Fractured Online has opened up a free playtest weekend, from today through Sunday. The team is also extending the overall fall playtest before the official Steam Early Access relaunch.
Anyone can download the game today and play for free through October 15th without any purchases necessary and no founder packs. After the 15th though, you will need a Founders pack to play through the final week of the playtest. The Fall Playtest was originally set to end on Sunday, but now there is a one-week extension through October 22nd.
The team announced this one week extension to give them more time to gather more player data, particular to progression, as well as spend a little more time polishing up the game and fixing some more bugs before Steam Early Access reopens.
As for the free play weekend, this will give them the opportunity to gather additional important data, and also to test the servers. According to the announcement, “First of all, after multiple rounds of optimizations, we want to analyze again all the performance metrics to assess how our new backend behaves in a real heavy-load scenario”.
They do say that they've been happy with server performance during the fall play test overall with those who do have founders packs getting in and testing out the systems, and they tout fixing over 60 issues over several days. they're really looking to get as many players in to test things out before they go for a fuller Early Access launch on the way to an eventual full launch.
An announcement on just when Steam Early Access will return is on the way, “in a few days”.
Head to Fractured Online to find out more.