Tamat announced at the end of last week that Dominion will be playable in the near future as part of a limited beta. Basically the game mode will be enabled during off-peak hours for anyone to play, but only for a limited amount of time.

I like the idea; it will be nice to get our hands on the game type early and hopefully the data will help produce a smooth release. As always, though, the issue is timing. You may remember this sort of thing happened with Twisted Treeline. It was available in limited doses early on, but there was a pretty significant gap between the first look at Twisted Treeline and its actual release.

That’s my big worry with Dominion. I already posted that it might get pushed back until October, but let’s consider a timeline in which testing gets started this week. I would imagine we’ll have at least two weeks of testing, followed by at least one week of development based on gathered data, followed by another week of internal testing before deploy. That’s four weeks, which puts us into the middle of October. Honestly, I think that’s best case scenario. It seems totally plausible to me that Dominion won’t fully launch until November.

I really hope that’s not the case. Dominion looks like a blast, but I’m not sure it will be able to keep all of my attention once we’re in the thick of the fall release schedule.