If you have ever played a game beta and thought it already felt almost finished, you are not alone. According to Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 lead designer Prokop Jirsa, most public “betas” today are not really betas at all. During a recent interview, Jirsa said the gaming industry has completely changed the meaning of the term.
He called modern beta versions a “total nominative falsehood,” explaining that the builds players get access to before launch are usually already polished and prepared for marketing, public previews, and server testing. The actual development versions used inside studios are very different. Jirsa said one of the biggest shocks he had when entering the industry was realizing “how bad a game looks and runs up until very close to release.”
According to him, internal builds stay rough for most of development, far beyond what players would normally expect. He described the development as a very messy process, “It’s like, sh*tty, sh*tty, sh*tty, sh*tty, slightly less sh*tty, and it skyrockets when you’re finishing and polishing to the quality you want to have.”
His point there is that game development is not a smooth upward climb where quality slowly improves every month. Instead, progress can look messy for years before everything finally comes together near the end, because modern games require huge amounts of work over several years for them to become “really nice and polished.”
He also admitted that, looking back at the original Kingdom Come: Deliverance, he is still surprised that the team managed to release it at all because of the small team size and tight deadlines behind the project. He stated, “I still don’t know how we managed to actually release [Kingdom Come: Deliverance 1], because we were so few people in such a short timeframe.”
In other news, Warhorse Studios has confirmed that the studio is working on its next project, which it described as a “huge immersive RPG.”
