Duke Debate

3D Realms and Gearbox Software are having a legal debate over who owns the rights to Duke Nukem. My question, why? This is happening because 3D Realms is trying to make a new Duke Nukem game and gearbox is claiming the rights to the IP were sold to them before they made the most recent game in the series. So I get why the fight is happening, but really, the series is dead. The most recent game was released approximately 15 years after it started development and was really not great, not that anything with that length of a development cycle can live up to expectations. The character is dated, the idea is very old, and most of us who enjoyed the old games are kind of turned off of the series due to the disappointment named Forever. Let it die and be at peace.

Elder Scrolls Online (Beta)

Ok, so the Elder Scrolls Online's beta has been made open to anyone to play, and the non-disclosure agreement has been lifted. So I can finally talk about the game which has stolen my life from me for the past couple months every few weekends. However, I am not going to talk about the game, not yet anyways. The reason I'm not talking about it is because it is still in beta, I am instead going to talk about what beta means, because it seems too many people misunderstand the term.

Over the past month or so I have seen quite a lot of talk about the ESO beta, even when the non-disclosure agreement was still in effect, and the vast majority of it has been complaining about how terrible and glitchy the game is. This bothers me because it is clear to me that the people complaining don't fully understand what a beta for a game is and what it's for. So if you or someone you know have some form of misunderstandings regarding the term, I suggest you listen close because I have some learning for you to soak up.

Purpose.
The purpose of a beta can be for a few different things. Popular reasons a game developer will put a beta form of their game out for the masses to poke at is to stress test the servers, discover glitches and bugs currently overlooked, find graphical errors, dialogue problems, easy hacks, balancing issues, etc. So when you enter into a beta it should be expected that you will discover some of the fore mentioned problems, and it is your job as a beta tester or participant to report any issues you come across to the devs through the channels they designate. Whether that is through specific email addresses, links to post game surveys, or forums on their sites, and if there is a non-disclosure agreement in effect it is required by law that you only speak of the game in those designated areas. The reason for this is that the game devs don't want an incorrect view of the game getting out, and painting a bad picture of the content before release, one which may effect game sales. They expect that if you agree to play a beta that you understand that what you are seeing is not the full game and that you should not be talking about it as it is. Which brings me to my next point.

Beta.
What a beta is, is an unfinished build of the game. When you play one you are playing the unfinished, unpolished version of the full release. There are going to be bugs, graphical errors, weird animations, unsynced voices, etc. I don't see how anyone can expect any more. Typically games go through an alpha build first, which is becoming a popular state to sell games at on steam these days, then when it's almost ready for release it goes into beta. This is when the devs play test it as much as possible to work out all the problems they can find, which is one reason why they reach out to gamers to help, the more eyes you have looking for issues, the more issues you can find, the more issues that are found the less the issues encountered on day one. Also when you get games which have a large focus on multiplayer, such as ESO and Battlefield, the game devs need as many players on the servers to figure out how many servers they will need to handle the amount of players, which would be why a server might fail often, you might not be able to connect to a game because of it, it's just how it is, this happens now so it won't happen later.

So what I'm trying to say is that before you participate in a beta, please know what you're getting into, know that you will experience many issues and problems. You may fall through the floor into the endless pit of a fade of colour, but that is so that it won't happen when you're playing the full release. Also please think before you make a decision about a game after playing it's beta, you are playing a very unfinished and upolished version of the game, yea it's not great, but it isn't supposed to be great. Most importantly remember why you're there, you're there to help make this game as good as it can be, you are there to discover annoying problems so that they can be fixed by the time the game is released, you are there to tell the devs about the issues you encountered to make it easier for them to fix them, and if there is a non-disclosure agreement in effect please take that into consideration and not go all over the internet blabbing about how the combat doesn't work of the UI is clunky, or that at one point all the NPCs disappeared and the sky turned to a strange shade of purple for thirty minutes before all your character's limbs turned to jelly. It doesn't help anyone. You aren't helping the devs find and fix the problems and you are possibly turning people away from getting a game they would have otherwise enjoyed. Think about this the next time you feel like signing up for a beta.