Possible Open Beta for v1?

[ronnie4444]

Heyya.

First off, congrats on the Prison Architect launch!

Second of all, I want to make sure that you guys know that I'm not trying to be "that guy". You know, the guy who always says "gimme gimme gimme!".

However, I think it would be really good to release an open beta of v1, perhaps with the campaign disabled (because spoilers = bad), so that us alpha players can play with it and help out with finding nasty car-sized (or, in this case, prison-bus-sized) bugs to squash. I don't see why not - It could be released via the steam betas tab, and for non-steam users, it could be released through sendowl.

//Ron

[FlipJaxx]

V1 is full release, they've been in Alpha for 3 years, no point in doing a Beta release anymore.

[Trixi]

Well,if im thinking at the last few alphas and its bugsthen i get a bit scary with the amount of new Features.

Im thinking of mail satchel. Gang members not going to appeal. Shop didnt work properly. Or the bugfix of logs that made it even worser.

[YMS]

Well, it is an odd decision to skip the beta phase. As Trixi said, all the recent alphas brought game-changing features, and they all brought game-breaking bugs - and now v1.0 is to get even more new features than usual. Plus there are tons of old, but still serious bugs left, too. For example for the Death Row campaign (which has been tested publicly for three years now), I'm sure Mantis still knows like 30 issues, but the four all-new campaigns won't need any playtesting except from IV staff? I doubt that.
And there are other issues, like translations. If the community is to make them (that's how it is so far, though the latest mail announces 26 languages, which could mean official translations), then the game will release with completely untranslated campaigns.

So I don't understand why there isn't a beta phase. Just a couple of monthly releases without any new features immediately before the release should have improved the game a lot before the magazines review the game and buyers expect to obtain a finished game.

However, five days before the heavily promoted release date, us thinking about a beta phase won't change anything any more. And in the end, to us alpha testers it should not matter much whether the next version is called 1.0 or beta 1.

[arwan]

you know they spent the month busting bugs.

many of the bugs are not all that bad even really.

[FlipJaxx]

Well, the quality of this product is still superior to many of the big name games that have been released over the past months (Bug-wise and also playability-wise), and with the promise that they still will bring updates and bugfixes to PA, I can't say I'm too worried about the release.

[bobybojunior]

I don't think that the devs would need to do this in the first place. We already have a pretty big PA community, so any bugs could probably be reported by us

[YMS]

you know they spent the month busting bugs.

many of the bugs are not all that bad even really.

Well, according to Mantis, one dev spent like a week fixing bugs for the upcoming version. Anyway, I'm not so worried about the pre-existing bugs, I'm worried about the ones coming with the new features and campaigns. There's a reason why god invented the beta phase. If you have testers willing to test every new iteration of your game and don't have a publisher pushing you to release, you just don't add a ton of new features in the moment you're releasing a software.
As I said, I don't have to care. I'm going to play the next version no matter how it is called, and I'm really looking forward to the campaign. I'm just wondering.

[Trixi]

yes, im also afraid of the bugs of that lot of new features. espacially the escape mode im afraid off. That whats in alpha 36 implemented from escape mode, is not really minimalistic.

Also they had in every little new things what has been released one or more bugs in it:

mail room - flood mail satchels
gang - gang member wont go to deathrow appeal (made a mod against it ...)
shop - only 1 front was used and users crowded
using showers in cell while showertime - worser then before, as now your prisoners crowd in some cells
fix for exporting to much logs - the opposite happened
gang - instead of gang members are furios when leader punished the members without this gang are furious

[5hifty]

Yeah unless they have been doing some serious work which they aren't showing us - I'm not really sure its ready for this. So many of the main features 'kinda work' instead of just solid 'work'.

[memory020]

We don't have to buy the beta do we? *Hopes not*

[Jailer]

We don't have to buy the beta do we? *Hopes not*

As you're on this forum I assume you have already got the alpha - so also the final product.

Issue with an open beta for a sandbox game is that the campaign is a relatively small part of the game - most will be playing in sandbox mode - so basically you give away the game for free.