M76
[H]F Junkie
- Joined
- Jun 12, 2012
- Messages
- 14,035
It has occurred to me that Early access might not be a very good thing if we want to play good and complete games. In fact it's possibly a very bad influence.
Nowadays many projects are kept in perpetual early access, and many never see a complete release, and gets abandoned by the developer long before it could be called a complete game. Even very successful early access games can suffer this fate like Ark.
And of course devs abandon it, why wouldn't they? People who are interested in a game and start playing during early access will loose interest by the time the game would get an official release. I mean who wouldn't get enough of a game in 1-2 years?
I wasn't too fond of early access before either, but now I think it's destructive to game development as a whole. It makes developers lazy, uncaring. They can just say "that's why it's early access" to every criticism. It's their get out of jail free card.
But the fact of the matter is that they're still charging you money for the game, they're charging you money for being a QA tester for them. It's a perfect scam. And they even release paid DLCs for early access games. That's crazy and it's wrong.
WTF do you mean do I want to buy a new seat cover option for my car that you haven't even put seats in yet?
And of course the most outrageous example of this is Star Citizen, who are just selling concepts of things that might one day get into a game, that might one day start looking like an actual game, and not a pre-alpha test build.
But it's not just about paid DLCs, even if they add content to it freely, it's problematic. I'm thinking of is Conan Exiles. They had a good concept, it could've been made into a great game, but they released it incomplete, with a lot of features missing. But now that it's out, they're more focused on putting more content in the game, and implementing small bugfixes, to keep the players happy, instead of focusing on actually finishing it.
Even I was so dumb that I purchased it, but after playing 20 minutes I realized how unpolished and how lacking it is, and ignored it since. And now I think the game might never get to the point where I'd even consider revisiting it.
On a side note however I'd still support crowdfunding. It's much better. It gives a chance to developers to make games without publisher backing, or a large investor. The only problem I see with crowdfunding is greed. They deliberately put the funding bar extremely low to make the campaign a success, instead of making it a realistic amount from which their game can actually be made. If they were honest they'd say to themselves "Well we couldn't drum up enough support to make the project feasible, Let's shelve it" Instead they grab the money that might only be 10% of what's needed spend it and hope for a miracle. That's retarded if you ask me.
What do you think?
Nowadays many projects are kept in perpetual early access, and many never see a complete release, and gets abandoned by the developer long before it could be called a complete game. Even very successful early access games can suffer this fate like Ark.
And of course devs abandon it, why wouldn't they? People who are interested in a game and start playing during early access will loose interest by the time the game would get an official release. I mean who wouldn't get enough of a game in 1-2 years?
I wasn't too fond of early access before either, but now I think it's destructive to game development as a whole. It makes developers lazy, uncaring. They can just say "that's why it's early access" to every criticism. It's their get out of jail free card.
But the fact of the matter is that they're still charging you money for the game, they're charging you money for being a QA tester for them. It's a perfect scam. And they even release paid DLCs for early access games. That's crazy and it's wrong.
WTF do you mean do I want to buy a new seat cover option for my car that you haven't even put seats in yet?
And of course the most outrageous example of this is Star Citizen, who are just selling concepts of things that might one day get into a game, that might one day start looking like an actual game, and not a pre-alpha test build.
But it's not just about paid DLCs, even if they add content to it freely, it's problematic. I'm thinking of is Conan Exiles. They had a good concept, it could've been made into a great game, but they released it incomplete, with a lot of features missing. But now that it's out, they're more focused on putting more content in the game, and implementing small bugfixes, to keep the players happy, instead of focusing on actually finishing it.
Even I was so dumb that I purchased it, but after playing 20 minutes I realized how unpolished and how lacking it is, and ignored it since. And now I think the game might never get to the point where I'd even consider revisiting it.
On a side note however I'd still support crowdfunding. It's much better. It gives a chance to developers to make games without publisher backing, or a large investor. The only problem I see with crowdfunding is greed. They deliberately put the funding bar extremely low to make the campaign a success, instead of making it a realistic amount from which their game can actually be made. If they were honest they'd say to themselves "Well we couldn't drum up enough support to make the project feasible, Let's shelve it" Instead they grab the money that might only be 10% of what's needed spend it and hope for a miracle. That's retarded if you ask me.
What do you think?