Anthem will be available to play later today to anyone with access to the VIP demo. This will be the first time the wider public can go hands-on with it, after the very limited Closed Alpha and the apparently non-existent Beta.
In an interview with GamesBeat, BioWare’s Lead Producer Michael Gamble argued that it won’t matter as issues will be there at launch regardless, though the developers think Anthem is already pretty solid as it is.
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It’s just a strategic way of doing it. Once the game is out, it doesn’t matter if you’ve done a lot of beta testing or not. There are still issues, and we want to find the issues as quickly as possible. All that said, we’ve done a lot of these things. There were a lot of closed, NDA’d events. There’s a build on servers that many people are playing. We haven’t done a public beta, but the demo is essentially–everyone will get to play it for the first time.
We just haven’t done a lot of public betas yet. We’ll find out stuff from the demo as well. We’re using that. It’s just a change of strategy. We are doing testing. We’re just not doing a public one that everyone can join up for.
Plus, we think the game is pretty solid. We’ll look out to see if issues come up over the next month and we’ll fix them as we get to them.
While it is true that any multiplayer game like Anthem is bound to have some issues at launch, it is also doubtless that thorough beta testing will yield a more polished product on day one.
It’s something that used to be the norm back in the early days of online multiplayer gaming, when developers conducted months or even years of Alpha and Beta testing where thousands of gamers helped them find bugs and steer the game in the right direction.
In his hands-on preview from the recent press event, Nathan did note the build was very buggy, though there’s no telling how much progress has been made since on this front. We’ll know for sure once Anthem launches next month.
