the final game will be as problematic as the beta. This poses a serious problem, as developers need to not only work on their game as a whole, but also make sure that the beta is polished in order to lure in players.
Luckily for Epic Games, the delay of Gears of War 3 allowed the team to allocate time for a multiplayer beta that will actually have repercussions in the final game, which will appear in September.
"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. 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."
Bulletstorm owners are enjoying the multiplayer beta of Gears of War 3 right now, while those who pre-ordered the title will be able to play it on April 25.