The Beta Club is what we call a public instance, which any player can enter. We’ve previously shown a couple of private instances, which are only open to players who meet some condition, like being on the right mission or task force. There’s no combat inside the club. Instead, it’s a place for players to meet up and enjoy some cool visual effects; we may even add some mission content to the club later.

Two of the things we are balancing in the Beta Club are the need to provide an exciting location and the need to have good FPS inside. We think we’ve got that now, as FPS is varying between about 50 and 100 for a single player. It is worth noting that a player can adjust the settings for SoH on the fly to raise FPS by several different means. This video was taken on Ultra settings. You can see a lot of dynamic lighting and reflection effects with these settings.

During the CCT Beta, there will be roughly a dozen exploration badges that can be obtained by exploring the city. These will be attached to your account, and will carry over into the launched game, and you’ll see our prototype system for tracking which badges you’ve earned so far. As always, we look forward to the feedback that you provide from actually using these systems. And by the way, there will be one special badge that can be found inside the Beta Club and will be unique to the participants of the CCT Beta. Which means if you don’t get the badge during the Beta, you’ll have to wait a year or two to catch up using the game store.

We’re building so much new content for the CCT Beta that it’s going to take at least two more videos to show it all. The current plan is to go through the next big interior map, the hospital, which has a completely different art style and feel. After that, we’ll do a video focusing on the many different things you can do with the CCT during the Beta, particularly for your heroes’ faces.