Hey everyone!
We’re very excited to announce we’ll be kicking off S5’s beta branch on July 5th. Let’s get into the details.
For anyone unfamiliar with these kind of testing phases, a beta branch is a separate branch of the game that has many of the changes intended to go in the game for the next season. It will be available through the betas tab in Steam, and will be open for everyone to join by simply switching to the proper branch.
Our intention with this beta branch is to have a proper stress test where we can gather as much feedback as possible on the early game experience in the first two maps available, find any performance issues (or worse, crashes), and get these things ironed out before we move into Season 5 release.
As mentioned before, we already have internal playtesting going, though for the most part it’s us developers, and the staging testers in our Discord. So far the biggest focus has been on the bad crashes that could cause an awful experience for the beta branch, and coming up with a better balanced early game experience. We feel we’re pretty much ready to move into public testing now.
With so many changes comes a pretty big possibility of many of them ruining what we expect to be a pretty good impression of this update and what’s to come, so getting those out of the way early is what this internal testing has been for. Many of the new features and changed mechanics need a much larger amount of players for us to get proper feedback on how they add to the game, what kind of tweaks we need to make, etc.
As for Season 5 release, we’ll be sharing more details as we get nearer to its release, but as you probably already gathered from our previous devblogs, our development focus in S5 will shift toward a much more fitting Early Access style of development, something which we are fully committed to. We will be quickly iterating, changing and adding things as the season progresses, similar to the beta branch but at a much larger scale.
Keep an eye on our Discord and Twitter. More information about the beta test will be shared there next week
—Neon