In responding to a question about what lessons were taken from the launch of Final Fantasy 14, Cook told Strategy Informer that releasing a ”finished” game was paramount.
”Lessons you learn: You’ve got to release a finished game. We didn’t talk about release dates, we didn’t talk about what we were going to do until we HAD it. Until we knew when we were going to launch and what we could get done.”
He then went on to talk about betas and how they’d become more about advertisement than game design.
”Betas are such a weird kettle of fish these days. One, you can’t have a closed beta anymore as you’re just releasing information to the public, so it might as well be an advertising period, betas have become marketing nonsense.”
”I think we took the best strategy we could, and we decided to run Alpha forever, much like WoW did, make sure the game’s really solid, do some stress teats… And then Beta, if it HAS to be an advertisement, if there’s no choice in the matter for us, we can’t just have an honest beta, let’s try out our service model.”
Keep an eye out for further RIFT coverage from Strategy Informer, and you can read the rest of the interview here. It’s due out in North America on March 1st, and Europe on March 5th, however the ‘Head Start’ period for pre-order customers has already begun.