As far as I remember, there was a quite long beta testing phase running for Warlock.
Surely, the game runs smoothly without any greater bugs or CTDs !
But to be honest, isn´t it also the task of beta testers to give feedback to the game ?
So I wonder how so many things could be go to release without chnages.
- You cannot, ever, draw any conclusions about the activities of beta testers from the state of a game.
- Moreover, beta testers are never, ever, responsible for the state of a game upon release. The only people who are responsible are those with a stake in the outcome, in other words, those that make money from it and call the shots.
- If a beta test goes great, it is to the credit of the developers, who organized a beta test adequate to their needs and were able to deal with the results; Conversely, if it does not, it is to the discredit of the developers. Not the beta testers.
- Speculating in public about what beta testers of games noticed/didn't noticed/did/didn't do is not only a spectacular waste of time - it is also unfairly putting the beta testers in an awkward situation, as they are covered by NDAs and cannot respond.
And in my opinion the came could have been so much better with twice the budget. Or with supermen from Alpha Centauri in charge of the programming. Or possibly with slave wages or indentured servants doing the work.Didn´t they realized, that the game suffers at so many things, beginning with city spam, very dumb AI, lacking diplomacy options, no summaries ingame and at the end of the game, simple city management without considering the tile fields (i.e. vulcano more frutile than sand giving more food output or similar things) and so on....
In my opinion the game could have been so much better with some more polishing or gamer feedback.
See what I did there? You made the assumption that the things you'd have liked to be better were caused by a lack of gamer feedback or lack of polishing; errors that you think should have been corrected.
But there's no evidence available to us that indicates that this is the cause of the game's deficiencies. We don't know how much feedback they received, we don't know how much polishing was done within the relevant constraints. And constraints are always relevant. You could just as well, as I just did, make the assumption that the development team, working on a bargain rate game, deliberately focused on a narrow set of features and worked on making those perform as well as they could within the budget allocated.
And that is, fundamentally, my assumption. That the goal was to deliver a simple beer & pretzels fantasy wargame in the tradition of Master of Magic using the IP of Majesty developed on a moderately short development cycle and selling at a cheap price point. And if I'm right, then they succeeded spectacularly.
But whether I am right or not, the one thing you should never, ever, do is start topics discussing the participation of beta testers, questioning their actions, about which you know nothing, or blaming them for the state of a game!