Videogame 'beta versions' are anything but, says veteran RPG dev—real games are 'sh***y, sh***y, sh***y, sh***y, slightly less sh***y, and it skyrockets' at the end

Henry of Skalitz looking puzzled. — (Image credit: Warhorse Studios)

I've never been one to get in on videogame betas—save the Diablo 4 one which I did purely to get the horse cosmetic (I then never played far enough to get a horse)—but they're a pretty popular hype-generation mechanism these days. If you've got any sort of live-service thing gearing up for release, why not have a beta? Get some players in, stress-test the servers, and whet everyone's appetite for the full thing.

A sound tactic, and a total nominative falsehood. Per my recent interview with Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 lead designer and one of Warhorse's two new creative directors, Prokop Jirsa, calling these little pre-release demos 'betas' just ain't right.

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"The things that get to the public—and that the public sometimes hates [because of] how horribly they run and how unfinished they are—that's still much more polished than what actual internal betas or alphas look like."

Folks, we've been hornswoggled. All this time, our betas have in fact been gammas, perhaps even deltas or epsilons. Jirsa said that, in his experience, a true image of videogame development goes more like this: "if you judge it, quality-wise, from a player's perspective, it doesn't grow linearly. It's like, shitty, shitty, shitty, shitty, slightly less shitty, and it skyrockets when you're finishing and polishing to the quality you want to have."

That's partially because, man, making videogames takes a really long time. Jirsa says one of his earliest surprises was "How long some things take… the fact of how slow [it can be] and how many people have to work on something for it to be really nice and polished. It takes months! Sometimes years!... 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."

That's a fact that, perhaps, gets a little obscured when the videogame "betas" we're used to playing are so relatively well-polished.

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One of Josh's first memories is of playing Quake 2 on the family computer when he was much too young to be doing that, and he's been irreparably game-brained ever since. His writing has been featured in Vice, Fanbyte, and the Financial Times. He'll play pretty much anything, and has written far too much on everything from visual novels to Assassin's Creed. His most profound loves are for CRPGs, immersive sims, and any game whose ambition outstrips its budget. He thinks you're all far too mean about Deus Ex: Invisible War.