Warhammer Beta Closing Polish Needed

Posted by Stropp on October 10, 2007

EA Mythic has announced that Warhammer Online will be closing down their beta servers on the 10th of October for two months, opening them up again in early December. There is a post by Mark Jacobs of EA Mythic on the F13 forums that goes into some detail on the background for this decision.

My first thought was that this indicated some problems with the game that required some major rejigging of the games systems. It looks like this isn’t the case.

2) That we are yanking out whole systems: Nope, we are adding new systems (as planned) and balancing the existing systems. Here’s a shocking bit of news, the game isn’t balanced yet. Thanks to the tools we have now, we are able to identify what is messed up and we can now fix it ahead of time, as opposed to the past. Trying to fix these things while we have lots of beta testers running around is not conducive to getting a game out on schedule.

But, there is still quite a lot of work to do by the looks. With the release being scheduled for sometime in Quarter One 2008, Mythic have a reasonable amount of wiggle room to complete the game on schedule. Of course, it is still possible that the Q1 release is too optimistic, depending on the work to be done, and that the game will be pushed out again.

When you look at it, the Warhammer Online beta started much earlier than most other MMOG betas. If you consider that most games have two or three months of beta before the game is released, then the resumption of the beta in December still gives them a generous amount of time to conduct testing before the game is released.

In any case, I would much rather see the developers push back the release date and continue to polish the game than to do a Vanguard and release a buggy mess. If they need to temporarily close the beta to do that, then so be it.

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