Pop quiz, hotshot: How do you install a beta version of a game on Steam? That's right, you right-click the game you want to em-beta-fy, hit properties, go down to betas, potentially enter some kind of complex password that unlocks the branch you want, then select the correct build from a drop-down box.
A nightmarish process of almost dizzying complexity. Kind of. Okay, not really. It's actually totally fine, but Valve is making it even easier nonetheless. A post on the Steamworks blog last Friday alerted devs to the fact that they could now get their players into and out of beta versions of their games with ease. Smoother, faster, downright expeditiously.
"Previously, accessing these alternative build branches has been fairly obscure, done by players through the Steam 'settings' panel for a game," says Valve. " However, new Steamworks APIs now allow developers to offer players this choice from within the game itself."
In essence, devs can now stick a button into their game somewhere. Once clicked, Steam will reboot your game and relaunch it in beta-mode, tuned to whichever build players selected from the menu. Which is, I have to admit, a better system than sticking a call for testers in a blog post I'll never read and crossing your fingers.
Plus, if you've ever gotten deep into an early access game, you'll know the sheer pain that can come from a sudden update making mincemeat of your saves, forcing you to restart from scratch or—if you're me—wander off forever, never to return to the game again. As Valve puts it, "trouble can arise when players with dozens or hundreds of hours of playtime find that their save file no longer works with the latest version of the game."
To put a stop to that, a new API will let devs "add some logic to your game to check if there is an existing save file, and for which version of the game that save file is for. If the game the user is running is newer than that version, you could prompt the user." Essentially, if the game realises you're running a save that's going to get broken by a patch, the devs can use the new tools to flash up a warning and let you opt to stay on the older, compatible version of the game, which I expect to pop up as an addition to Crusader Kings 3 any day now.
None of this will take effect automatically, mind you. Devs will have to go in and plug the new APIs into their games, but it looks like that should be pretty easy (I say with the confidence of a man whose most ambitious coding project was an HTML website in middle school). Brace for better betas, brothers.
