Alpha

"Soon" is the best answer.
It drove us planetside fans nuts for well over a year. :lol:

Yeah well considering the state that game is in ... it was a bit TO soon ...

Teleport Assassin was fun and the most utterly useless and unintuitive to use skill ever.

because battlefield and such have made people to believe that alpha and beta are completely playable and almost complete games, which need only a bit of tweaking. this was apparent in the community around bf3 beta. people who knew that the game was practically retail quality and were bashing it, got rammed by fanboys who just kept telling that is "just a beta"

Well, Minecraft wasn't too bad in Alpha, i dunno if it could be called an Alpha specifically, but you could have some enjoyment from it even in its earliest stages.

You can't exactly say Minecraft is comparable to a game like PA. It is inherently simpler, and the core gameplay mechanic of randomly generated world that you can run around in was made even before alpha and was perfectly playable as such. Indeed, Alpha and Beta and then updates since release have just been excuses for adding new mechanics and features and fixing bugs that came with said new mechanics and features.

I'm guessing PA will be different in that a simple playable game with all expected mechanics and features will be released for alpha, and through alpha and beta they will mainly be doing bugfixes and adding content as opposed to mechanics and features.

I could be completely wrong though. What makes me think what I think is that Minecraft is very much a game built with mechanics and features added on top of previous mechanics and features, whereas PA feels as though it would instead be different mechanics and features that come together and give a (very) incomplete game if one is removed. And of course, any one of the features or mechanics is useless without all the others.

Again, I have no idea how game development works, so pardon my assumptions.

Hey all.

I just Pre-ordered the game at 90 bucks and the very first question crossed my mind was: Alpha Start ?

After read all your posts i feel much better - NOT

So 8 months to go for release (hopefully), mostly 4-6 weeks before release, the beta will start, means alpha comes out between tomorrow and first of august :twisted:

This will be a hot summer waiting ...

After all i guess you guys sell shirts ? :lol:

Ever heard of Minecraft?

The Minecraft Alpha was more of a beta when compared to the development cycles of other games. I would be more inclined to consider this to be the alpha stage of Minecraft, or potentially this.

I was an alpha tester -and still am a beta tester- for World of Warplanes... Alpha was worlds better than the beta.

The standard original IBM definition was that all software mafor fatures were implemented during alpha while minor additions and bug fixes were beta.

So, very certainly a game alpha is playable!

"During alpha" is not the same as "At the start of alpha", when all the features are implemented it goes from alpha to beta (since all that is left then is the mentioned "minor additions and bug fixes").

So a alpha dosent have to be "playable". They could leave the last core gameplay implement to be the last addition to the alpha = it goes to beta status before being playable, but its unlikely that they would be so cruel.

Alpha is definitely playable. There would be no point in releasing it if you can't play it

Is it Playable AND Mod-able? XD

The exact nature of the answer to this, Neutrino would have to answer, but.. from experience, if an alpha isn't representative of all the major architecture decisions you have made up til that point, you have a fairly large problem. Take from that answer what you will.