It may finally be happening (since this news isn’t coming out from an NCsoft earnings conference call). Instead, the Korea IT Times reports that a “final test” will be conducted at the Pangyo R&D center on February 21 and 22 (with players being recruited from January 26th in Korea).
This will therefore not be like the usual CBT (these tests that are performed internally are normally focus test groups; though that normally occurs earlier in the cycle) where players can play test from home. Furthermore, the testing is of fairly limited duration; around 5 hours comprised of the tutorial, main story questing (codex play for the game world and story), local events, and the raid system.
In other words, it seems to be fairly scripted as to what NCsoft wants the testers to focus on versus allowing a wider range of free play since the last time there was a CBT, the game was still known as Lineage Eternal, but with a completely different play loop compared to earlier trailers; the overall game play, systems, and content were NOT well received (which resulted in the entire dev team being replaced, and the entire game being rebooted/rebranded as Project TL). It seems that they want to avoid this sort of scenario again (and pretty much want to launch what they have, and let the public decide).
As I wrote previously regarding the Directors Preview, I am not sold on what was shown (and it isn’t clear if this is still taking place in the Lineage universe, or they’ve just decided to spin things off to see what sticks). According to this article, the company still seems to be looking at releasing this globally in the first half of this year (that isn’t much time since we’re already heading into the short month of February, and have effectively 4 months to actually get all of their marketing and messaging together. I guess time will tell if this is actually it (launching) this time.
