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We don't mean to laugh at your suffering, Final Fantasy XIV fans, but we have to admit that we find this whole situation pretty amusing. See, Square's slammed the brakes on its FFXIV open beta test, which was scheduled to begin on August 31.
“FINAL FANTASY XIV Open Beta Test, which is scheduled to begin at 19:00 (PDT) on Aug. 31, 2010, will be postponed due to a confirmation of critical bugs. New schedule will be released at a later date,” the developer wrote on FFXIV's official site.
So then, why are we conjuring up our hardest Gigglaga at your expense? Well, here's the thing: aren't beta tests all about sniffing out and squashing the daylights out of “critical bugs”? If we were to yank the phony costume mustache off this “beta test” guy, we're pretty sure we'd find our old buddy “glorified free promotional demo” underneath -- as we have with countless other recent "open betas." Can we just start calling these things by their real names already?
Comments are closed on this article
mesiah
September 02, 2010 at 12:37am
Having played Squares previous MMO as well as many others, I do have a lot of respect for the level of quality they put into their game. You can call Final Fantasy XI boring, too hard, or a grind fest. But one thing you can not call it is bug ridden. In the 6 years I played that game (I have since moved on) it was always extremely solid. After playing FFXI and then going to games like WoW and WAR and STO I simply could not believe the type of glitches that people just dealt with in those games. Things like not being able to attack a mob that is raping you because the local client disagreed with the server on where your character was standing. If that happened in Squares MMO they would shut the game down for emergency maintenance. Add to that all of these MMOs weekly maintenance days where the servers are taken down for god knows what and never come back up on time. Barring any real complications, Final Fantasy XI servers go down once every 3 months for a version update which includes a significant amount of content being added to the game. Other than that the servers rarely go down, and if they do it is very briefly for an emergency patch.
Based on my previous experience I have the utmost respect for Square's quality standards. They may not have mastered the art of MMOs, And they may have insane spaghetti code that occasionally causes game changes to break things here and there, but it is fixed extremely fast.
When Square states that there is a critical issue with the game that they need to fix before the open beta begins, I believe them. Yes, beta testing is about squashing bugs, but open betas are really just a stress test for the equipment. Usually the major bugs are worked out before open beta begins and very few changes are made between open beta and release. I do think too many people view beta tests as a free preview, and a lot of companies treat them as such (I'm looking at you cryptic) but we should still value the importance and utility that comes with open beta tests. Without them, more than a few MMOs would have melted to the ground from extreme server traffic on launch day... not that some still don't.
aCi11i3s
September 01, 2010 at 8:48am
I was sitting at my PC last night waiting for 19:00 PDT to arrive. As it approached, I anxiously awaited my chance to start a new toon and leave Azeroth for a while. Oh well...guess I have to wait till Sept 26th. Not sure if this is a ploy as MaxPC suggests or such a bad bug that it may delay release. Hope MaxPC is right.
