Early Access Games

[Foxi4]

Why not just program something in real life with your real coding skills? The game was basically "You build our game for us." I'm paying you for entertainment, I shouldn't pay you so I can entertain myself.

The entertainment was supposed to come from coding logic for the various parts of your ship. Say, you have turrets - you could code how they react to threats all by yourself using ready snippets or your own programming experience. Not only does that allow you to make the ship more or less autonomous, working exactly the way you want it to work rather than in the way invisioned by the game designers, it's also heavily competitive if you take interstellar combat in mind - the best A.I wins, after all. It'd be an interesting and learning experience that could introduce people to coding through video games - I think it's a cool idea.

Even then it's a dead project like Scrolls. If it ever comes out it'll have such niche appeal that it'll flop and get bad reviews and the stupid child fanbase of Minecraft will never buy into Notch bullshit again. Then I'm sure he'll have a hissy fit about how no one understands "his vision" and that the world isn't ready for his games or some bullshit.

Naw, it's even more dead then Scrolls since it's been officially cancelled.

 

[Gahars]

Guild basically made my comment but better, so... shoot.

I will say, though, it's really sad to see how degraded betas have become (and I ain't talking about the fedora'd kind). A beta should be quid-pro-quo; developers let people play their game a bit early in exchange for reports on how the game runs and performs. It allows players to become a part of the development process, and it puts the fans and the developers on a more even playing field. Even if you don't look at it so idealistically, it's still a helpful development tool.

Now, though? Either a beta is a glorified demo tacked on to prop up another game ("Buy Crackdown to get exclusive access to the Halo 3 Beta!") or you actually have to pay money to test an unfinished product (Early Access). It's become just another marketing tool.

 

[FAST6191]

Minecraft is also like one of the first "Early Access" games. You paid to get into a beta.

I don't know, many Euro RPG/strategy devs seem to have adopted that model many years ago. They even evolved it into the more advanced pay for the original and then pay for the "gold" version too.

 

[Taleweaver]

I personally think this is a phenomenon that will diminish in a distant future. The reason is that the gaming industry as a whole seems to stretch out on how far they think they can push this thing. Indies go for early access, but even some AAA-studios seem to release stuff in unfinished state. The end result is that any hype surrounding 'release day' get milked to death.
I don't get the appeal of playing around in a buggy state that may or may not crash my pc, and is missing serious parts of the content. In my UT2004 days, I beta tested quite some maps and gave feedback to the mappers. I liked doing that and had some influence on the end product. But it came at a price. Or rather: two prices. One was that a mapper did not always agree or being able to change it to your liking. On games, I figure this'll be even worse. If your game crashes, you're mentally obliged to fill in a bug report, but that's not always clear (just writing 'it crashes' isn't helping them much). So you spend a lot of effort doing something that is basically work. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but then there is that second price to pay:
playing early diminishes any chance of wonder and excitement. By the time those maps were published, I was already tired of them. And where others saw something awesome, I mostly saw the grey-ish walls that used to be there.

I've only bought one early access game thus far (contraption maker), and that was after reading enough about it to have confidence that it was pretty stable and was nearing public release. I'm glad that gamble turned out correctly, but it's a lucky gamble.


What isn't mentioned so much here is that there's a plus side to early access. Bug fixing is one (though I have my doubts on the effectiveness of it). But in games where the user is expected to create some content from himself, that model could be awesome. On contraption maker, there are already many dozens of fun contraptions and puzzles. That new unreal tournament will probably have ten times the amount of custom levels than stock ones (as it stands, they barely have anything but a working engine and editor). And I haven't followed minecraft, but it wouldn't surprise me if most of what's being built there is just being built because they were inspired by the efforts OTHERS had already put into it. In other words: if everyone had to wait until release day, everyone would've seen a pretty barren ground and just leave.





Oh, and...relevant edutainment video...click me, click me!

 

[BORTZ]

Early Access games are shit. Shows how awful indie development is.

You're basically paying for an unfinished game. When a developer already has the money, why finish development? A ton of the games just die because they're made by indies who have no idea what "work" or "dedication" is and once they have the money they cut and run to a different project. Then rinse and repeat.

Buy a game once it's finished, let devs know they need to make finished games to get money. Nowadays any yahoo with a computer can throw together some indie mess and market it as "retro" or "underground" or "emotional" and gullible shitgobblers will eat it up.

Its amazing how easily you take the words right out of my mouth sometimes.

I have seen a lot of games that seem like they could be ok, but never get better because devs have no reason to continue working on them. Really allows for a no loyalty policy after the game hits "early access".