VG247

DICE’s Patrick Liu has come back at those criticising the open beta of Battlefield 3, saying it’s “misunderstanding” the meaning of the concept of a beta test.

EA opened up the Battlefield 3 beta last week to PS3, 360 and PC, but has been criticised from some corners because of it coming with some bugs.

“Yeah, I think there’s been a misunderstanding of the term ‘beta test’,” Liu told The Guardian.

“We ran the alpha tests with a rush map and we wanted to have some sort of reference so we could compare results – so we needed to have more-or-less the same map. But we do understand the concerns that we didn’t show a conquest map, but we have demoed Caspian Border, and we did run a conquest map as a limited PC-only test.”

The beta, according to the game’s producer, is more aimed at having the online backend ready and able for the end of the month, having seen heavy launches with the releases of Battlefield 1943 in 2009 and Bad Company 2 last year.

“Yeah, we just wanted to know it wouldn’t crash and burn at launch,” he said.

“It was horrible with Battlefield 1943 – it sold ten times the numbers we thought it would, and it was down for three or four days which is really bad. We don’t want to go through that again.”

As for the future of spin-off series Bad Company, Liu played coy.

“Well, we haven’t killed Bad Company! But we can only make so many games. Be patient – there might be something else coming up…”

http://www.vg247.com/2011/10/07/dice-gamers-misunderstanding-the-term-beta-test/

They're right. But... in this case they need to change because the customer isn't going to. Console gamers simply don't expect what DICE offered for a Beta, and they either need to adjust to their audience or change their approach.

Gamers aren't going to adjust to DICE - they'll simply form a bad impression - so DICE have to make the effort to adjust instead.

It's one month before release and the game is broken and ugly, yes it might be a beta but it shouldn't be this crap.

Lets see what the final game is like, I'm started to suspect EA is full of shit, their PR behaviour recently has been so childish.

This

Since it's so close to release and the fact that it's been touted as pretty bad, that's not a good thing. If it was 6 months before release, then I would agree with their remarks, since they could iron out the problems.

Console gamers don't understand what a beta is.

I understand what a beta is, and I am 95% sure all of the beta's ugliness is going to be smoothed out in the final version.

However, this beta shouldn't have been public, more of an invite only thing to test the network and thats it. Average Joe is going to assume that this is a demo and how the final game is going to run, and probably aren't going to buy it after this.

I have been in betas before and I understand what they are. This is a very high profile release and it comes out in less than a month, which means it's most likely has gone gold already. I understand they can work on the problems and release a patch day one, but I've heard the beta was a big mess, which means they're going to have to work extra hard to get it up to par for a day one patch.

I don't know why anyone would complain. This is the best Beta ever, it saved me 60 bucks.

It didn't feel much like a beta but felt more like a warning.