NEWS - Monday, March 5, 2007

Bungie Quashes Halo 3 Dual Beta Rumors
Bungie has laid to rest rumors of a dual beta for Halo 3; but a spokesperson told Next-Gen the stories have an understandable genesis. Last week, strange stories surfaced that the Halo 3 bets would be run along two tracks. Bungie’s Frank O’Connor told Next-Gen, “Like, we have time to be working on two separate betas? No, people have confused the issue. Bungie’s going to have a friends and family program which is basically a tiny alternative to the Crackdown BETA program. We’re going to get a bunch of beta invites sent to people in the Bungie community as well s those people who have bought Crackdown. Some people have decided that it was this whole separate beta but it’s the same beta, we’re just giving out our own tokens.” Asked about the goals of the beta, likely to be one of the biggest in console gaming history, he said, “It’s going to be a great place to see what weapons people enjoy and how they like the levels that we’re going to share with them and all that game balance stuff. But the really important data is going to be about networking and match making and population. The only realistic way to get that data, is to put it out on some scale. So it’s very useful for us. We could try to translate a lot of scaled information from smaller populations and figure out how things are going to scale, but it’s very, very useful for us to see how it works in real life and in the field.”Source: http://www.next-gen.biz/
