Currently playing a beta of an upcoming game and have no idea if/how much the developers can change things when there’s a month before release. When there is already so much work and detail put into creating a video game over years, how much can really be changed in a month or even a few and how?
In: Technology
Oftentimes a developer cannot implement an idea before beta is even available. You cannot program the animation of a character before you have a character model. You cannot program how an animation with interact with another character before you have that animation programmed. You cannot program even a rudimentary ai before you have all that done. At the beta level, you will often see model variety, storylines added, skill trees, thale actual game balancing tweaks, and generally 50-75% of what a player actually experiences.
The biggest changes are sweeping changes, like the algorithms used by non-player entities. The texture on that chest is just one of a zillion textures. It’s not like changing all the textures is feasible, so changing that one needs to be for a very good reason.
There’s some differences in the types of changes that can be made.
There’s fundamental changes to something like the game engine or entire game mechanics in the game.
Taking an FPS and adding in a brand new vehicle and driving system is probably hard and couldn’t be done easily, it’s a fundamental shift in the game play and the objects and interface and physics etc…
But sometimes you could make a big change to the game play, balance or feel and look of the game that doesn’t actually require a huge change to the underlying mechanics of the game.
You could take the same fully developed team based FPS mode and add in a Battle Royale mode and its probably not that hard. You haven’t changed the characters, the guns, the physics, the damage, the movement or anything, you’ve just created a bigger map with more players and added some shrinking zone mechanic. A good example is Fortnite, originally a co-op building game turned into a Battle Royale and done pretty quickly
in a Strategy game like StarCraft 2, the unit statistics in the Beta were very different from the actual launch for both the original game and both expansions, in many cases a complete redesign, deletion and addition of units.
This vastly affects how the game plays, but it doesn’t change how the game ‘works’
In fact in many games like Warcraft 3, StarCraft and StarCraft 2, because of map design features in the game, you can see how its actually quite possible to take the base design of an RTS and within a few weeks of work of a single coder, turn that game into a Tower Defense, a Version of Mario Party, into DotA, into an RPG, into a Diablo-clone etc…
It depends a lot on the scope of the changes. For something like a PvP Battle Royal game, if everyone is using one particular gun because it does way more damage, just changing the damage value of the gun probably isn’t too difficult. On the other hand “Your UI is a mess, NPC AI is broken, and I keep falling through the world” is more difficult.
It would be a bad idea to do that, but it’s possible. Development teams typically don’t make their production builds immediately available to beta. Beta is usually the current release candidate, so it might not have all the features that developers are working on due to outstanding bugs or insufficient in-house testing. Once they are confident that changes are of sufficient quality, they’ll be pushed to beta and then eventually to release.
Now, it is possible that the development team has a bunch of outstanding changes that haven’t been pushed to beta, but it’s very risky to hold that much back when a release is close. Typically, they want to release to beta so that it can have a larger group playing and testing to find any bugs that they may have missed. If they wait until release, it’s possible they’ll find their release riddled with bugs that they hadn’t found during in-house testing.
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