Skyforge has entered its final beta test, which means that open beta and soft launch is just around the corner. If you’ve been watching the game with interest since its initial announcement, there’s a sense of completeness at its impending launch, and no small measure of satisfaction… but at the same time, we’re not out of the woods yet. There’s still another testing phase to go through, after all, and that means more players putting the game through its paces.
We took the opportunity to ask a few questions of the development team to see how the beta process was going and what elements are still being adjusted. If you’d like to know more about the testing as it’s being run from behind the scenes, read on.
Massively Overpowered: How many more closed beta phases does the team anticipate the game will go through before open beta later this summer?
Skyforge Team: In addition to further optimizations and new features & content, CBT4 features a large number of updates to the game and its systems that were implemented based on feedback we received from the community during the previous closed beta tests. You can find a full list of these updates on the official site. As for the Open Beta, we will finalize its date after CBT4 is finished, so be sure to follow us on your favorite social media site to ensure you don’t miss any announcements regarding the Open Beta.
With the game already available in Russia, are balance concerns from that client being addressed in the testing client?
Having Skyforge out in Russia gives us a great opportunity to get additional information from both players & game telemetry and allows us to see how game systems behave in larger scale tests. It’s important to us that we collect feedback and data from our players globally and use all the data in our decisions on what changes to the game we feel are necessary.
As we said before, we have made significant changes to the game that western players will be able to get their hands on in CBT4 and we are anxious to read their feedback and see if any further changes are necessary.
What sort of concurrency are the beta tests seeing thus far?
We purposely kept the concurrency low during our beta tests thus far, which allowed us to really test our core systems such as game progression, the rate at which players consume game content, Matchmaking, and other systems. We’re now at a point where we’re ready to open the floodgates and bring in a ton more players!
Shortly before CBT4 is scheduled to being, we will be inviting a minimum of 30,000 more players (in addition to those who have already been invited to previous tests) to participate in the test! On top of that, we’ll be giving all players who purchased a Founder Pack beta keys that they can give away to their family and friends.
What can players look forward to playing in the next closed beta?
There are a lot of updates coming in CBT4! We’ve published a full list of patch notes on the official site, here are some highlights of the updates you can expect:
- [CBT4 Only] Instant access to the Knight and Alchemist advanced classes
- ~30% Increase to FPS for all systems compared to previous builds.
- Fixed crashes affecting users with AMD chipsets when they attempted to start the game.
- Lifted prestige restriction for participating in Adventures with group members of varying prestige levels
- Optimized matchmaking for normal PvP battles.
- Added 2 new equipment types and 6 new slots.
- 4 Class Amulet slots and 2 Trophy slots
- More information on Amulets & Trophies will be revealed soon
- Pantheons are now available for Immortals to create! You can find more about Pantheons in our Pantheon reveal article.
- Character creation has been enhanced and fine-tuned for personalizing your character.
- Chat made significantly more convenient to use.
- New English voice over dialogue has been added
What’s the most valuable insight the team has received during testing, and how has it been addressed?
We’ve received A LOT of valuable feedback from our players around the world. We take all the feedback we receive very seriously regardless if someone on our forums saying it take too long to unlock a character class’s ultimate ability to someone on our Facebook page saying they are loving a specific boss battle.
Perhaps the most valuable insight we gained was in seeing how difficult it was to play with your friends when prestige differences kept you from adventuring together. As developers we often test our content by cheating our characters progression up or down as needed to get into the right range for certain tests, and they did not notice the frustration the first system created for players. Sharing adventures and content with your friends is one of the best parts of any multiplayer game. We’ve made a lot of changes to remove unnecessary restrictions and to make playing in groups and finding groups to play with easier.
Thanks for your time! Readers, stay tuned to later today as we’re giving away a number of keys for CBT4!
