Recently Bethesda held a preview event to show the press few hours of gameplay from the upcoming Skyrim. Many outlets were there to take a look at the game, but Kotaku ran into some glitches, and it was explained to Kotaku's Editor in Chief that everyone was playing a pre-alpha build of the game. Panic ensued when the story was published, and a few bloggers and commenters were shocked that the press would be playing such early code so close to the game's release.

Bethesda must have been lying, and Crecente was being too credulous about accepting the explanation, right? Or maybe we're just in for a glitchy launch of the game. Why was an old build of the game being shown to the press? I smell a conspiracy!

Why code played for coverage close to launch is often older than you think

The truth is getting code to the press is much more complicated than gamers assume, especially this close to the game's launch. Bethesda's Pete Hines clarified the reasoning for showing code that still has bugs to the press.

"Here's the problem: to keep people from playing the start of the game and removing a few other things, we had to branch a modified build," Hines told Kotaku. "With everything we have going on getting the game done, the team didn't have time to fork another build, redo all the script work again, and test it. So we just stuck with the build we had which won't have all the fixes and improvements we've done, but avoids the spoilers we really wanted to avoid."

This is a common practice for big projects, especially games as complex as Skyrim. You may be dealing with sections of code that have placeholder animations or sound effects, a few bugs here and there, or even out and out crashes. Why not just show newer code? Because it may be missing a vital feature, it shows something you don't want to reveal yet, or an earlier build simply shows off an aspect of the game better than the current version of the game. Games aren't made in neat little chunks; bits and pieces are added here and there, and it takes significant time and energy to create a section of the game that's stable enough to show to the press during a lengthy demo; developers tend to view the months before E3 bitterly for this reason. There are many reasons why new code is unavailable, or even unusable.

This issue hit the Battlefield 3 beta as well. Gamers were expecting something closer to a demo than the working beta they were presented with. Many assumed that the game would ship with the same features missing and glitches they saw in the open beta, and there was a backlash in many forums and on Twitter.

This had to be explained in a post on the game's official blog. "The Battlefield 3 Open Beta is based on software that is more than one month old. We need to test the new back end dedicated server structure we've built," Karl Magnus Troedsson, the general manager of DICE, wrote. "Not only have we built a new game engine, but an entirely new back end system so that everyone can enjoy the benefits of dedicated servers on all platforms."

He also pointed out that the open beta required long lead times so they could test, certify, and set up the code and infrastructure needed to run the game across three platforms. "This means that the code you are now playing is actually quite early and not representative of the final game," Troedsson wrote.

There needs to be more education

When you preview games for a living, you're used to playing incomplete versions of games, even when you're close to a game's release. We also understand that the games can undergo dramatic changes in the last month or two before launch, especially with a dedicated team of developers working long hours. The games we play at preview events or those that are sent to our offices to play on our debug systems could be a mess compared to the final release, even if that release is very soon.

The flap at Kotaku showed that this is an issue worth talking about, and the backlash against the unfinished version of Battlefield 3 we played during the open beta shows that customers need to be aware of the hows and whys behind a working beta. We're used to beta tests being used as marketing tools or even selling points for pre-orders; many gamers were taken aback by the rougher state of Battlefield 3 and wondered how DICE would be able to fix the game for next week's release. In reality, many of the issues discussed had already been fixed in the newer version the team was actively working on while the beta continued.

It takes time and resources to create a version of the game suitable for the press or beta testers, and that time often can't be spared close to release, leading to chunks of the game being shown that come from slightly stale code. This isn't news, and it's certainly not out of the ordinary. It may, however, need to be discussed more openly.