Are some people already playing this?

Vomster

Based on what I read from the following post, it leads me to believe some people are alpa/beta testing the enhanced edition, is this the case?

From the post: "Dozens of volunteers from all over the world helped us improve game play, squash bugs, and generally fine-tune the game."

http://forum.baldursgate.com/discussion/4796/ship-date-delay

elminster

Maybe you should read Tanthalas's comments on page 18 of that very same thread ...

Permidion_Stark

I'm playing it. But only in my mind. And it's still great.

Silverstar

Permidion_Stark said:

I'm playing it. But only in my mind. And it's still great.

Good thing for you I'm not a mindflayer. I want to play BG:EE too

bigdogchris

Back in the day, beta testers actually "tested" the games, unlike most modern beta's where users just download the game before everyone else and play it, then uninstall it. BG:EE Beta is being handled in a very old fashion way where the people who have it are actually testing specific conditions and aspects of the game, they are not playing it as if they were to enjoy it.

If you want to know what it's like to beta test BG:EE take a look in the Bugs and Fixed topics. You'll see a lot of conversation about what people are testing and how they fixed the issues.

mlnevese

I wonder if the beta testers will ever be able to enjoy playing the game after so many months testing specific conditions and bugs... I probably wouldn't want to see the game for quite some time after that.

mixnmatch

I just finished the Nashkel mines.. Now I'm off to find a chicken.. Oh the life of a beta tester.
Yours truly
Troll

mlnevese

More like...

I just finished Nashkell mines 20 times in a row using different spell/race/class combination, no bugs showed up, all dialogs seem to be working, no undefined strings left, let me check my next assignment.

hmmm Mellicamp quest have to test all the success and failure conditions, let me make a list not to forget anything.... Have to try with skull and without, hmmm must fail, must succeed, how many dialog options? Have to test them...

lansounet

mlnevese said:

More like...

(...)

It's not -that- bad.

Talvrae

bigdogchris said:

Back in the day, beta testers actually "tested" the games, unlike most modern beta's where users just download the game before everyone else and play it, then uninstall it. .

That's mostelly an MMO thing that, and they sort off test the servers by playing the game

mlnevese

lansounet said:

mlnevese said:

More like...

(...)

It's not -that- bad.

But close?

mch202

Allow me to quote Tanthalas:

Tanthalas said:

- I haven't "played" the beta for over two months now. All those bugfixes that make it into the open forum have to be tested so we're sure that they're actually fixed, and that's where I spend most of my time.
- I wouldn't be surprised if 50% of the time I "played" the beta was me in Candlekeep CLUAConsole'ing stuff to test if the game mechanics are working properly.
- The stuff that I can't test in Candlekeep is tested by me teleporting my character to relevant places, not by actually playing the game.
- Testing quests? The way I test them is by creating a save before the quest and then constantly reloading it to test if every single condition is working.
- A lot of my beta-testing is also spent looking up item/area/creature codes online.
- At one point we had to do a run-through of the character creation process to make sure that everything was working correctly. That was 7 hours going through the menus testing all the conditions.
- The new content? My experience of the new content has been limited to creating 5 Dorn's to add to my party when I need to kill something manually (I found out the hard way that CTRL+Y'ing stuff breaks quests). Thankfully other beta-testers have been looking into the new content.

And when I find a problem? Time to load up vanilla BG1 or BG2 to see if the problem comes from the original game or if its something that popped up in BGEE.

I was in the Diablo 3 beta, and yeah, I played that beta a lot. BGEE? Not really.

Don't get me wrong, its a privilege to be able to help, but don't get the idea that all I do is play BGEE all day. I'm really don't consider this playing it, I'm testing it.

It doesn't sounds like fun...

Roller12

mlnevese said:

I wonder if the beta testers will ever be able to enjoy playing the game after so many months testing specific conditions and bugs... I probably wouldn't want to see the game for quite some time after that.

ha, probably never. No mystery left, id hate to be a beta tester.

Dee

I think that there's a little bit of disconnect in terms. What we've been doing, and what Tanthalas described, is more like Quality Assurance and regression testing. I honestly don't consider us Beta Testers; I consider us QA (Quality Assurance) Technicians.

When you beta test software, it's usually more laid-back, "report bugs if you find any", but otherwise just enjoy the game and let the developers know what your impressions are. I think that where the beta team changed here was that a lot of the beta testers are also modders, which means that they understand a lot of the code behind the game and know how to fix some of the smaller issues, and that those of us who aren't modders were brought into the process early enough that we were able to come up with a kind of system for operation.

But yeah, it's kind of like a second job you do for free. There's no one tracking your hours, but the work needs to get done one way or another.

ajwz

I have enjoyed doing it, but that's mainly because I enjoy that sort of thing. It's certainly not a beta test in the blizzard sense however.