There wasn’t a beta for Halo 4 because Im guessing 343 felt really confident and not a lot of people really liked that idea. Well Im suggesting there be a beta for Halo 5 because the community should be able to share their opinions on it and if they find any bugs,glitches, etc then it will be easier for 343 to acknowledge them and fix them.
> There wasn’t a beta for Halo 4 because Im guessing 343 felt really confident and not a lot of people really liked that idea. Well Im suggesting there be a beta for Halo 5 because the community should be able to share their opinions on it and if they find any bugs,glitches, etc then it will be easier for 343 to acknowledge them and fix them.
Well, the thing is a Beta isn’t really there to help focus test the game (as in to test new gameplay ideas to see how they’ll go down with the public. That is to get community feedback.) They’re to test the game in a very mechanical way to work out those bugs and performance issues that will keep you from having a smooth launch. Sure, if gun A is totally overpowering and that shows up in a public beta the devs are going to do something about it, but it’s an opportunity you take advantage of, not the reason why you divert a lot of internal resources to hosting a part of the game months in advance.
Take the halo Reach beta. Sure, looking at balance was something Bungie did for the hell of it but the priorities were in finding bugs (ex. in headshots registering) and in testing new netcoding, particularly for Firefight Versus. If they were more confident in those core aspects you can bet that the game wouldn’t have had a beta, as Halo 4 did not and as was justified by the lack of comparable bugs and problems (I think the only thing I’ve had is the odd SOPS objective fail to trigger and audio bugs with weapons after switching.)
> > There wasn’t a beta for Halo 4 because Im guessing 343 felt really confident and not a lot of people really liked that idea. Well Im suggesting there be a beta for Halo 5 because the community should be able to share their opinions on it and if they find any bugs,glitches, etc then it will be easier for 343 to acknowledge them and fix them.
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> Well, the thing is a Beta isn’t really there to help focus test the game (as in to test new gameplay ideas to see how they’ll go down with the public.) They’re to test the game in a very mechanical way to work out those bugs and performance issues that will keep you from having a smooth launch. Sure, if gun A is totally overpowering and that shows up in a public beta the devs are going to do something about it, but it’s an opportunity you take advantage of, not the reason why you divert a lot of internal resources to hosting a part of the game months in advance.
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> Take the halo Reach beta. Sure, looking at balance was something Bungie did for the hell of it but the priorities were in finding bugs (ex. in headshots registering) and in testing new netcoding, particularly for Firefight Versus. If they were more confident in those core aspects you can bet that the game wouldn’t have had a beta, regardless of the state of balancing (which was crap even with a beta. Remember, after all the fuss we were still left with AL, double melee, apocalyptic grenades, swiss-army DMR’s, vehicles made out of C-4 and gasoline, non-working lasers, and Sniper Rifles that could put a hole through a battleship.)
After the way Halo 4’s player retention rate has been declining, and the problems you pointed were present even after Reach’s Beta, perhaps it should become a more pressing objective for 343i to see how the players react to changes/additions this time around. Also, rather than requiring the purchase of a specific game to attend the Beta, I think it would be wise to have it open to all. This gives new players, as well as players who stopped playing Halo, to see what it will be like.
> After the way Halo 4’s player retention rate has been declining, and the problems you pointed were present even after Reach’s Beta, perhaps it should become a more pressing objective for 343i to see how the players react to changes/additions this time around. Also, rather than requiring the purchase of a specific game to attend the Beta, I think it would be wise to have it open to all. This gives new players, as well as players who stopped playing Halo, to see what it will be like.
But how would a Halo 5 beta that looks at blance be any different in practice than Reach’s beta? People still gave feedback about bloom, about sprint, about AL, and about vehicles and bungie did tweak some things accordingly. But even if they headlined “balance” on an internal memo and said “this is what we are looking for” a Beta wouldn’t have helped because, as I said, that’s NOT what they are for in both intention and capability.
You cannot gauge how well a game will do based on a couple weeks of gameplay on just a few maps and only in a few playlists. Take, for example, the Banshee. In the beta the message was “it’s a bit weak” because all it could do was face a scorpion on Boneyard. But when you played with it in the final game that one situation that was heavily tested in the beta became an odd case compared to BTB slayer on Pinnacle or the Spire, and in those the banshee became a problem. Unless you just gave everyone free access to the final product, a beta wouldn’t have identified the problems with infini-vade or nuclear-powered, homing fuel rod cannons.
Nor even then could you have spotted just how annoying sprint-double melee would become or how dull some of the maps would be because those issues, based on player behavior and game replayability, take time to develop. So in order to do what you want and fix the problems that Halo 4 had you would need to release the whole game and to do so for extended periods of time. And that’s not a beta, that’s just what happens on release day.
AND on top of that, the very LAST thing a beta is for is to give players a taste for what the new game will be like. That’s what a DEMO is for, something that comes out along with or just a week before the game, not months in advance when that directly interferes with the normal course of development.
> There wasn’t a beta for Halo 4 because Im guessing 343 felt really confident and not a lot of people really liked that idea. Well Im suggesting there be a beta for Halo 5 because the community should be able to share their opinions on it and if they find any bugs,glitches, etc then it will be easier for 343 to acknowledge them and fix them.
I’m not going to add anything to Duncan Idaho 11’s posts, but even if 343i decided to use it as a way to get player feedback, there would be a problem.
If 343i listened to the people on this forum Halo 5 would be a copy of Halo 3. There’s no getting around that. This forum seems to think that Halo 3 was the pinnacle of gaming and that’s what they’d tell 343i.
Halo XB1 needs a beta. If 343 doesn’t have one, its proof they didn’t learn their lesson from H4.
> There wasn’t a beta for Halo 4 because Im guessing 343 felt really confident and not a lot of people really liked that idea.
No, they didn’t have a beta because they knew the game was awful and people would cancel their preorders in droves.
> Halo XB1 needs a beta. If 343 doesn’t have one, its proof they didn’t learn their lesson from H4.
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> > There wasn’t a beta for Halo 4 because Im guessing 343 felt really confident and not a lot of people really liked that idea.
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> No, they didn’t have a beta because they knew the game was awful and people would cancel their preorders in droves.
Yup, exactly
> There wasn’t a beta for Halo 4 because Im guessing 343 felt really confident and not a lot of people really liked that idea.
I’ve said this before in another thread, but reading between the lines of this profile of 343 and Halo 4 from the Wall Street Journal, it sounds like the decision to not hold a beta was based more around a lack of time and resources rather than overconfidence on 343’s part as you suggest. There would have been huge pressure from the higher-ups at Microsoft for the studio dedicate all available resources to make sure the game would ship in time for the last Holiday season before the launch of a new console.
Key quote:
> But efforts to streamline the story and begin creating art and other aspects of the game went slowly, pushing it a month behind schedule. In late 2011, the team had its “one year out” meeting and realized it would need to shift development teams around to catch up.
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> By that point, more than 5,000 concept art images had been made, as well as more than 180 renditions of Master Chief. Much more would need to be created. In one part of the game, 480,013 digital leaves would need to be assembled to create the floor of a digital jungle.
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> In late June, with 19 weeks to go until launch, Ms. Ross and her team held a crucial “go/no-go” meeting with 20 departmental heads, to check whether they were meeting deadlines.
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> In a presentation, one color-coded chart, dubbed a “Christmas tree,” showed the status of the game’s progress. Green meant the effort was on-schedule, yellow signified being behind and red was at significant risk of missing deadline. Only about a quarter of the game appeared green in the chart. Key components, from software bugs to sounds to multiplayer features and overall performance, looked like they could miss deadline.
> > There wasn’t a beta for Halo 4 because Im guessing 343 felt really confident and not a lot of people really liked that idea. Well Im suggesting there be a beta for Halo 5 because the community should be able to share their opinions on it and if they find any bugs,glitches, etc then it will be easier for 343 to acknowledge them and fix them.
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> I’m not going to add anything to Duncan Idaho 11’s posts, but even if 343i decided to use it as a way to get player feedback, there would be a problem.
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> If 343i listened to the people on this forum Halo 5 would be a copy of Halo 3. There’s no getting around that. This forum seems to think that Halo 3 was the pinnacle of gaming and that’s what they’d tell 343i.
Numbers don’t lie. The player retention rate of Reach and Halo 4 have been significantly lackluster when compared to H2-H3. The biggest correlation to base this phenomenon is that H2-H3 had better core gameplay and that many popular FPS additions, such as loadouts and ordinance, have alienated the loyal fanbase population, while failing to pull in and maintain the players they hoped to gain from such additions. It has left a negative impact that can be resolved by returning to the more tried-and-true gameplay of previous installments.
However, some players have embraced some changes, such as default sprinting, and it would be hard to see this feature be taken out. Other additions, such as personal loadouts and ordinance are a relatively easy fix. They can easily explain in their ‘attempted canonization of multiplayer’ as training exercises will revolve more around resourcefully gathering equipment from the battiefield, rather than preferred weapons/equipment being equipped at spawn.