With surprisingly little fanfare (I can’t even find the official announcement on their site), MechWarrior Online has announced that Closed Beta is coming to an end, and Open Beta will be starting October 16th.
Here is the tweet from Stephanie Schopp (she’s the great PR person involved, she arranged the whole Nvidia MechWarrior Community Day thing.. and is just awesome).
“MechWarrior Online going Open Beta on October 16!”
You can see it in all its glory here:Â http://twitter.com/stephanieschopp/status/256077400155226113
As part of this, the MWO team will stop selling Founder’s Packs (again) on October 14th, so if you haven’t got one yet, get one while their still there for the getting. I think mine was a good investment, and I’m not even that good at the game – unless you count being good at getting blown up, then I’m great! ;)
There is a small statement on the MWO site addressing what is sure to be a rash of “too soon!” type complaints..Here’s part of that statement:
As closed beta draws to an end we would like to take this moment to thank those that participated, without their help we could not have gotten this far.
At first hearing about the Open Beta launch many of our players will feel concerned and say to themselves “Why go open beta now?†or “wait it’s not ready yet because ‘X’ feature isn’t implementedâ€. Therefore we would like to explain as best we can as to why the time is right to enter open beta.
Perhaps the simplest way to explain things is that we feel our closed beta players have done all they can and simply they are fatigued by closed beta. What I mean by this is that closed beta can be trying mainly because all of their hard work gets wiped on a regular basis and even though we continue to have tens of thousands of unique players playing each day there are many that are waiting to spend their time when it really counts. There are many other reasons but that one is reason enough, it has become time for us to open our doors and allow all of our great players to start progressing towards advancement that they can keep. Also to that point it has become time for us to let in an entirely new batch of players to continue to help us generate the metrics and data which will help us craft the best game possible.
If you haven’t already played the game…you only have a few more days to wait! Barring any unforeseen events, there should be no further wipes of your progression after Open Beta starts, so you don’t have to worry about having your hard work erased weekly like it was during Closed Beta.
And lastly, the PC Gamer’s October issue hit the newsstands yesterday in the US..grab your copy for a skin for your ‘Mech, and the first in-game cockpit decoration!