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QUESTION: Are there any other terms you can think of (e.g. "soft lock") that are commonly misused or misunderstood by players?

ANSWER: The terms “Alpha” and “Beta” are probably the most commonly misused/misunderstood terms by players, mostly because of video game marketing departments. These terms have essentially become marketing terms that aren’t anywhere close to internal Alpha and Beta milestone requirements, setting weirdly unrealistic expectations in the public. During the development process, Alpha and Beta are extremely important milestones in the project.

It’s important for you to understand that the purpose of Alpha and Beta is to maximize game stability in the leadup to launch. As we approach shipping the game, the stability of the game is becoming more and more important. Any new thing that we add - a quest, a model, an animation, a texture, a feature, etc. - introduces additional instability because of how many moving parts are involved in processing each of these things. This means that Alpha and Beta become more and more restrictive as time passes when it comes to the work we do. At the end of beta, the only thing we’re allowed to fix are cert blockers.

When a project goes “Alpha”, it means that the production phase is finished. The project is dubbed “content-complete” and “feature-complete”, meaning that no more content or features are allowed to be added to the game. When a game goes to Alpha, we set our sights on fixing bugs and polishing the game experience. The more bugs we have to fix, the less we get to polish. The term “content-complete” also means that artists and designers are barred from adding or adjusting content/assets anymore - they are only allowed to make changes if the producers approve the change, which usually requires a specific bug that must be deemed important enough to make the change.

When a project goes “Beta”, the restrictions are tightened even further. The project is dubbed “code-complete”, meaning no new code is allowed in and all changes must be approved by production. The only issues that are allowed to be fixed in beta are cert-blocking bugs. Polish really isn’t allowed in beta - production values stability more than a good player experience at this point. Cosmetic or even gameplay bugs that would have been required to be fixed during production might not be if they appear during beta for fear of upsetting the apple cart. By Beta, most artists and designers are waiting in the wings in case they need to fix something critical or have been shuffled off to work on DLC or other projects. It’s mostly only engineers remaining, and even they are only allowed to touch high priority bugs.

This means that any “alpha game footage” where you see placeholder visuals really isn’t - we usually aren’t allowed to make changes to assets in Alpha. That’s usually production game footage, while we’re still working on that stuff. “Public beta tests” where the public gets to play the game and then we make changes to elements like spells, talent trees, gameplay systems, UI, etc. are actually nowhere near “beta” at all. These are not certification-blocking issues, they’re often game balance or player experience issues. Changes to those don’t happen in alpha or beta - we’re supposed to be content and code locked at that point. It’s usually in late production, when we’ve begun tightening the restrictions for stability and need more bodies to make sure that stuff isn’t broken.

Ah, so journalist and marketing has lead us to wrongly believe how game developing works again.