Super Monday Night Combat is taking the first Monday Night Combat title and bringing
in more DotA-like elements while decreasing the lethality of play. In other words, this is
going to be a more strategic game with less of an emphasis on killing the other players.

"Super MNC is neither a MOBA/Action RTS nor a shooter," Chandana Ekanayake,
 the art director and executive producer for Super Monday Night Combat, told Ars.
"There are elements of both mixed together in a single package.
We wanted to find out if this was a good direction to go and where is that fine line
where the two different genres play well together."

To that end, the team invited a small number of players for a very early beta and has
begun to roll out changes on an ordered, weekly basis. We sat down with Ekanayake
to discuss this process and why it's been so helpful for development.

The goal is to make Super Monday Night Combat more like a service than a game.
It will be a free-to-play title with frequent, ongoing updates, and that's a tricky business
model to do correctly. "With that mindset, we wanted to get players in as early as possible
while still in development," Ekanayake told Ars. "Our first beta release eight weeks ago
was more like an alpha, with a fair amount of temp assets. For us this has been the
earliest in development we've ever let outside players check out our progress.
The process was a bit scary, but the feedback has been very useful in shaping the game."



The team spends Monday through Wednesday working on game updates,
and then they test and launch on Thursday. That day they spend extensive time
on a Mumble server, discussing the changes with players as everyone involved
sees how the new update changes the game for players. The pace is hard to imagine.

"If nothing is completely broken, functionally or balance-wise, we'll start on the next
week's update," Ekanayake said. "But there have been several instances where we
just messed up badly and end up patching on Friday as well. The skilled players find
exploits very quickly and we want to turn around an update as fast as we can."

Uber Entertainment began the beta with 50 players, and the pool has now grown to
2,000 or so players. The developers have begun to balance things for newer
characters and to test for accessibility while also having a number of high-level,
expert players to provide balance to the games and servers. The timeframe
for "release" seems loose, but the model of constant updates and new content will be retained.

"Our plan is to switch from Beta to an Invite-only game over the next several months
as we add more players and more features to the game," Ekanayake said. The game
is to be considered "shipped" when Uber opens access to anyone and everyone who
wants to play. "It's a very different way of thinking about a game when it's constantly
evolving and being updated," Ekanayake said.

By bringing in players this early and working so closely with fans of the game,
Uber Entertainment is making sure the people who play the game will get to
experience something that has already been tested extensively, even on the first day of wide release.

"We were still unsure about the path we've been taking with the direction of
Super MNC, and it's great to see players that were with us from the
first days of Update 1 still playing," Ekanayake said. "Some of them have clocked
in over five hundred games and continue to come back."
If you would like to sign up for beta access, you can go to the game's official site.
Unfortunately for me, this beta is for the fans and players, not press.