Killing Floor 3’s next stress test launches today, and won’t share the last one’s five-year NDA
What happens when an unenforceable force meets an un-shut-uppable object? Cooperative monsterman shooter Killing Floor 3 found out this past Sunday, as players of its closed online stress test were asked to agree to a nondisclosure agreement (shared on Reddit) that would stay in effect for five years. Or four years, three hundred and fifty-four days after KF3 is supposed to launch, on July 24th.
Naturally, this was broken almost immediately, including by Twitch streamers clicking through the agreement live on air. In a forum post, developers Tripwire Interactive have since declared that they stopped bothering to enforce within the test’s first hour, and apologised for making such a mad demand in the first place. The post also confirms that another stress test – which PC players can still apply to join – is happening later today, Wednesday 16th, and won’t insist on any legal gagging at all.
Update: I’ve accessed this new stress test myself and, as the forum posts mentions, the NDA page is still present – though Tripwire say its content can be disregarded.
NDAs are commonly wheeled out when developers run limited pre-release play sessions like these, though the half-decade duration is plainly nonsense in KF3’s case. Tripwire’s statement attributes it to essentially misused paperwork, claiming “5 years is our standard boilerplate language for internal tests and was too heavy handed for this context,” adding that “It was never our intention to enforce a 5-year ban on discussing the game.” The same post infers that at least some time was spent clamping down on agreement breakers, but then that wouldn’t have been weird at all were they only told to keep schtum for a few days. Not, y’know, the same time it took to build the Hoover Dam.
It’s not like gamers have a particularly proud history of nondisclosure compliance, either. Take the Fortnite tester who let slip its Season 2 details, or the rogue Marathon streamer who managed to beam an hour of the upcoming FPS like that doomed Rebel Alliance soldier passing the Death Star plans out of Darth Vader’s murder hallway. Or my personal favourite case, YouTuber and arch Team Fortress 2 Engie main Uncle Dane leaking Deadlock so hard that Valve abandoned their secrecy altogether.
Anyway, this new, unbound stress test begins today at 2pm BST / 9am EST, and will run for 12 hours, making it a much meatier opportunity to test drive Killing Floor 3 than Sunday’s two-hour sesh. You can request access via Steam if you’d like to see what all the fuss is about.
Fuss has certainly been in no short supply for KF3; it was previously delayed from a planned March 2025 release after a disastrous open beta that produced widespread complaints on the game’s performance, gunfeel, and switch from having freely mix-matchable characters and perk classes – as in Killing Floors 1 and 2 – to a more hero shooterish Specialist system. By many accounts from the Sunday stress test, encouraging improvements have been made, though Tripwire say that unjoining characters and perks won’t take place until after release.
