I am talking to you, Blizzard (MWIII)

  • fidodo@lemm.ee
    19·
    1 year ago

    It used to be called early access. At least it wasn’t a misleading term.

    • sciawp@lemm.ee
      10·
      1 year ago

      Nah, ‘open beta’ was the term for a long time; early access is a newer thing.

      • fidodo@lemm.ee
        5·
        1 year ago

        I think you’re misunderstanding what I mean. Early Access is a newer term for getting paid access to a game early. Open beta is an older term but was used for free access to a game early for testing purposes. They used to have different meanings which is why early access was created as a new term to distinguish it from a beta. Calling paid early access a beta is intentionally misleading.

        • sciawp@lemm.ee
          3·
          1 year ago

          Alright, thanks for the clarification! Honestly, I think both terms are misused all the time and I have just stopped caring about it.

    • R0cket_M00se@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      Early access is a much newer term, an open beta used to be a period of time you could play a beta build of a game and then give feedback to the developers on how to tweak it so they could take that information and build it out/QA it before release. Like Halo 3 before it launched, when you could apply at Bungie.net for access on Xbox live.

      Then eventually the term “beta” just became synonymous with “demo” as the “beta’s” started coming out within time periods that were unrealistic for the company to actually make changes to for the release date, and had no structure with which to give the developer feedback. Why? Because it’s not a beta, it’s a demo.

      Early access was popularized after game devs began realizing that people would literally pay for a game that wasn’t finished and might never be, essentially game development as a service. Thanks Star Citizen, for showing people you can make millions with a tech demo. Now broken on release and months of patches to get the game in the state it should have been on launch is the standard, because people keep buying this shit on launch day.

  • Gork@lemm.ee
    16·
    1 year ago

    I hate this trend.

    Attack from Tarkov

    Star Citizen

    The only one that I’ve played that has bucked that trend is Valheim. It’s relatively bug free and the gameplay is smooth as hell.

  • DrQuint@lemm.ee
    4·
    1 year ago

    The only games I played in early anything were Slay the Spire, Hades and Against the Storm.

    I never wagered on shit.

  • AnonTwo@kbin.social
    1·
    1 year ago

    You mean the random selection signups? I think only WoW’s first stress test was a straight “anyone can download” open beta…

    • Xiaz@lemmy.world
      7·
      1 year ago

      nah, used to be that was closed beta. Palia is currently in “open beta” but its actually just PC exclusive launch because there are no further wipes.

      Used to be the terminology was strict and easily understood. Now its just whatever the dev wants to claim it is.

      Open Beta used to be “game is free for a week then we will wipe, do any backend fixes we identified, and then launch”. Last MMO that did that that I can concretely remember was SWTOR.