So I’ve been playing the Battlefield 4 Beta since the 1st October and I have to say for myself while I have only experience a few bugs and some annoying moments of not being able to jump over some obstacles. I’ve had a great experience playing the Battlefield 4 Beta however reading up on the battlelog forums and various other sites about betas people clearly expect way too much during the games early stages of Alpha and Beta. And clearly do not read the disclaimer saying that if you participate in the game at this stage the gameplay, graphics, physics and so forth are subject to change now that could vary from small to huge changes.
But what I find stupid is how people moan that oh this games just a port of that game or how I’m not going to buy this game because it’s worse than that game. Let me do a little remind for people and explain why companies do Alpha and Beta tests.
Companies often do in house testing however for big multiplayer games like Battlefield they will often do a closed Alpha test and then an open Beta which aids the developers in optimizing their game for release. Ensuring consumers do not have the issues they experience during the alpha or beta on the day of launch. So you don’t go online to find all the servers are full or crashing so you can’t play.
These forms of testing allow for the developers to gain so much information on how to optimize and greatly increase the gameplay experience and even help balance the game so you’re not having an unfair advantage. Often we hear of people complain why don’t they put out a patch for this stuff, well while developers will release the odd patch during the test phase you have to realise that its often just easier to leave the changes to the full game as creating a patch can take time. From verification processes to in house testing to make sure the patch its 100% and not going to have its own side effects which can often happen all too much in a test phase.
While I might have a little more insight into how these test phases work from studying a games development course I often get quite frustrated from hearing these crazy things people say, and I’m sure developers do to. So take a moment and be thankful that their doing a testing phase to try and phase out the odd bugs and make their service enjoyable for a day one launch. Rather than buying the game and finding out when you go to launch it, its buggy, crashing, loosing character data and often you can’t play it because of these issues (yes I was referring to GTA V Online there).
So take a deep breath I know it can be frustrating to experience crashes and long loading times but it’s a test phase these things will be better in the full game. Report those bugs on the correct forums don’t be angry your helping the developers make their game better for you and other gamers.