You Can Now Beta Test The New 1.4 Skyrim Patch
When a new game is in development, fans usually do whatever they can to obtain a beta key, so that they can play it before everyone else. However, Bethesda doesn’t think that full games are the only things that deserve a beta. For their latest Skyrim patch, they are giving PC users the opportunity to beta test it.
This may seem like an odd approach, but after a bad case of dragons flying in reverse, they want to make sure that this release goes as smoothly as possible. So how do you get your hands on the latest patch? All you need to do is opt into the beta by going into your Account settings and changing your beta preferences. Once you’ve done this, Steam will restart, and Skyrim will be updated to the latest patch. You can later opt-out, and the game will be returned to its current state. For a complete list of changes in the patch, see here.
This is an interesting approach to releasing game patches, and I think that there’s a good chance that we will be seeing this from other companies in the future. It looks like Valve has gone the extra mile in making such a feature available to developers, so we can only hope that it will get utilized.
