Kingmaker - Alpha Testing Soon

Owlcat has announced that Pathfinder: Kingmaker will be beginning Alpha Testing soon in the latest update.

Dear Pathfinders,

Those among you, who have pledged to get alpha access to Pathfinder: Kingmaker will be able to get started at the end of this month! In order to get access, please be sure you have followed the instructions in our email titled 'Backer Portal is now live'. You need to transfer your Kickstarter pledge to our backer portal and pick the alpha Add-on, which you have paid for during the Kickstarter campaign. If you need assistance with your pledge transfer, please be sure to send a message to team@owlcatgames.com so we can help you.

An email with detailed instructions on how to access the alpha will be sent out next week to all qualifying backers.

Back to Rivellon

The full release of Pathfinder: Kingmaker is still a while away. But there's no need to sit around and feel bored in the meanwhile. Why not pay the good folks over at Larian a visit and grab Divinity: Original Sin 2? If you crave a role-playing experience, which feels incredibly close to pen & paper, with deep, tactical combat and the possibility for 4 player cooperative gameplay, then you absolutely cannot miss this game! Release is slated for the 14th of September.

Hail to the Kings!

Owlcats

More information.

It's nice to see it is moving along. I'm looking forward to it.

Any backers on Watch planning to take part in the alpha testing?

Originally Posted by purpleblob
Any backers on Watch planning to take part in the alpha testing?

I was just going to ask the same question. I'm not but I'd love to hear some Watchers' early impressions.

I joined in on some premium level, but that does not include alpha access.
Anyway, I'm glad this is coming along nicely! This and Battletech are my most anticipated games for next year.

That fast? No slowing down the Red Army once it gets rolling.

I'd love to hear some impressions from the Alpha, but I'm staying clear of spoilers so no alpha nor beta nor early access for me.

I think the term alpha is pretty meaningless in these KS projects. It's not really what a developer would understand as an alpha stage game. Alphas and betas in KS games are usually just sales gimmicks - really they're just early demos. If a you pay a bit extra, you get to play with an early demo, and if you pay a lot extra, you get to play with a very early demo. They can keep all of it until there's a finished game to show, IMO.

Agree w/ Ripper in most cases.
However there is something to be said for alpha and beta testing to come across bugs. I personally detest "early access" but will truly test and alpha or beta (and not an early demo).

Yeah, the proper testing of actual alphas and betas is essential. But real alphas and betas would be builds of a whole game, with some stuff in a very raw state. Very few of these KS projects really offer that kind of access. I think a more accurate description of what they offer would be a limited vertical slice during development.

There's a bit of a grey area, and some benefit, as the feedback on this stuff can still be useful, but I still think that calling it alpha or beta access is a bit misleading.

My interpretation of an alpha and beta version of a game is that an alpha game shows a functionally incomplete game and a beta is a functionally complete game. The difference between the two would be that in a beta, all features are build in the game, but not everything is probably working as it should yet. An alpha version is basically just a version of the game before beta, where not all features are available yet.
However the terms alpha and beta are used very loosely by game developers and basically are just names for two milestones on their development chart. They could have called them Jippo and Jappo, which say just as much about the state of the game as alpha and beta does.

Kind of, and I think an alpha can mean different things to different folks. I'd say, though, that a beta is pretty universally understood to mean the product is supposed to be complete and working, but almost certainly isn't because it hasn't been properly tested yet.

But I also think that offering only a restricted slice of the game to backers is something quite different than having proper beta access. I think it would be much better just to offer people "early access", which I think is a much better (vague) description of what backers actually get.

Originally Posted by purpleblob
Any backers on Watch planning to take part in the alpha testing?

I'm a backer. But does every backer has access to the alpha?