At this point they should just hold on to all the updates they want to add, and make it a sequel. I love all the things that they’ve added and it’s clearly a piece of passion, but at some point they’re going to need to publish something else
I work for a video game company, and I promise you’re being far too generous about their motives. This NDA prevents press from doing press. If the alpha is bad, they’re not allowed to say how or why it’s bad, at all.
I’m on publisher QA side. Every so often, around this time of year, my company does closed internal playtests for games that are on the pre-alpha release candidate (usually it’s the ones they expect to be blockbusters). Generally when a pre-alpha RC is selected for this, a very small subsection of the game is highly polished to give Users an honest preview of what the devs expect the launch game to be. Obviously since it’s in alpha a lot of things will be changed and there are a lot of game breaking bugs to be found still, but the general experience should still be up for discussion if it was bad. I know it’s possible to imagine a game in alpha as released, because part of my job is to give professional feedback to the producers without ever mentioning unfinished or bugged aspects of the game.
Alpha testing is, by definition, testing on unreleased code. Even though they are offering the testing to some select group of people, it’s still considered un-released.
I go out of my way to explain how alphas are typically done as a games industry professional, and you’re still out here spewing the same nonsense? get outta here. This is not a defensible action by a corporation. When a game reaches alpha, the whole of the game is unready but the part used in the public playtests are extensively reviewed by QA and gets as polished as possible. When a game is at alpha stage, it’s by definition gone through multiple release candidates.
Steamdeck performance is still pretty good though, imo the most important factor in the handheld pc market is battery life. If games take a 5% hit to performance for an extra 40 minutes of battery life, the tradeoff becomes obvious to me.
BG3 set the highest standard for a game. It’s not a bad thing that it exists, and the studio absolutely deserves the praise they’re getting. However, we should not seek to make it the minimum standard. Larian Studios worked hard on this for over 5 years without crunch. The ABK’s, Bioware’s, EA’s, and Ubisoft’s of the world will not do that. Games should not come at the expense of abusive workplace practices. There’s something to say about having higher standards for variety and creativity absolutely, but the game in it’s entirety should not be the expectation.
I want shorter games with worse graphics, made by people that are paid more to work less and I’m not kidding.
You’re responding to a AAA game dev. I work at one of the companies I listed. I’m very well aware of the abuses that occurs at these companies. The developers have 0 say it the timetables for launch. The people I work with are incredibly talented and capable of doing amazing work. The corporate side is where I have concerns, companies will literally grind employees to dust if it means making a game like BG in a corporate time span.
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On today’s episode of “This shouldn’t be legal”…...
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Hope it is successful.
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