We’ve been following our friends over at Fallout 4: New Vegas for awhile now, and their ambitious fan-project continues to impress with each new update. Now that we are assured that Bethesda is still on board with their continuation of this project, it’s only natural that many are curious as to when a public beta will go live. Or if it’s coming at all.
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The team recently took to social media to explain why a public beta might not be in this project’s best interest regarding development workflow and how the team operates. You have to remember, these aren’t paid employees – this is a fan project, one that is totally voluntary and out of their own free time.
“As it stands, we have no plans to run a public beta of Fallout 4: New Vegas any time in the foreseeable future,” opens up their most recent ‘devlog.’ “This isn’t an arbitrary decision made to keep people from having fun, but more to ensure that F4NV can be developed without any interruptions. Unfortunately, the process of creating a public alpha or beta release would significantly impact our development workflow, and also create a long-term drain on our ability to develop F4NV.”
They also opened up about how much of a “huge deal” a public beta would be and how it would essentially mean creating a separate mod entirely:
“Firstly, we need to make the public alpha/beta. This alone might not seem like a huge deal, however it’s actually a somewhat complex and time consuming process, as we need to essentially create a separate mod for the public, that no further development is added to. We then need to clean it up so no unfinished code or assets make their way into the mod, and that means pulling team members off of any new content they may be working on, and redirecting them towards a beta that will be, at that point, outdated compared to what the rest of the team is working on. Then we need to run internal testing to ensure that this release works, and fix any bugs found there. While some might think that last step isn’t necessary, releasing a version with a large number of bugs present only complicates the next step – supporting the release.”
A public beta would also mean a division of their modders, a team that is needed in an all hands on deck capacity for this project to reach final completion, “this means time and effort spent on something that ultimately doesn’t contribute to our end product.” Which makes sense when look at this from a fan perspective.
Their final reason is geared more towards property protection:
“Finally, this creates a serious issue for mod-makers. Many modders will want to create content based on or in the Mojave we’ve made, and while this is fantastic, it means that any further releases we do, or any patches we do, may end up breaking their mods, not to mention their work produced for our beta will almost certainly not work for our final release, meaning they’ll end up needing to rework their mods to remain compatible with F4NV. This isn’t really fair to the modder or the end user, so we’d rather avoid that.”
With this project having been in development for so long, it’s understandable that they would want to protect their progress. Hopefully we’ll be seeing the finished product ourselves in the near future!
