14 DAY TRIAL // One of the biggest things happening in these past two weeks in the gaming industry and its community, particularly with first-person shooter fans, is the Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 beta stage. The trial already took place on the PS4 last week and concludes at the end of the weekend on PC and Xbox One platforms.
The beta has been pretty popular with fans, but quite a few different problems have weighed it down and kept it from reaching maximum popularity.
The PS4 version of the multiplayer test phase went off without any major hitches, but the PC and Xbox One versions were different things altogether.
On the PC platform, the game is plagued by different performance problems. From stuttering and micro-freezes, even on very powerful computer configurations, to other technical problems, users who got into the beta weren't that impressed with Black Ops 3.
Treyarch did try to get as many people into the test phase on Steam, allowing access not only to those who pre-purchased the game and their friends but also to those who owned previous Call of Duty titles like Advanced Warfare, Ghosts, or Black Ops 2. This ensured that a lot of fans would get in on the multiplayer action, but the unpolished beta has resulted in limited interest in the game.
On the Xbox One, code redemption issues kept many fans from accessing the Black Ops 3 beta on Microsoft's console. While a workaround was soon found by the community, and then a fix was rolled out onto Xbox Live, some people still got upset, understandably so.
Betas need to be polished in order to avoid causing a backlash
No matter how many times a developer emphasizes the beta nature of a technical test, fans will jump into it expecting a polished experience.
Treyarch's dedicated PC team has already explained how the optimization process for Black Ops 3 is ongoing and how some of those improvements weren't ready to be incorporated into the beta. Until the game launches, the studio wants to ensure that the shooter runs as well as possible on a multitude of PCs. However, fans will remember the problematic performance of the beta and might not be interested in pre-purchasing the game.
This is the reality of the gaming industry nowadays, so a developer thinking about releasing a beta or a game as an Early Access experience needs to work extra hard to ensure that the title behaves as well as possible for the largest number of players.
This is easier said than done, however, as some independent developers don't even have time to properly market their games in order to draw in an audience, let alone ensure that it works well in all sorts of situations.
What's more, big-name publishers, such as Warner Bros., have proven that they're not even interested in a well-performing final version of a game, as we've seen with Batman: Arkham Knight. As such, I don't even want to imagine if an Arkham Knight beta released before the actual game.
One good example of a pretty polished beta was Halo 5: Guardians, which got a multiplayer test phase at the beginning of the year. Even if its final release was 10 months away, the title's trial worked quite well and managed to make plenty of people interested in the actual game. Since then, 343 Industries has also shown the many ways it's improving upon the multiplayer mode with feedback from beta participants, so things are going really well.
In the end, it's great that we see more and more beta stages, but if developers and publishers don't want to lose face in front of fans, they need to polish the test phases a bit more thoroughly.