Updated: High scale beta in the end of June
Update no.2: I wanted to make one final update to this news so everything is as clarified as it can be. Here is the full transcript of the SWTOR related part of John Riccitiello’s speech (thanks to swtor.com user Gumstumdar):
From: 20:09
“We’re very confident in the title umm but we did give a range of potential ship dates. It depends really on the beta that we’re now in. We’re in mid-scale beta now, we’ve got a high scale beta at the end of June umm and umm only the foolish assume they know the outcome of beta in terms of uh umm you know whether it’s a six week hit or not. Uhm we intend to make sure that this is a very successful launch and while we’re very very confident umm the reason for range in guidance is to bracket around the possibilities is what we’ve done.”
Stop: 20:40
Stephen Reid, Senior Community Manager at Bioware, had a few things to say about this (you can read his full post on the subject bellow). Game Testing is on-going and they recently started a more long-term, longer-lasting version of it. It is highly likely that the six week comment was in relation to what happens when the game comes out and not how long the beta will last before the game is shipped. In a later post Stephen also said that “European Testing has not fully started yet.”. What all this basically means is that yes, beta is getting bigger and it is changing its shape, which is great news because things seem to be moving towards release. The fact that this is now know publicly changes nothing really, but it is good to hear.
During some investor conference (it is called 31st Annual Growth Stock Conference and it was streamed at this URL) that is happening as I write this (8:30 PDT), John Riccitiello, CEO of Electronic Arts just announced that SWTOR High Scale Beta will start by the end of June. It was also said that ship date will depend on the beta. If high scale beta goes well there might be NO MORE DELAY before release. This puts possible SWTOR release much closer than most of the more optimistic predictions. I would like to thank the ladies at Corellian Run Radio for spotting this first and the official forum speculation thread on release date that broke the news. We are still waiting for official confirmation or denial of this news. We hope to get it soon and we’ll keep you posted on the developments.
I have one thing to say to their marketing department if this turns out to be true. You should have said this at E3!
Now I am off to dance naked in the grass from pure joy of knowing things are about to get real, real fast!
Update: Stephen Reid, our beloved Community Manager, just made a post on the forums regarding this news. Here’s the complete post. I am not commenting at all on this, better let everyone form their own opinions.
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.
14 Responses to “Updated: High scale beta in the end of June”
Good news indeed! 🙂
AWESOME!!!
WOOOOOOOOOOOO
xD
I just wanted to add 1 more thing:
I think its awesome that you give credits to the ladies at Corellian Run Radio
really nice ;D
woooot!
@Tim aye we definitely always try to give credit where credit is due, sometimes we fail like the rest but our hearts are always in the position of wanting to represent the news correctly.
the ladies at CRR are a great resource to this community and worthy of our props. 🙂
I am excited to finally see it start to happen, after what seems like an eternity of development time.
It is exciting to know things are picking up. Grass is too itchy though to be dancing naked in. Plus the mosquitoes and other bugs, yikes.
would be great
[…] looks like they may increase the number of beta testers at the end of this month. Updated: High scale beta in the end of June | Swtor Life […]
@swtorcrafter
thats a good thing and i appreciate it a lot ;D
(thx for the updates as well)
———————————————–
Lets all keep our fingers crossed! maybe we will get one too xD
It would be great to know the dates, that the invites are sent on!
If this turns out to be true I agree E3 was the place to show it. E3 is the sage that this would have gone down a lot better.
Yet I take everything revealed at EA’s investor conferences with a pinch of salt. Remember that spring release date ?
Also large-scale could mean 1-2K extra beta places or 10-20K. Very little to go on atm but at long last we have a shimmer of hope.
In reply to Mr Warlock. The EA Investor’s Conference did say Q2 of 2011, which is anywhere from July to September and not April to June, since EA’s cycle begins in April.
My guess is that they are going to have around 10 servers worth of players doing around 6 weeks of testing where the first couple of weeks will be on “test servers” and then the following weeks will be on replicated servers from the initial test batch so that they can proliferate servers to both the US and European server farms. Since Ricciatello said that this “testing period” will tell them if they are on schedule or not, this tells me that they are in the stages of stress-testing their servers and that the “delays” would simply be an infrastructure deal as it takes time for them to get servers to Europe that can then be proliferated in time for a release date. 6 weeks from July 1st would be right around PAX Seattle. I expect that this will be the time of any kind of release date announcement, barring server/technical problems. They’ve already had 2+ years of game-testing and demo-testing (conferences/press events).
With BF3 being released in late October, I imagine that they are looking for a September release date. Late November would be too late in the cycle. And luckily for EA/Bioware, September falls in the Q2 range.
This would be fantastic if it pans out!
Great news.
Are there any testers from Europe, at this point?
@golffuul Those dates are what we are working on now. Yet these were not the first EA released.
@Derimos Yes the EU have players testing though it seems nowhere as large as the US has. With no numbers in beta or how many more will be getting the e-mails, I’m not sure how happy I should be with this so-called news.
Everything BioWare releases in the way of information only brings more questions, they give us bones and we try to put a little flesh on them.
This beta news is no different, it serves to ramp hype with saying very little about how, when and how many.