We recently cut our first Alpha Release Candidate. The huge amount of work that the team put into this build has resulted in an RC that fixes the overwhelming majority of game breaking issues. Issues like crashes, networking bugs, and glaring graphical glitches have been identified, targeted, and resolved. That means significant parts of Halo: Reach??s multiplayer are now that much closer to our extremely high ??shippable? quality bar.
Now that we have an RC build cut, we??ll spend some time running it through an intensive test cycle, fixing any other Pri 1 issues that come up and generating additional RCs as needed before we release the Alpha for certification. To put this in a little bit of perspective, less than a month ago there were over a thousand bugs flagged as ??fix-by Alpha.? We??ve burned through those in a gargantuan ??bug smash? effort to make sure we ship the Reach Alpha in the most polished and stable state possible.
Milestones like Alpha have a huge galvanizing effect across the entire team. Art, Animation, Engineering and Design have all made enormous strides as we prepare to let the outside world get their hands on the game for the first time. Some genuinely new, crazy, and fun multiplayer stuff has come together to make this a really great milestone. The Alpha testers are in for some surprises.
In a few weeks we??ll release the Alpha to a small population. It??s a great opportunity for us to iron out the wrinkles with a smaller scale audience (thousands as opposed to millions). Using their feedback, we??ll build a better Beta. Which we??ll share with you on May 3rd!
Joe
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