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January 23rd, 2005 - World at War goes beta . . . (Page 1/3)

Good news! We've reached Beta on Gary Grigsby's World at War. Actually, for most game play functions, we've been at Beta since early December, but it took until early January to finish up the remaining items. Aside from making a few graphics improvements and finishing our onscreen Tutorials, we will be fully focused on fixing the remaining bugs. At last count, there were around 90 known bugs. We've added a half dozen new testers this month to help us weed out the last of the bugs. My experience is that the Beta to Final process usually takes 1 to 2 months, so that should give you an idea of where we are.

Since the game has been fully playable in a near Beta state for the past 3 months, we've had a lot of time to test the game balance. The most recent change in the rules was made to help out against the strategy of a coordinated Axis assault on the Soviet Union. Sending Japan to go after the Soviet Union was turning out to be a very successful strategy. We considered adding a chance that the US would declare war on Japan under these conditions, but decided against this, as we didn't like the idea of leaving it to a die roll to determine such an important part of the game. We decided to increase the US factory multiplier in this case, under the assumption that had both Germany and Japan attacked the Soviet Union, the US would have awoken to the serious danger in the world and would have increased their military preparedness.

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January 23rd, 2005 - World at War goes beta . . . (Page 2/3)

In game terms, this will allow the Western Allies to send even more Lend Lease to the Russians (and the Chinese as they can be a thorn in Japan's side), while increasing Allied research and development of their weapons. This will allow the British to be an earlier threat to Germany. It's still likely to be a good strategy to use, but hopefully it won't be as dominant.

We're very happy with the way the game is turning out. We think it's a game that can be played by a broader wargaming audience, but is deep, nuanced, and realistic enough to be enjoyed by serious wargamers. I've recently enjoyed playing 4 PBEM games against some of the testers, and I can say that even after 2 years of development and testing, I looked forward to receiving each email containing a new turn. The game lends itself to player's trying different strategies (including radically different production and research strategies), and this comes across when you're playing a lot of different human opponents. Keith recently added a feature that seeds each unit with a random number so that no matter how many times you load a save, the unit will always roll the same numbers. This should cut down on PBEM cheating. We're also considering some other features to minimize PBEM cheating since this game is ideally suited for PBEM play.

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January 23rd, 2005 - World at War goes beta . . . (Page 3/3)

As for future development work, we continue to work on our American Civil War game. The map and unit graphics are coming along nicely, and should be completed by the time we are ready to fully focus on this game. We don't know yet whether we can put the game together and develop it in time for a 2005 release, but at least the art shouldn't slow us down. As soon as Keith is finished with World at War, we also hope to get Mike Wood rolling on our long delayed Eastern Front game. In the meantime, he's kept himself busy patching War in the Pacific, even adding a few new features while he focuses on fixing bugs.

That's all for now. Hopefully, the next entry will report that World at War is finished.

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