Comment on How did Call of Duty get to this point?
bigmclargehuge@lemmy.world 2 months agoI’ve been saying this for years. I remember playing the Planetside 2 beta, it ran for months. It was actually used for bug/stability testing, fixing networking issues, balancing, etc etc etc. It was an incredibly important step in developing a multiplayer game.
These aren’t betas, they’re demos that at most will help them do a limited network stress test. The amount of data they can get from 2 weeks of feedback is nowhere near enough to do any real bug fixes or balance changes.
What’s worse is that now, any game that does have a long alpha or beta period is accused of squatting in early access.
PunchingWood@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Oh man I remember Planetside 2 launch being so insanely laggy and buggy lol
At some point we threw grenades on a giant pile because they just never went off, or sometimes just disappeared as soon as we threw them. I don’t think the devs ever tested that huge influx of players anywhere in the pre-launch stage. It’s hard to predict some things that will go different from testing to live, but man it seems so obvious with large multiplayer titles.
Even WoW still struggled with this, servers becoming laggy and unresponsive even, it’s been better last 2 expansion launches but it’s still not great. And they had over 15 years of data to go on too.
bigmclargehuge@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I also remember it being in a pretty rough state early on, all the more reason 2 weeks of testing is a joke.
Although, one thing CoD has going for it, each game changes so little they really don’t need a beta. They’re almost like sports games in that regard, they may as well be released as updates instead of new titles.