Thursday 25 March 2010

This is not the Game Tester Login page that you are looking for...

Sean Dahlberg posted on the forum in regards to the "hidden launch website", confirming that it is indeed a game tester login page:
You have indeed found the login portal for Game Testing. That said, this is not a new page and we are not ready to make any additional announcements about our Game Testing Program. When we are ready, we will make sure The Old Republic Community is the first to know!

If you haven’t signed up yet to be a tester or wish to learn more, access our Game Testing Portal.
And a little later he posted some more answers:
A couple of quick answers:
  • Yes, it is indeed called the Game Testing Program and not anything else. As when we originally announced sign-ups, Game testing for Star Wars: The Old Republic will be rolled out in several phases over an extended period of time. These test phases will begin with smaller, tightly focused test groups, and later tests will expand.
  • We thought about waiting until it hit 2,000 posts but figured it was more important to get the information to you sooner than wait.
  • Good insight, Skyewauker.
  • In regards to swtor.bioware.com, just know that we'll always keep the TOR Community updated here
  • I would have posted the announcement sooner but I spent too much time working on this (not really).
The site has probably been around for a while, maybe as they were working on setting up the portal in advance, maybe for running demos at conferences and for publishers and such, or maybe for internal testing. Either way it'll likely be what's going to be used by beta testers and such as well. But with the launch at least a year away it'll probably take a while before they open it up to the first players.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

I know Warcraft beta tested for over 9 months, and so I would imagine that testing is probably right around the corner.

Ayane said...

You might be right. But I guess it depends a bit on what you understand with "testing". I'm fairly certain that they're already testing the game. Then comes alpha testing, friends-and-family beta, small closed beta which slowly expands to include more people until they've got the full game in closed beta testing with a lot of players. Then finally open beta for stress testing and to advertise the game, allowing loads of people in (where "open" is relative, as considering the popularity of this game I'm very certain that it'll be a kind of "open" where you still need to obtain one of the limited number of keys somehow).

With I meant to say was that the testing phase that people have a good chance of getting into, allowing them to play the game themselves, is likely still a good while away. I'm not expecting that until closer to the end of the year, with maybe an announcement about beta sometime around E3.

Of course, I've been quite off on a number of my estimates before. ;)