{"id":1574901,"date":"2026-05-08T14:54:32","date_gmt":"2026-05-08T14:54:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/Qt57g4g7VWp5fE2ALb3jNf"},"modified":"2026-05-08T14:54:32","modified_gmt":"2026-05-08T14:54:32","slug":"videogame-beta-versions-are-anything-but-says-veteran-rpg-dev-real-games-are-shy-shy-shy-shy-slightly-less-shy-and-it-skyrockets-at-the-end","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/arcader.org\/news\/videogame-beta-versions-are-anything-but-says-veteran-rpg-dev-real-games-are-shy-shy-shy-shy-slightly-less-shy-and-it-skyrockets-at-the-end\/","title":{"rendered":"Videogame ‘beta versions’ are anything but, says veteran RPG dev\u2014real games are ‘sh***y, sh***y, sh***y, sh***y, slightly less sh***y, and it skyrockets’ at the end"},"content":{"rendered":"
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I’ve never been one to get in on videogame betas\u2014save the Diablo 4<\/a> one which I did purely to get the horse cosmetic (I then never played far enough to get a horse)\u2014but they’re a pretty popular hype-generation mechanism these days. If you’ve got any sort of live-service thing gearing up for release, why not have a beta Get some players in, stress-test the servers, and whet everyone’s appetite for the full thing.<\/p>\n

A sound tactic, and a total nominative falsehood<\/em>. Per my recent interview with Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2<\/a> lead designer and one of Warhorse’s two new creative directors, Prokop Jirsa<\/a>, calling these little pre-release demos ‘betas’ just ain’t right.<\/p>\n

Jirsa was talking about the surprises of his early years in game dev when he mentioned that “Another surprising thing is how bad a game looks and runs up until very close to release. People are used to some ‘beta versions,’ but those are not beta versions.<\/em><\/p>\n

“The things that get to the public\u2014and that the public sometimes hates [because of] how horribly they run and how unfinished they are\u2014that’s still much<\/em> more polished than what actual internal betas or alphas look like.”<\/p>\n

Folks, we’ve been hornswoggled. All this time, our betas have in fact been gammas, perhaps even deltas or epsilons. Jirsa said that, in his experience, a true image of videogame development goes more like this: “if you judge it, quality-wise, from a player’s perspective, it doesn’t grow linearly. It’s like, shitty, shitty, shitty, shitty, slightly less shitty, and it skyrockets when you’re finishing and polishing to the quality you want to have.”<\/p>\n

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