The Beta is not fun...

I disagree entirely.
If anything I find the game is still too easy to be played as anything other than a creative environment with combat, ala Minecraft.

So, now what? Are you right or am I?

 

Actually, the point of early access is giving early access... to unfinished games. The idea of an early access IS that you will be playing an unfinished game where the devs are basically asking you "Hey, we don't have millions dollars to hire and pay for hundred of QA testers because all our funds are going to making the game in the first place. Can you -help- us in exchange for accessing the game early?"

And actually, this IS what a beta test is supposed to be. Except most people have skewed perspective from the practices of AAA publishers who have grown to use so-called "public" beta test as nothing more than marketing ploy when the game has more or less already gone gold, with discs already being printed and distributed, just to iron out the last few bugs before the day one patch that is eventually made and distributed at the game's official release.

A -true- beta test, as it was traditionally done before this modern twist on the term is what you are seeing exactly right now.

Cut the devs some effing slack. Tiy himself spent 19 hours working on the patch yesterday. They're human beings, not your personal slaves to rant at because the beta test they -had- warned players would be an incomplete game in the earliest phase of what people used to traditionally call a beta. isn't the complete experience you were thinking was coming.

 

Um no your wrong. a BETA traditionally means FEATURE COMPLETE. Dont believe me ? look it up. This is a paid alpha. Also it doesnt matter how you spin it, once you release your game on steam and start taking money for it people will judge it, whether its done or not. They should of never released this on steam.

Also where did I say I wanted them to work harder or anything. I said they made a mistake releasing this on steam. That was it. Stop putting words in my mouth.

 

Even then, here are the words on pretty much EVERY Steam early access games.

My apologies for misunderstanding. I did look up Beta and one of the traditional implication of the term is admitedly feature complete(or almost). But the problem is that at the end of the day the fact remains the term has taken multiple meanings when it comes to stage of development. Just look back when the team WAS mentionning considering not having a public beta test originally, despite players who kept pushing them whilst claiming they would have no problems with a public incomplete beta whilst citing "how minecraft had success with a public beta that lacked in features at first".**

But what I meant(well, less what I meant in this thread but this came up in another) is at the end of the day they don't have a lot of manpower. There's only so much testing they can do by themselves, or even with a limited group of beta tester(and without talking about reviewing applications for the amount of tester such a game would have needed in a closed beta test) so early access, at least on paper, was the best mean for a studio that has only so much manpower(compared to a studio working for the likes of, and benifitting from the infrastructure of, Activision Blizzard) was an interesting proposition to get the number of testers they would have required.

The problem is most people who are coming in didn't read the warnings about the three stage of the beta or gave them only the slightest heeding.

Should or should they not have run that public beta/alpha(it doesn't matter much anymore)? I don't know. Sometimes I wish they had kept to their original idea of keeping a beta purely as a closed beta.
At the same time I'm not the dev, do not know the realities and limitations they had to deal with prior to openning this public beta so at the same time I'll aknowledge that the other question could be asked: "But what other options did they truly have?"




**and which is where my annoyance with that line of thought, because it forget that Minecraft also worked because it did it first back in an era when people didn't have expectations about this sort of game. And that a lot of the people who made the minecraft beta comparison often had their own expectations based on a beta the game had already been running for a while with large amount of content and polish added during it's lifespan rather than the state the game was when it -originally- entered beta.


Edit: And also, it's "You're wrong". Or "You are wrong". Not "your wrong".

 

The game is far from complete. So your assessment is exceedingly premature. You have no idea how much is coming or how it will affect the gameplay. It may be too easy to you NOW. That is not indicative of the final product in any way. Not by a long shot.

It's one thing for people to give specific feedback about certain features and the like. It's another to pan it as if it's a complete product, ready for such scathing and sweeping generalizations as to it's overall quality and playability.

and BTW, the one guy is correct technically. Beta has largely meant feature complete, and about final bug testing and polish. However, the word has been bastardized and co-opted so many times in recent years, it is just semantics at this point.

But by tradition, old school terminology, this is more fairly characterized as Alpha level.

 

Testing the game for bugs isn't always the best way, I think the best way is play it normally, with a friend preferably, and you'll start noticing the bugs

 

Hej everybody,

thanks for the lively discussion - I just checked back on my thread and was happy it exploded.

To clarify a little: Of course testing the beta can be fun. I enjoy it immensely, as I wrote in the post scriptum. I didn't mean it should be tedious work. My main point is that it's skewed to look at this stage of the game in regard to player enjoyment. While that can happen, this stage is about feedback.

Of course this includes feedback regarding gameplay, and it's helpful for the devs to know what's not fun.
But the important bit in the last sentence is "helpful for the devs to know". The fun itself is not the important bit.

Apart from that, it's pretty clear there is a large group here who expect this to be feature complete. I don't know if this is because that is one definition of beta or because money was involved, but the point is moot: Starbound right now is not feature-complete, and that was communicated from the start.
I believe these expectations are wrong to have, but I also believe people differ (diversity rules), so that's that.

 

Bugs are one thing, but at such an early stage it's also important for testers to let the devs know if something isn't fun. If you aren't enjoying something in beta, it isn't suddenly going to get better at release. Not to say there won't be problems, but at least parts of beta should be fun, if it's not fun then the devs need to know so things can be changed now instead of once more features are built on top of ones that aren't working well. Is it as fun as the final should be? no, but if nothing in the game is fun then either it's not complete enough to be called a beta or it has some serious design flaws. (not saying this applies to starbound atm)

 

The problem is the way people make these comments. If a particular aspect is not as fun as it should be, then suggestions should be made on how it could be improved in ways that the devs can easily implement it.

There's also perspective. Many people overeacted on a change, demanding it be changed back to a more primitive form, before any basic balancing could actually happen to it.
Personally for example, I like the change to the bird AIs that made them more aggressive. Before that they just felt like glorified backdrop. But at the same time I am able to aknowledge they are hard to fight right now.

Like I am able to aknowledge, with perspective, that balancing is already taking place with the devs apparently(as stated by others) adding changes to melee weapons that will make them able to be directed(so that spears, for example, can be "aimed" in different directions like Terraria's rather than be limited to striking purely in front of you all the time).

And then there are the people who say the game is "not fun" but without even being specific, making broad scathing generalizations that are not only sapping for one's mood, but are not even helpful because they cannot efficiently(and I stress, efficiently) corner the aspect which truly deserves to be looked into and changed. In those case, all one can see if an angry "fan" which speak in near-insulting terms about the devs without being able to even offer the devs a chance to truly single out what could be fixed in a meaningful way.

 

I'll grant that if you are following Starbound's website enough to look at that warning, you will have had a more realistic impression of how the 'beta' would go.

Unfortunately, that is not the impression you get if you go and look at Starbound's steam page, which even in it's 'early access' warning gives the impression of a feature complete game that just has a few bugs.

By far the easiest way to communicate this would have been by calling it an alpha, rather than 'beta stage 1'.

 

This is a great thread. Props to the OP for putting my thoughts into words.

In this scenario we are the crazy two-year old kids that break everything, so the parent learns to make it unbreakable. If the parent catered to the kid's every whim, things would never get any better. The kid would just get spoiled.

That analogy started off making a lot more sense than it ended up with.

 

HOLY SHIT! A POST CREATED BY SOMEBODY THAT CAN READ AND IS INTELLIGENT :O
I think I need to call the internet police cause surely this isn't allowed?

 

Uhh, no. This is wrong, and I am sure that this misconception has been the cause of a lot of grief on this forum.

Alpha = Engine INCOMPLETE, Feature INCOMPLETE, not enough features to be playable or even considerd a game. Often in alpha you don't even have a working UI, and you are starting games from a developer console or tool!

Beta = Engine COMPLETE, feature INCOMPLETE, the game has the MINIMUM amount of features to be playable. Bug fixing and implementation of "nice to have" features that round out the game and bring the gameplay more in line with the original vision remains.

Release Candidate = Feature COMPLETE, ALL features and game mechanics DONE, bug fixing and polish plus some balance work remains.

Release = A finished and polished game.

Source: I am a software engineer.

Please quote this or repeat it if you can, more people need to understand this. I think the "open betas" sometimes done by larger developers have warped people's understanding of what the term "beta" means.

 

A beta is definitely not a complete game, I don't understand where people are getting this misconception from.

 

TL;DR betas are not feature complete by any stretch of the imagination. TBH I felt the game was pretty polished considering it was the start of beta. I mean everything looked gorgeous, it had music and a fair amount of things to find. Often the beginning of beta is more like: 'Woot! The engine finally renders stuff and handles object interaction properly! Time to start implementing features!'

 

I was agreeing with you, basically. =p

I just don't understand where people are getting the idea that a beta is feature complete and just needs polish. A beta has never been that.

 

Something else I think is being revealed here is the fact that people take the wrong attitude to games in Steam's Early Access section. My understanding of anything released that way is that they're still reasonably far from complete, and I wouldn't expect them to be anything else. But that's also just me having the whole "Beta is Beta" mantra drilled into me from watching people cover early access stuff. Also, I think in general when it comes to videogame beta tests, we're more used to things like big MMOs and the like, which tend to have (presumably) much larger internal testing teams, which means by the time they get to beta tests that we as consumers could participate in, they're very complete. A smaller team like Chucklefish though is an entirely different matter. Not to mention a lot of 'beta tests' for games like those really are just glorified demos, where everything is 99% done.

Also, well, I guess we have @dholedays giving a way more accurate definition of alpha/beta tests, so by that, I'd say Starbound is right where it should be for a reasonably early beta test!

 

No, it is an inaccurate definition. Beta versions are feature complete. It's the definition of beta. If you arn't using it that way, you are using it wrong.

More to the point, it's the publicly understood definition of beta. Public understanding of beta testing mostly goes back to MMO 'stress test' betas which were feature complete. It does not matter how a term is used within a company, actually. We're treading on 'the customer is always right' territory here.

Or to put it another way... People went in expecting something and didn't get it. Is there some other reason for this expectations gap?

 

What bug me with this thinking is that... wording semantic set aside regarding if it should be an alpha or a beta.... the devs made it -very- clear many times this "early access" would be a very features-bare incomplete version.

People came in, rant because their expectations were not meant.... but never bothered to read what the devs had to say about this before the whole thing was even publically made available,

 

It's actually super fun. I know it's a beta, I knew it was a beta when I bought it, before I bought it I was here reading what to expect. With all that in mind, I allow myself to enjoy the game to the fullest with all it has to offer me at this moment in time