Jrgen Tharaldsen explains the Age of Conan open beta
A lot of Age of Conan fans have felt slighted over the recent Fileplanet "Open Beta" happening on May 1st. The reason? You have to be a Fileplanet subscriber to have access to the beta, which means you have to pony up some cash. We feel it's important for Funcom to explain the reasoning behind the Fileplanet beta and apparently, so does Jørgen Tharaldsen, Funcom's product director.
Jørgen begins his explanation by citing the fact that up until this point, nobody has been charged in any way for beta access. It's true, in fact thousands of players have participated in the Age of Conan beta without paying a cent. The reason being that these players are supposed to be helping Funcom out with testing and not only playing the game for their enjoyment.
On the topic of why they went with Fileplanet Jørgen says they needed to, "focus on the game, the closed beta and the launch, and not on the infrastructure related to the Fileplanet Open beta." which makes a lot of sense, really. The problem people have is largely with the beta not actually being open. This is something Jørgen also realizes as he says, "Looking back on this I think that if we had called it simply 'Fileplanet beta' instead of 'Open beta', many would have reacted differently."
We agree. The problem is not that Funcom decided to let Fileplanet handle the final beta process, but that they're calling it an open beta when it certainly is not. There are only 50,000 beta keys available through Fileplanet and while that number is big, it certainly isn't the amount of players Funcom would have if they went completely open.
Another issue lies with the level 13 cap on the "Fileplanet beta" causing some players to wonder if Funcom has something to hide content-wise. We can see how this would be true of many other MMOs, but you have to remember that the first 20 levels in AoC are almost entirely story-driven. So it would seem that Funcom is just trying to prevent people from spoiling the destiny story (there are four: one for each class archetype), but we won't know until launch day arrives.
They could be hiding something beyond level 20, but that something could be a good or a bad thing. Jørgen himself says, "in fact, I have heard from so many testers that the game gets even better as you move beyond Tortage." So for all we know, there's plenty of awesome content between level 20 and 80.
Open betas are nice, but we'd much rather let Funcom focus on making the game the best it can be for launch. Hopefully, by the time the three-day-start beings our 5 bucks to try that out will be worth the early admission-plus-ten extra days of subscription.