DICE has defended Battlefield 3 from criticism among gamers, claiming that the fans have misunderstood what the term “beta” actually means. Some people expected a proper demo, but Producer Patrick Liu says that the beta existed so DICE could test its backend.
“Our primary intentions have been to test the backend,” he said. “As we said at the beginning, we have six times the number of players we had with Bad Company 2, we have record high concurrent users compared to anything we’ve done before. And we know it works. In previous games, like Bad Company and 1943, we’ve had serious problems with the backend, it’s just been overloaded — this time it hasn’t been a problem.
“… there’s been a misunderstanding of the term ‘beta test.’ 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.”
Considering the amount of glorified demos that masquerade as beta tests these days, it’s hardly surprising that gamers don’t understand what the term means. In any case, people have strong opinions about the game, so expect quite a bit of heated debate when the full product launches.
Battlefield 3 interview: the beta, the future… [The Guardian]
