Gears of War 4 developer has slammed industry’s definition of the term “beta.” According to Rod Fergusson, the industry misuses the term and thinks it is a polished demo of the game, however, that isn’t the case at all.
He said that the situation is so bad that they considered calling their multiplayer beta an alpha. Betas aren’t a representation of the final product unless their are issues with the game’s core design, criticizing fixable issues isn’t really fair because getting feedback and improving the game is the point of a beta.
The industry has taken the word beta and twisted it to mean ‘pre-release demo’.The community thinks they should be a highly polished demo. We are really focused on saying we’re pre-alpha right now.
I even joked that we should call our beta an alpha just so people understand where we are and that we are actually looking for feedback and we’re actually testing systems
Fergus admitted that Gears of War games in the past haven’t had perfect technical releases. They are using Gears of War 4 beta to resolve as much issues as they can before its final release.
We stumbled out of the gate with Gears 2 because it was our first time doing party-based match-making,” Ferguson explained. “We were testing that with 1,000 people internally with Microsoft and all of a sudden it was a million people and everything falls down
Gears of War 4 will release on October 1 for Xbox One but we will get to see more of it at E3.
Source: MCV
