With Astellia’s first western closed beta coming up on us next week – on Tuesday, in fact – Barunson has posted up a fresh dev blog outlining exactly what players can expect.
“The CBT Phase will focus on testing the servers performance, PvE Progression, and collecting user data to support our future content plans,” the devs explain. “Beyond testing these points and collecting gameplay information, we are excited to show you our first wave of combat improvements that include active dodging as well as the improved animations, our new in-game wiki, performance improvements and more.” Just know that not everything is entirely finished; for example, the studio says it’s running testers through the Korean tutorial in order to figure out best how to fix it to suit western players. It also sounds as if there will be two phases for the beta: one where everyone’s a noob, and one where the game is tricking us out.
“For the first 5 days of CBT-1 you will be able to play the game in its default state, this will allow us to measure progression speed, determine problematic areas, and overall give us a baseline for how the various game systems are being used. Beyond this general information, we’re also going to be paying close attention to how normal and legendary dungeons are performing. Our concern here is gear progression, we want to make sure that the progression from normal to legendary dungeons is both challenging and rewarding. To support this on Saturday we will enable a Special NPC that will level your character to level 50 and provide a set of suitable equipment. Please note to use the Level-Up NPC your character will need to be level ten or higher.”
Client downloads begin tomorrow afternoon, and we’re told there won’t be any NDA on the beta. To guarantee entry, you’d need to grab the $99.99 preorder package, but we’ve got a hunch there might be other ways to wiggle your way into the test.
Get caught up on some of our Astellia coverage since it was announced for the west:
