I’ve never been one to get in on videogame betas—save the Diablo 4 one which I did purely to get the horse cosmetic (I then never played far enough to get a horse)—but they’re a pretty popular hype-generation mechanism these days. If you’ve got any sort of live-service thing gearing up for release, why not have a beta? Get some players in, stress-test the servers, and whet everyone’s appetite for the full thing.
A sound tactic, and a total nominative falsehood. Per my recent interview with Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 lead designer and one of Warhorse’s two new creative directors, Prokop Jirsa, calling these little pre-release demos ‘betas’ just ain’t right.
“The things that get to the public—and that the public sometimes hates [because of] how horribly they run and how unfinished they are—that’s still much more polished than what actual internal betas or alphas look like.”
That’s partially because, man, making videogames takes a really long time. Jirsa says one of his earliest surprises was “How long some things take… the fact of how slow [it can be] and how many people have to work on something for it to be really nice and polished. It takes months! Sometimes years!… I still don’t know how we managed to actually release [Kingdom Come: Deliverance 1], because we were so few people in such a short timeframe.”
That’s a fact that, perhaps, gets a little obscured when the videogame “betas” we’re used to playing are so relatively well-polished.
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