As you might have heard, the start of RotF’s Closed Testing period is being pushed back to February.
It’s not a decision that we’re making lightly—our goal with Closed Testing is to iron out as many game-breaking bugs (particularly server-breaking bugs) as testers can find, and then polish individual pieces of content. But the period between bug-fixing and polishing is finite. Stability determines whether or not we have a playerbase. We need time to do limited playtests internally, before the start of Closed Testing.
Several games (in this genre!) have learned this the hard way. Realm of the Mad God, Trials of Titan, Domain of Magica, Desolate Lands—all of these games have seen fresh ideas and content, but due to stability issues, don’t have the sizeable playerbases you’d expect. Day1 stability matters a lot, and it can affect sentiment around the quality of your game, long-term.
So even if we have all of the playable content “ready” by Q4 2020, we don’t feel comfortable thrusting it into your hands, yet. In particular, there are six areas that we still want to improve before CT:
- Build variety (through class skill tree, stat skill tree, and runes)
- Primal + legendary items and their niches
- Class special moves, abilities
- World bosses + their loot
- General midgame content
- Internal stability testing
By the end of February, we think we can check these things off, and begin Closed Testing.
Until then, however, we know we need to do a better job of communicating where our progress is at. We’ll be doing weekly progress updates on Saturdays, here on aced.gg. It feels like a consolation prize to us (and it probably does to you, too), but we believe that this is the best way to make good on our promise of creating the game that legacy Revenge of the Fallen was meant to be.
aced.gg 