The almighty Beta

 

It's such an enfranchised aspect of the video game release timeline to drop a Beta that gets players in early for some free feedback that I can't actually ascertain what the term 'beta' even means anymore. I mean sure, once upon a time it referred to a late-project state of the game where polish and tuning are the core-most requirements to cross that finish-line, but often times it's subbed in to mean games that are literally a spit-shine away from being ready to games that feel like they're one bad slip away from a popped artery. But still the 'Beta' is an almost expected part of certain kinds of games marketing cycle, to a point where some of the time these 'Betas' clearly aren't even for the benefit of the game and serve simply as marketing tools. And in fact, I know just one such time where such marketing blew the game to the moon and back. Wizard. Moon. I'm talking about Destiny.

Destiny was a title that was on the radar of every Halo fan in existence of course, but I wouldn't discover Halo for several more years thus the effect was largely lost on my oblivious ass. The game looked pretty, sure, but there was no wider understanding of what a 'Live Service' was or would become. A shooter/MMO seemed like a strange concept that only appealed to small niches and without getting the thing in your hands there wasn't even any telling if this would be a good feeling shooter at all- remember we were in the age of the every-game-shooter, so everyone and their mothers was cobbling together pretenders to the Call of Duty throne and missing all the points along the way. Destiny was, however, much better than all those pretenders, and all it had to prove that fact was get in the hands of potential buyers.

I honestly do not believe that the Destiny Beta was truly established in order to test the game before launch. Maybe they were kind of iffy about how their servers would hold up but that game was straight done before by the time everyone got it dropped upon them for free. And I was absolutely smitten with the game. It's visuals, it's controls, it's character, it's enemy design (343 really could learn something about character design from Destiny! Even now!) The game sparkled with potential and everyone who was anyone could pick up the game and enjoy that without spending a single dime. It was a AAA gleam that swept the world and, I imagine, played no small part in the industry realising just how easier it is to get online games off the ground by making them free-to-play. Fortnite probably sealed that into fact, but I think Destiny's over-night fame might have had something to say there too!

But nowadays Beta's can even serve as the launching point for some games when developers simply can't get their game to the finish line without support or simply want players hand in guiding that. This movement has given birth to a whole separate breed of game releases- the 'early access' world where you'll view games without complete narratives, fully realised gameplay routines and sometimes even design directions. (This movement owes more to Minecraft, in my opinion.) It is often a mire for missed shots and half-ideas; few of which make it to the limelight whilst most stumble and die along the path. And recent events certainly have highlighted just how contentious this route can be.

Life by You may not have been on my personal radar for games that were going to change my view of the world in any substantive way, but I do think the Sim genre would have been in for a bit of a shakeup had it made it to the beta it was building towards. That's right, the game wasn't even releasing in the full sense, it was just going to soft-launch into a beta that was supposed to build up and up into a grand title that would have shaken the deeply monetised core of The Sims. Or at least that was the dream before Paradox decided to pull the plug early. Could that Beta alone have proven such a drain on resources/good will that they were justified pulling it so early? The team don't seem to think so, neither do the fans. But I guess it's one of those mysteries we'll carry to the grave, isn't it?

And what about 'The Division: Heartland'? Set to be another spin-off of 'The Division' brand, Heartland was going to move the action from the squad-based shooter paradigm into survivalist rough-living where you have to hunt for clean water and manage your resources. Personally I find such a style of game to be largely overdone, but considering the recent survival revival I would certainly be in the minority for that assertion. Heartland actually made a couple of betas, coming out to the audience and gauging that response. And then it was killed off just a few weeks back. Totally cancelled through earnings call.  Was the beta truly that bad? What does this mean for what a Beta even is anymore?

Presumably when a game hits the Beta stage it has already gone through all the preliminary trials and tribulations to prove it deserves in some abstract way to exist in the world. Systems have been built, functionality has been confirmed, the team are headed towards some rough sense of a finish line- pulling the plug at this point is a genuine flushing of time and resources- and yet it's still happening more often lately. Have the parameters changed, then? Maybe the modern day realisation of the sheer damage that a bad launch can wrought on one's reputation, and thus future profitability, has levied unrealistic expectations upon the performance of Betas- or maybe the term has lost any and all meaning altogether.

To be fair, I think most everyone is better off when games are dropped at the finish line-  not a few milestones beforehand. Of course there are exceptions- Larian seem to really think that Baldur's Gate 3's time in early access was totally invaluable to help shaping the game into as fine a point as it ended up striking withy. But how many other titles have used that designation as a shield? Some games, that might be called Fallout 76, even launched their games without such a label but relied on the 'culture' established by beta's and early access games to insist there's nothing wrong with unfinished deliveries. Maybe the status quo shift is for the best in that case...

Death by Paradox

 

If there's one thing about the whole life cycle of Life By You taught me- it's that after all these decades under the degradation of the EA hammer- people really want a competitor to the Sims brand. I guess it's something you never really think about if you've fallen off from caring about that franchise ever since EA decided to turn it into a simulator game for how many inconsequential pieces of nothing they tacked onto the product with a hefty pricetag. The bloat has gotten so ridiculous it's now a mental hurdle for new people coming to the game simply looking at the insane price to have at everything on offer and deciding- "you know what? I don't want that smoke!" The average consumer, and even the entrenched life simulation enthusiast, seems to have finally gotten around to the truth that if literally anyone else could scour some ground in this market- maybe things would be just that little bit more equitable on the consumer's side. Just a tiny bit.

The reason I know that so well is because when Life By You was first announced it looked like total crap and no one can convince me otherwise. Seriously, just look at it! Life By You seemed every bit the under-realised starter Unity project back when it's in those pre-Alpha stages of trying to figure out the bare basic idea of what it is you're even doing. Everything, from the character models to the UI looked placeholder- and it's only by merit of the publishers involved that I didn't immediately take it for another overly ambitious nowhere project helmed by a team of first time coders. Paradox's name alone was the only thing that led this game announcement any ounce of legitimacy in my wary eyes. But when you're just hungry for a competitor- you look past the face and see the heart.

Life By You promised full world simulation, instead of the aggressively regressive 'single plot' simulation that The Sims 4 has confusingly peddled for so very long now. Itself an absolutely humongous leap back from The Sims 3's simulation efforts which allowed people to wonder the whole neighbourhood if they felt like it. Of course, LBY promised to take things one step further by having all the town be playable on a whim, so that if one families' plight began to bore you could switch to see what the bickering couple down the road's life is like. That kind of seamless connectivity would obviously be impossible in the direction that the Sims went, making a genuine opportunity for more of the ultimate 'life sim' fantasy to be fulfilled. 

But then the game did also throb with an air of the overambitious too. There were those typical overreaches of promise that boasted more of insane propositions rather than legitimate possibilities. NPCs taking off their clothes and then leaving them on the ground to be interacted as objects? That is an insane level of dynamic deformation values that would need to be applied on every errant piece of clothing at all times- for a seemingly inconsequential feature. How about cutting flowers in a garden and then putting those flowers in a vast? Innocent enough, until you learn that was supposed to be tracked the entire way from the ground to the vase. This is 'watching an acorn turn into a tree' from the Original Fable all over again!

Still- I guess I speak ill of the dead with all this rambling because wouldn't you know it- despite the hype and the anticipation- Life By You was unceremoniously killed, axed, cancelled- by Paradox Interactive themselves. The game had been scheduled to go onto early access just a few weeks beforehand, it missed that deadline and then wiped it's slate totally clean but a stone's throw later. (Damn, I didn't Paradox was run by the Japanese Train board!) Now this pretty much came right out of nowhere as not enough eyes were on this game for media feelers to be out there. No trickle of troubled development scenarios managed to make it's way to the headlines and this all spiralled out of control before anyone outside really knew what was happening.

Now we have retrospectives from the now defunct studio, yes they killed the studio as well, telling us just some small measure of the puzzle- and the conclusions we can draw are... puzzling. William Delventhal posted his testimony to Linkedin on the matter, claiming that the game was actually coming together well and the milestones they had set for themselves seemed to have been approved by Paradox until suddenly they weren't anymore. The Early Access was cancelled for them, and with the same public announcement that the rest of us heard- the team lost their jobs. (Which is never going to be anything but the worst way to close a studio. Do you have so little respect for your own staff that you can't even break the news to them personally before airing it out for all the world to see and natter on? It's just a gross, yet common, practice.)

So everything was going well? In a situation like this it seems literally no one holds the answers aside from the suits themselves and all we can do is speculate amongst ourselves about a situation that seems to make no earthly sense. They had the tools to challenge the Sims, even to some small degree, and if that ultimately hadn't worked out for them then at least the attempt would have been made! Apparently the team seems to think what they had was above the minimum threshold to early launch, but someone higher was apparently playing on a totally different board. Maybe someone was looking at the roadmap to totally finish the game and just thought the expense wouldn't be worth the cost, or that the reputational hit of failure would be worse than that of giving up now. (To which most conventional logic would insist is demonstrably untrue.)

Whatever the case it leaves us with the situation where EA's ant farm life-sim has won again without lifting a finger. Top god without making any concession, without fighting for their audience and without learning any valuable lessons about value propositions. I won't pretend to have been a diehard supporter of Life By You- but I like the potential of life sims and was really excited for the future back in the days of Sims 3. Now the genre has stagnated, and apparently the barrier to break in is so overwhelming that a publisher seemingly designed for the sole purpose of developing titles for this kind of crowd- long form deep focus style games, can't take the risk. Can't wait for Sims 5 where EA starts charging us for slots to maintain simultaneous households! (I'm only half joking- I bet they've at least considered that.)