In a gamespot interview Daniel Erickson wrote:
[...] there will not be a traditional open beta due to anticipated high player population.
John Riccitiello wrote:
"we're in mid-scale beta, we've got a high scale beta at the end of June." [...] "and only the foolish assume they know the outcome of a beta in terms of whether it's a six week hit or not."
Stephen Reid wrote:
Take a deep breath, everyone...
Game Testing is currently ongoing for Star Wars: The Old Republic. This isn't news - it's been ongoing for quite a while. At different points in the process, we have invited a number of people to test. Some of those people tested for short periods, some for longer periods.
We've recently transitioned into longer-term and larger-scale testing. We have more people testing the game now than ever before. We are allowing them to play for longer than ever before. We're also continuing to invite people to test, so if you haven't signed up for testing yet now is a good time.
We will be allowing more and more people to test The Old Republic before launch, and that means occasionally we'll spike in our invite numbers. It doesn't mean everyone who's signed up for testing is going to be invited in one block.
What we're doing now, essentially, is similar to a Closed Beta for other MMORPGs, but we call it Game Testing. It's invite-only, and it's limited in size. That gives us the most 'bang for our buck' in terms of getting meaningful, actionable feedback. However, we're still ramping up, we're getting more people in... and we're still aiming to launch in 2011.
So beta is ramping up at the end of June, but we are not likely to see a huge open beta like past games, more like a large closed beta.
WoW's long open beta and lack of NDA are, in my opinion, part of its huge release success. The game was more polished in beta than SWG was 3 years later. The lack of NDA really spread the word that the game was great and worth picking up on release day. I Hope TOR gets a good polish, and gets all the bugs worked out before release. I rather a clean, bug free release than a SOE we’ll fix it as you pay release.
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