Early Access Games: Pro and Con

The Game Room
1

This is me splitting off a side conversation from the Star Citizen thread.

SenorBeef and myself had a slight disagreement (with a few dozen instances of spittle-flecked screaming invectives). He used Cyberpunk 2077 as a (supposed) example of bad, full-release games. I disagreed.

However, let me back up and discuss Early Access and why it might not be much beloved by a large portion of the audience. And also why I was using Cyberpunk 2077 as a good example of full-release games.

Early Access in theory can be applied to any genre of games. However, by nature Early Access games are almost always in a handful of categories, all of which have infinite or infinitely-repeatable content. Sandbox builders often make good Early Access candidates, for several reasons. First, they usually have little-to-no story. This is significant because story-heavy games usually involves careful pacing. Early Access turns that into a drip-feed of content. This isn’t the killing blow, but it does. If, like me, you liked Cyberpunk 2077, then compare the hypothetical where it was turned into Early Access and released in chunks over a year. Aside from really harming the open-world and exploration aspects, it also cuts off much of the story flow. Waiting three months to finish a quest chain would basically wreck the connection of player choices and emotional investment.

Second, Early Access games also have a tendency to simply be incomplete experiences. Significant, clearly-promised systems might never actually get implemented. Worse yet, there’s an annoying tendency for Early Access games to get into the market and then stagnate, where development never quite seems to take a major step forward.

Third, Just because a game is Early Access doesn’t mean it ever will actually receive bug-fixes. For example, Subnautica has critical bugs that were well-documented early, but for whatever reason the developers never bothered to fix them. For instance, even though I’m extremely positive about the game, I will never be able to finish it. In some environments there’s a weird glitch that turns my game into a slideshow, despite having played it on two different rigs, one of which can easily hit 75+ FPS on most modern titles. (…and as much as 30 FPS on the original Crysis!) This basically makes it unplayable and un-finishable. By contrast, Cyberpunk 2077, and The Witcher 3 before it, have received thorough post-release patches and fixes.

Does this mean that Early Access is just bad? Well, no. But in my mind, it’s also not actually Early Access. If you’re selling the game for money and I pay the money and then play it, it’s not Early Access, it’s just incomplete. I’m willing to try Early Access games, but I always have to consider that I should only pay if I’m willing to accept the experience as it is right now, not what I think I might get in the future. For example, I’ve had my eye on TemTem for awhile, and I might well decide to get it once I feel I’m confident playing the game with nothing more than what is available that day. And, IMHO, we should consider that a good practice but I don’t tell people what to do with their own money.

That all being said, what different companies mean by Early Access can be frustratingly vague, and frankly, I’m not really that interested in spending my limited time on Earth trying to second-guess their long-term intentions for a product. For some, and Early Access product is basically done and will receive some tweaks and a final few patches. For others, it’s a broken half-product that may be complete finished in several years. From a consumer perspective, calling both of these “Early Access” is not the best communication one could have. There’s also no way to really see where an Early Access product might be in terms of development other than to start asking around forums or otherwise trying to figure what’s worth the time.

2

I agree that sandbox games work better as EA titles than story-heavy ones.

EA titles have a different purpose for me: supporting the developer. In short, if I see an EA title that looks promising, then as far as I’m concerned the purchase is a vote of confidence and a small investment in that developer. If it fails, ho hum–I’m more sad about the loss of a promising developer than my investment. But this only applies to small teams. I’ll never EA a title from a large, established developer.

In some cases I’ll buy EA titles that I know I’ll never play in any significant amount, just because I want to support small/indie devs. And in some cases (like for Subnautica: Below Zero), I bought the title EA but held off playing it (or even keeping track of development) until it was nearly released.

3

I have experience with two early access games. One is Wind Bound. It is a survival/adventure game, which started out with a very minimalist sort of story. It was fun, I could play it with the kids – no firearms, no fighting other people, just killing animals for survival, plus building boats and paddling or sailing them between islands. I liked it, although it was a bit short and a little repetitive in some of the animations.

I expected them to primarily add to it. Instead, updates have changed the whole game a lot. There are added “spirit” enemies, which are essentially other people you have to fight, so I’m not thrilled with my kids playing it. Also these fights are hard. They also made the sailing much harder, as well as other game mechanics. The fighting system now involves doing combos with the right timing. I don’t enjoy any of the new content, but I’m sure others do. I would not have bought the game if it had already been in this form.

My other experience (which I’m relatively new to) is with 7 Days to Die. It’s a survival, crafting, zombie horde sandbox game. It’s supposedly in early access, but alpha 20 was just released, and it’s been in “early access” since 2013. The developers make changes to improve or change things periodically. I’m not sure it will ever be “released.” I started with alpha 19. Alpha 20 looks great (as in, visual improvements) but they took a system I liked – farming – and seem to have totally borked it. Overall, I think it has a lot of improvements, but it also seems like they could just change a bunch of stuff next time – it’s not necessarily on a path of continuous progress toward a vision of a final game.

4

I am the opposite of an early adopter, so I have no interest in playing early access games. I’m glad there are other people out there willing to do alpha/beta testing, though.

5

So to be clear, since I was mentioned as part of the argument that lead to the creation of this thread, my only point to early access is that there are people who avoid any game labelled “early access” because they think they’re incomplete, but have no problem buying games that are obviously incomplete yet do not label themselves as early access. I don’t think that’s a rational behavior. Early access games often reach a stage of polish where they are quite well developed and close to feature complete, and non-early access games are often given “full release” in a broken and incomplete state and still require a lot of development.

I used Cyberpunk 2077 as an example. And by “incomplete” in that case, I mean it obviously could’ve used another year of development before release. It wouldn’t have been out of place to be labelled “early access” in theory when it released given how underdeveloped it was, but AA and AAA companies will almost never label themselves early access - which is fair, because most of the point of the early access process is to allow an alternative funding model to publishers. My point was that games should be evaluated on their merits individually, rather than whether or not they’re labelled early access.

You took a position that was orthogonal to mine, which was essentially that no early access games could compete with Cyberpunk 2077, because it was a story-driven game which is inherently better than (or at least more ambitious than) games that are designed with more of an infinite replay loop. I don’t really agree with that assertion either - that’s just your preference. Factorio or Rocket League are not worse games than Cyberpunk 2077 just because they don’t have a story.

I will say that there are story-driven early access games, with Divinity Original sin / 2 / Baldur’s Gate 3 being the leading examples. I, personally, think that it’s a bad idea to play a game like that in early access, because you’re getting an incomplete version of the story, and that seems like it would be awkward to me. Each update, rather than adding just new features, would add new bits of story - but then do you go back and play them out of order, or what? So I agree that games that are story-driven are less suitable for the early access model. But the fact that other people were willing to do exactly that ended up contributing to the quality of the final product.

I think early access is a good thing as a concept, as it’s basically a better way of crowdfunding than something like kickstarter. It allows independent developers to get away from being reliant on publishers, who often use their control to stifle creativity and innovation. Anything that gives developers a route to get their games out outside the publisher system is a good thing. It also allows a lot more user feedback from people who, for whatever reason, want to be early adopters and often ends up creating a superior product in the end.

But I think people who are looking to buy a game should judge games by their merits as they exist now, regardless of whether or not they’re labelled early access. If the game looks like something you’d enjoy, now, in its current state, go ahead and buy it. Both early access and non-early access games do, or do not, receive future support, though early access games tend to receive more. I believe the position of “I will not buy early access games no matter what” is not rational, and in an era of online patching, what qualifies as a game being in “release” stage rather than still in the developing stage is very arbitrary, since some games are released in an underdeveloped state, and almost all games receive post-release support.

6

My reasoning is that, by waiting before buying, a game will almost never get worse and will usually get better. Furthermore, I tend to lose interest in a game after playing it for a certain period of time. So why shouldn’t I spend my time playing the best version of the game?

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While any game is sort of a gamble, if you’re buying a traditionally published game, it probably has more reviews and 3rd party information available. Buying a “broken” AAA game is usually a question of not doing any cursory research whereas buying an EA game that’s basically a tech demo can more easily stem from developer hype mixing existing and “upcoming” features and a legion of enthusiastic True Fans. The signal to noise ratio feels different. I’m not opposed to EA games, mind you, but I do think they present some extra risk and it isn’t as easy to suss out the good ones.

My most up and down EA experience was probably with ARK. On one hand, it was terribly optimized and had numerous mechanical issues. On the other hand, I much preferred the game when it was simpler and more Sim Caveman than the later versions that got into pew-pew laser dragons and each thing taking fifteen steps (vs knocking out dinosaurs and shoving berries down their throats until they learn to love you). So, while it was a mechanically rougher experience playing ARK early, I’m glad I did because I don’t think I’d have enjoyed it as much if I came in after its official release. Rust was much the same; the early experience may have been super janky but it had a raw newness and chaos to it that you’ll never experience by waiting a year or two for the bugs to get worked out.

8

I have had my heart broken by a few EA games. But I’m a sucker for them. As other stated, I like supporting the development of games. But you have to enjoy it for what it is, if it never changes.

9

Sure, I agree with this for single player games. This is why it doesn’t make any sense for anyone to buy a single player game for full price at release, especially on PC where the stock and discounts are reliable. Why pay $60 now when you can pay $10 for a better version of the game in 2 years?

Multiplayer games are a different story, though. There’s going to be a lifecycle to the multiplayer base of a game. If you get in early, you can learn and grow with the community rather than dropping in later to play with a bunch of people way more familiar than you are, and you may be getting into the game when the multiplayer population is biggest and most vibrant. There, then, there’s a cost to waiting, and early access games often see their peak popularity before they consider themselves at the release level.

10

I fall into the category of “know what you’re buying” and its immediate extension “publicity sometimes lies”.

To throw another game development model into the mix: there’s also “base game plus frequent expansions”. Ideally, the base game is feature-complete and works fine by itself. Expansions add more features while also paying for free improvements to the base game.

Paradox Studios (Crusader Kings, Stellaris, etc) uses this model with varying degrees of success. Their expansions always come with free fixes to the base game and previous expansions. And you always have the option of reverting to previous versions. But sometimes they add as many bugs as they fix, as it sometimes goes in software development.

11

I was looking for games on Steam. I bought a friend Beam.NG for his birthday. It was published in 2015. It is still “early access.” 7 Days to Die, published in 2013. In the case of these games, what does early access even mean?

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I don’t really understand the appeal of early access games from the consumer’s point of view. Why would I be interested in paying for an incomplete product? Perhaps if I wanted to help out a small independent producer and make sure they have the funds to finish a project I think it promising. But games are often buggy or outright broken on launch to begin with. Early access seems like a great deal for publishers but offers nothing of benefit to me.

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It’s quite simple. People don’t like to wait, they want it now. Regardless of what state it’s in.

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  • Some people want to support the developer
  • Some people like to feel as though they’re part of the development process. How much they’re a part is arguable (and would vary from dev to dev) but some people get into the whole forum posting and bug finding thing.
  • Some people want to get in early and feel like they’re in the first wave. Like I mentioned before, the early weeks/months of Rust (or PUBG or other genre setting titles) aren’t what you experience now. Maybe you could argue that it’s better now but no one else is going to recreate that all new, ground floor, experience.
  • Some people, speaking of ground floors, want to get into multiplayer games early for the systematic advantage later on of having more time in the game, more levels, more cash, etc.

And, of course, not all “Early Access” games are in the same state. Some are very playable and fun and the devs are just working on fleshing out the end game or adding more maps. So, sure, you CAN wait for the “finished” game but you can also feel like you’re getting your money’s worth now because the game is essentially a full product. A few titles also stated that the Early Access price would be lower than the “release” price since you were taking some risk or buying into a less complete game but I don’t see much of that any longer. Probably because so many games wind up being cheap in bundles or deep sales later so you have guys who bought in a $20 thinking it was cheaper than $30 then, eight months later, it’s with six other games for $5.99 on some bundle site.