Shadowrun

Kimona chimed in on the official Shadowrun forums to explain why non-US residents won’t be able to play in the Shadowrun beta. Along the way she stated that there won’t be a second patch to the Shadowrun beta. She also revealed that Shadowrun will have a demo localized for each player. Sorry non-US testers. I guess you’ll have to wait for the demo. But that isn’t too far way is it?

Some folks have been asking if the beta is open to non-US users. I can now give you the short answer: no. Here’s the long answer. Please scan it before pulling out the flamethrower.

Why didn’t we just say so? We had planned to let international players into the beta when we opened the application process. We ended up not being able to do it at launch, but hoped to do it with a patch. Then we weren’t able to do it with a patch, but held off on announcing it till we were certain we couldn’t do it with a second patch. Well, we know now that we won’t be doing a second patch, so we can give you a definite no.

Why can’t we just send out invite codes to people in other countries? Because it won’t work. The beta has to be “signed” for each territory in which we offer it, and it has to be propped up on each territory’s Live Marketplace. This means legal review for each territory, some extra dev work, and extra time in Certification. We weren’t able to do this work. As some of you have seen, if you try to download the beta using a non-US Live Gold membership, you just get an error code.

So if I have a US Live Gold membership, I can get in, no matter where I live? No. We choose folks at random. We assume if you don’t live in the US, you don’t have a US Live Gold membership, and the code won’t work for you. So when we generate a new batch of invitees, we filter out non-US applicants. If you’re one of the few non-US folks we’ve mistakenly sent an invite to, my apologies; hopefully this has explained why your code doesn’t work. And again apologies, but we do not have time to do anything but completely random selection. Fall’s our community manager AND our chief gameplay analysis tester. Respect the Fall.

Why didn’t we put the extra work in to get this done? Time. As most of you know, we had a mad rush to get our beta out because we got knocked into the Stone Age for a week by a windstorm in December, and we were pretty late with our patch because of unexpected voice issues that appeared in Cert (three times). Our Dev and Test teams have been working seven day weeks for about six months now, with mostly 12-16 hour days. Much as we wanted to include everyone, this was just not time we could afford. The beta is for finding and addressing bugs, and the US-only beta has been exceptionally useful in achieving these goals.

Aren’t we interested in testing our networking across large geographic distances? Yes and no. The US-only test has pretty much achieved our network testing goals. While it would have been interesting to see more international connections, it’s not particularly useful in the beta. That’s because the beta’s relatively small. Small # of players + time differences = decent number of games up at 5pm in Seattle, but hardly anybody to play with at 5pm in London. When the game’s released, matchmaking will favor good connectivity, so there shouldn’t be a whole lot of transcontinental matches happening at random.

So does this mean you don’t care about non-US players? If that were true, there wouldn’t be an small army of people in Europe and Asia now rushing to make umpteen different Shadowrun localizations. Mitch, Todd, Stephen and I wouldn’t have taken a week out of our schedules to do the Shadowrun European tour earlier this month. And we wouldn’t be doing localized versions of the demo.

Oh. Did I just say we were doing localized versions of the demo?

I guess I did.

We’re on the final lap, folks. Stay tuned. Come the demo, everyone gets a shot at grenading Fall and making me flee screaming. And you don’t have to do it in English.

-Kimona

Lead Program Manager, FASA Studio