It has been confirmed that 343 will not be releasing a beta for Halo 4 and I think that is a horrible move, why? Take Call of Duty: Black Ops for example, if there was a beta for that then the sales would be VERY low. So far, since the title update 343 has really started to disappoint me. To me, the only good things they have done is the original title update and bringing back the title update. What do you guys think? Article: http://xbox360.ign.com/articles/122/1220366p1.html
1. Why would that be specific for COD and not Halo? If you're directing this at the quality of Call of Duty games, I'm afraid that's a tad narrow-minded. Heaps of people would still buy a buggy, repetitive and boring COD because guess what? They do it annually anyway. There's no doubt that they do certain things right though, they wouldn't have a ridiculous player population if they were complete crap. 2. People just want betas so they get to play a game early. Most open beta testers don't provide feedback at all. Those that do are the kind of people in closed beta testing. I'm pretty sure open betas are there to simply get reactions, test servers and other little kinks that need to be tested on a broader level. My brother worked on an indie title last year (a top-down shooter). They released a beta for testing purposes because they don't have the power to get dedicated testers. Out of all the responses only like two people knew what they were talking about. Other people were providing very helpful feedback like, "You should add a third person view to make it easier". Or "The grafics need a bit moar awsome". Yes that is how the guy spelt it........ I too find the lack of a beta disappointing, because I wanted to play it early. I respect their decision even though I personally believe larger scale testing to see overall community reaction is crucial. P.S Put this in the Halo 4 thread in Gaming discussion instead....
The reason we had the Halo Reach Beta was so that Bungie could test the netcode of the game. As Halo 4 is built off the same engine as Reach, 343i knows how it will perform online. It would be a waste of time and resources for 343i to commit to a beta when it will not provide any useful information for them. Essentially, the reason why so many people want a beta is so they can demo the game months ahead of time. If you're lucky, you'll get a demo version of H4 prior to release. There's a huge difference in goals between a beta and a demo.
That doesn't explain why Reach had a beta as it was using the same engine as Halo 3. I call bullshit.
Halo 4 is based off the Halo 1 engine. They have rewritten a lot of stuff along the way but every new Halo game has used the engine of the previous iteration.
Um.... no. Period. No seriously, its not. Microsoft and 343i have both come out and stated plenty of times already that H4 is based off the Reach engine. Where the hell did you get the H1 engine bollocks?
Halo 4 is based of Reach's engine, Reach's engine is based of 3's engine, 3's engine is based on 2's engine and 2's engine is based of 1's engine. That's what I'm saying.
lol... I watched this bungie presentation about their games engines and how they expanded them. They all essentially use the same engine... just what they can do with the engines once re-written is a whole lot more because they simplified the code into "tags". like to get an object property tag or something, they'd end up writing it like Call Object.Property, instead of something as tedious as object.exists=yes object.density=60 object.display=true item.property=true item.property.show=true etc... or so it was summed up (obviously, I just wrote that crap out, but it's tedious stuff like that that they simplified into one liners). Because the code used was smaller, the game itself could be bigger if the code was referenced by all these one liners. They basically "borrowed" code from the previous game engine, wrote a function for it, stored it, then everytime they needed to reference that block of code, they'd just call the function and simplify everything. Anyway... Reach's beta test was basically a test on performance and whether or not the existing servers could handle the load.