I should note that, although Ark’s full expansion seems particularly egregious, they’re not the first to have paid DLC while in EA. Killing Floor 2, for example, has an item shop and drop/key system and it’s still in EA as well.
It also looks like the expansion adds powerful rides that you can bring into standard servers, meaning you have to get the expansion to compete. Poor form.
I’ll also note that since this thread was started both Kerbal Space Program and Starbound have been officially released.
So has Prison Architect, mentioned about, and it’s currently on sale for 75% - bargain for what’s turned into a pretty good management game.
I’'m still generally torn on Early Access. I avoid it, mostly, but sometimes I can’t help myself.
Interestingly, **DayZ **is still in early access from when I first posted about it 2.5 years ago. It’s much prettier with a new graphics engine. But it’s still mostly wandering around a huge map full of wilderness, Eastern European villages and cities and not much else but players griefing each other. FWIW, it seems to have beaten out Rust, WarZ, and **H1Z1 **for “unfinished zombie open world survival game”.
I picked up Space Engineers. Sort of a “Minecraft in space”. I got it cheap and probably put 2000 hours into it over the years. So it’s definitely worth it. But it’s hard to figure out where the game is ultimately going. It started out, you could basically just build ships and stations is “Creative” mode. Or mind asteroids in “Survival” mode where you have to refine the raw ore into components and your character could die.
Later they introduced planets, which are very pretty, but not sure what they add other than a place to build stuff and a demonstration of how absurd the scales are (i.e your ship can’t travel faster than 104m/s and the range of the weapons are like 800m. Fine for a small sandbox. Stupid when you now have planetary(ish) distances to scale against.
The other issue is the game engine has a real hard time with the Enterprise and Star Destroyer size ships that players want to build in Creative mode.
IOW, I’m interested in seeing how the game ultimately ties everything together into an actual “game”, rather than it’s current state as a bunch of interesting and entertaining concepts.
Planetary Annihilation I bought on sale after it went live. I don’t think I ever played it.