Last night it was announced by Mark Kern, CEO of Red 5 Studios, that the Firefall beta would begin after this months PAX Prime expo, which ends on Aug 28th. However this will not be the traditional closed, open beta schedule because Mark and Red 5 Studios already consider Firefall “launched”, even if it is only to friends and family currently.
Instead Firefall will be launched in stages through an invite system.
We will not have a traditional beta, open beta, launch process. We no longer feel this makes sense in a modern, online, service oriented business, especially a free2play game. Instead, we have modeled our launch after G-mail’s invite system.
The way this works is that we bring testers and content up in layers. As each layer proves itself out, we give our testers invite slots, which they are free to send to their fellow gamers. We use different criteria to decide when and to whom we release more invite slots. This process never stops, as it didn’t stop for G-mail for a very long time. It’s a great way to grow the game through people’s social networks, which is what we want for our team and clan oriented game.
Mark also responded to the comment on the Escapist where they sated he said that Firefall was only 50% complete.
this is an overly simplistic way of representing progress in a game. Game development has many parallel tracks, and some are harder than others. Our custom 3D engine and server engine, for example, is 90% complete. Our terrain and art and towns for December are also at 80% as is the art for NPCs, monsters, mobs, etc. Our competitive multiplayer maps are about 75% of the way there, and while Co-op missions are the lowest at below 20%, these are also the fastest to produce with our tools.