Betawatch: WoW’s Shadowlands hits alpha, Virtuverse moves to public testing

Yes, after all the waiting, World of Warcraft: Shadowlands was announced to be going into alpha testing and then finally did so. If you care about the game, you’re in one of two states, either celebrating that you got into the test by playing or wailing and gnashing your teeth in frustration. You can go ahead and guess where our individual staff has fallen in that spectrum, but I need to go give my teeth a break from all the gnashing.

Other beta news! In list form! It’s a thing.

• It turns out that Virtuverse is now in free public early access testing! If you’re not clear on what that is, you can check out the trailer for this third-person action MMO over hither.
• There’s another MU title, somehow; MU Archangel is starting registration for its closed beta. Apparently this one is more mobile?
• Dino Squad is now in open beta. It is a PvP shooter in which you control dinosaurs with weapons strapped to them. What else do you want?
• More people are getting invited into Blue Protocol’s closed beta in Japan, so that’s still humming along there. (And you don’t need to gnash your teeth or wail if you’re not getting invited if, you know, you don’t live in Japan.)
• Last but not least, the Twitch viewership metrics for Valorant seem quite favorable… which makes sense when you consider that this was part of the only path to getting keys into the beta.

There’s probably something in there you care about, but if not, you could also see how much you care about all of the various titles down in the list below. Caring is good. You can also let us know how much you care about us with a tip of the hat if something has been unexpectedly jumped in phases without us catching it.

As always, we consider an MMO to be in open testing if it features free, public signups and will server wipe prior to launch. An MMO is marked in closed testing if it’s running a private test phase that cannot freely be accessed by the general public; it’s usually under NDA as well. Early access and crowdfunded MMOs whose tests we deem legitimate will be included. So-called “open beta” soft-launch MMOs with cash shops, no sign of launch in the west, or limited interest for our readers will not be listed; we also do not list expansions, with occasional exceptions.