So what are the future plans now we have Premium Beta?

[nats]

Ok so the Premium Beta is out and its not much differnet to the final Alpha phase other than lots more people being involved. So once this has been tested and is running smoothly is that it? Is the standard Beta going to be released then?

Because AFAIK Beta pahse is usually released when the game is relatively 'feature complete' and only needs testing, optimising and fixing. But this game surely seems to be well from feature complete [unless Frontier have a heck of a lot of features in house that havent been put into the game yet].

We are talking newspapers, contracts, bounty hunting, more ships, more stations, large missions, pirating, policing and law, fitting out to be completed, gas giant refuelling, cargo snatching, turrets, most of the equipment, etc etc. All the stuff that is required to 'fill out the gameplay' in fact from the limited combat and trading that is presently provided.

So is all of this stuff going to be introduced before the standard Beta is released on within that final Beta phase I wonder?

 

[Sacman]

No one knows that at the moment.
We only can speculate what features will be available in future beta builds.
AFAIK there is also no official FD statement what are the next 'feature' steps and when they plan to release them.

 

[ZeeWolf]

If only Frontier had offered some kind of final Beta stage that might match everyone's expectations of what a standard Beta could be?

Standard...

Oh wait.

 

[Bobbydylan]

Dont let the name fool you, this is very much an alpha

 

[KING5TON]

Can you access this thread?
http://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=19639

It lists all the things we're aware of that hopefully will be in the full game that may or may not appear in Beta.

 

[Tinman]

So is all of this stuff going to be introduced before the standard Beta is released on within that final Beta phase I wonder?

Try during Beta instead. That's the way Michael has phrased his answers lately when people have been asking about upcoming features/fixes. And that probably refers to both stages (Premium/Standard).

My guess is that the move to Standard Beta will be decided more by when they want to scale up the number of users for stresstesting rather than by which features are in the game at that stage (even if these two are tightly connected). This was the main reason for going from Alpha 4 to Premium Beta after all. This doesn't mean there won't be new features added until then though, of course there will be. Next week is such a time I guess due to their appearance on E3.

Finally, and this isn't really focused at you, just a general thought. I really think people should stop saying things like "Beta is usually feature complete" since no matter what that term originally meant (which was open for interpretation in the first place) I think it's pretty clear that these definitions are out the window if you look at how games/software is being developed in todays climate.

 

[trekman]

Ok so the Premium Beta is out and its not much differnet to the final Alpha phase other than lots more people being involved. So once this has been tested and is running smoothly is that it? Is the standard Beta going to be released then?

Because AFAIK Beta pahse is usually released when the game is relatively 'feature complete' and only needs testing, optimising and fixing. But this game surely seems to be well from feature complete [unless Frontier have a heck of a lot of features in house that havent been put into the game yet].

We are talking newspapers, contracts, bounty hunting, more ships, more stations, large missions, pirating, policing and law, fitting out to be completed, gas giant refuelling, cargo snatching, turrets, most of the equipment, etc etc. All the stuff that is required to 'fill out the gameplay' in fact from the limited combat and trading that is presently provided.

So is all of this stuff going to be introduced before the standard Beta is released on within that final Beta phase I wonder?

Its pretty safe to say the game as it currently stands is definitely not feature complete. We don't know how many stages there will be in the premium beta before they even get to standard beta. Then there will be the gamma stage and we again don't know how many stages there will be to that before we get to final relase of the fully completed game.

As for content there is still quite a bit to come. For example in the current beta we are limited to a choice of 5 ships but in the final game we will have a choice of 25 to pick from. In the beta there is only 5 systems that we can travel to and this will expand considerably to an area of 200 light years iirc although there will still be areas of the galaxy locked for future expansion but i think 200 light years will keep most of us busy for quite a while. Then there will be things like nebula, comets and other astronomical things that will be added.

 

[Ceeege]

Fingers crossed for some new features to be implemented / demonstrated as E3 next week. Hopefully they'll filter into the next PB build.

 

[Aleksej]

It seems to me that a lot of people get a wrong understanding of "Beta" reading the Wikipedia article about it. The feature complete version of ED should be released as Gamma. Beta is for testing.

As for features that can be expected to be added during Beta check this thread:
http://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=19639