DICE explains Battlefield 3 beta decisions
Gamers "misunderstanding term beta test".
DICE has reflected on the ongoing Battlefield 3 beta, saying there has been a "misunderstanding" of the term "beta test".
Some gamers have reacted badly to the beta test, which runs the Rush game mode on the Operation Metro map, and gamers have reported a number of bugs and gameplay issues.
According to producer Patrick Liu, the beta is about testing the shooter's backend to ensure a smooth launch, and promised bugs will be ironed out.
"Our primary intentions have been to test the backend," Liu told The Guardian. "As we said at the beginning, we have six times the number of players we had with Bad Company 2, we have record high concurrent users compared to anything we've done before. And we know it works. In previous games, like Bad Company and 1943, we've had serious problems with the backend, it's just been overloaded - this time it hasn't been a problem."
He continued: "We just wanted to know it wouldn't crash and burn at launch. It was horrible with Battlefield 1943 - it sold ten times the numbers we thought it would, and it was down for three or four days which is really bad. We don't want to go through that again."
Some fans have complained that DICE limited the beta to a single level - one without vehicles.
Responding to this, Liu said "there's been a misunderstanding of the term 'beta test'".
"We ran the alpha tests with a rush map and we wanted to have some sort of reference so we could compare results - so we needed to have more-or-less the same map.
"But we do understand the concerns that we didn't show a conquest map, but we have demoed Caspian Border, and we did run a conquest map as a limited PC-only test."