With the Starhawk closed-beta concluded, I wanted to catch up with senior producer Harvard Bonin to see how the past few months have treated the game. While I was able to learn a great deal about the community's involvement with the bug-squashing process, Bonin also teased what the team at Lightbox Interactive have in store for post-launch support.
RespawnAction: Overall, how would you describe how Starhawk's closed-beta went?
Harvard Bonin: From our team standpoint, it had a ton of highs mixed with a few lows. I'm happy to say we were more successful than not when it came to proving out the game. Overall, the fun factor seems to be there and players are responding positively. I can say from a personal experience that I had a few late, great nights playing with the fans. We collected a gigantic amount of data and with that we were able to make frequent (often daily) updates to the beta. It was really done the way betas should be done, and we're proud of that. We're running surveys now at http://www.lightboxinteractive.com/starhawk-beta-survey-1. We ask players to answer some questions and really participate in game making.
We also had private forums for players and we got a ton of info from that. Overall, we had some freezes, crashes, balance issues, etc. There was nothing that wasn't surprising and we've been able to address a lot of this stuff. Our public beta starts soon and the next 1.2 update will fix even more. We realize players want more vehicles, structures, maps, etc. to play with, however, we are testing the game and we're getting plenty just from the content we have right now. We'll see what we add in the future.
We'll have a community page up down the road, but in the meantime if players want to participate with the team on a daily basis, visit https://www.facebook.com/#!/StarhawkTheGame.
