Early Access is a useful tool for developers, but is it something you should get involved in as a player?
It’s almost inevitable that you’re thinking about buying a game on Steam, that you’ll find out it’s in Early Access. It’s happened to me a few times. It’s something that really makes me reconsider if it’s worth buying into.
In this video, I try to give my best analysis on Early Access and how it effects the game in the long term. Baldur’s Gate 3 recently launched into Steam’s Early Access, and considering Larian Studio’s experience with the program with Divinity Original Sin, and if reviews are anything to go by, it seems like they know what they’re doing. But do they really?
Allow me, a mere gamer, to fully explain everything to you.
Transcript:
Early Access is a descriptor that soured many games for years. A promising game launches on steam unfinished, with the promise of gamers helping to shape the future 1.0 release. Then, over the course of multiple updates, the game would start to morph into something the players didn’t like. Something different from what they purchased months or even years earlier. It became a stain that meant a lot of people just wouldn’t touch your game until it’s full release however many years down the line.
Early Access isn’t something a lot of devs take lightly. I’ve seen countless interviews with developers where they talk about how unsure they were launching into Early Access, compared to just waiting and releasing the full game. And I’ve also seen cases of gamers getting burnt by Early Access.
So what’s the point? Why am I, a stupid moron idiot, preaching to you right now?
In this video, I hope to lay out the reasons a developer would choose to go into Early Access and how players factor into that.
I should preface everything I’m about to say with, “I’m not a game developer”. My only experience in this topic is as a gamer myself, and as the viewer of half a dozen GDC talks featuring developers talking about launching their games into Early Access. So while you should take what I say with a grain of salt, I’ll do my best to base my opinions and inferences as much as I can in the facts that I know.
I’ll also say that I’m not strictly talking about games in Steam’s Early Access program, I’m opening the discussion out to any game on any platform that the developers admit isn’t finished and want player feedback.
With that out of the way, let’s look at a case of Early Access gone right.
Divinity Original Sin 2.
But before we look at that game, we should take a short look at the company behind the game, Larian Studios.
They’re an older studio than I thought and been through quite a lot over the years. Larian was at their lowest point after the release of Divinity 2: Ego Draconis. It had a lukewarm reception at best and they were at a low point financially. So they knew they had to hit it big with their next project. They started work on Divinity Dragon Commander. It was meant to be their next big ambitious title and the focus of the studio for the next few years. But they also started work on a smaller project, one that wouldn’t take as long to put out and would help fund the game that the bigger team was working on. That smaller game was titled Divinity: Eyes of a Child. After a fair bit of work, they launched Eyes of a Child onto kickstarter, with the brand-new name, Divinity: Original Sin.
Of course, Divinity Original Sin is what put Larian on the map for a lot of gamers out there. So how did the smaller game, Original Sin, come to take over the game that was meant to be the focus of the studio, Dragon Commander?
Swen Vincke revealed during a GDC talk in 2015 that the studio realized that they liked Original Sin more and that it had more potential, so they decided to make Dragon Commander the smaller game to help fund the game that they truly wanted to make, Divinity: Original Sin.
The Kickstarter was quite successful, raising nearly a million dollars, over half their intended goal, and it went into Steam Early Access in January of the next year.
Swen talked about how the studio was unsure if they should release into Early Access or not, because they knew they were going to have to delay the game no matter what. Brian Fargo, founder of Interplay and inXile entertainment, convinced Swen to go into Early Access after telling him how successful Wasteland 2’s Early Access run was for the game.
But it’s not like Early Access made the game any easier to develop. If anything, it seems like it puts a lot of stress on the developers. Swen mentions they had thousands upon thousands of community suggested tasks that they sorted through and had to implement. He was concerned if such a transparent connection between the player and developer would harm the game in the long run, but after seeing the results from implementing player feedback from Early Access, he felt it was worth the sacrifice.
In the end, Divinity Original Sin was received quite well in the gaming community when it came out in June of 2014. The non-enhanced edition sits at an 87 on MetaCritic. Not a bad score, but doesn’t really stand out from the pack of other CRPGs.
August 2015 rolls around, and the kickstarter for Divinity Original Sin 2 is announced. And it kind of blows everyone’s expectations into orbit. They had 43,000 backers compared to Original Sin’s 20,000. Original Sin 1 raised 944,000 of their 400,000 dollar goal, doubling it. Original Sin 2 raised 2 million dollars of their 500,000 dollar goal.
I think a lot of that success can be tied back to the success of the first game. And I think that game was received as well as it was because of Early Access. Sure, it very well could have been in the same spot it is now if they had not done the whole Early Access thing, but there’s a lot of aspects of the game that were definitively better at release because of it. It’s very likely that a lot of those 3 thousand bugs that players reported in Early Access wouldn’t have been found by Larian’s internal QA before release.
Like I said earlier, they found themselves in the loop of, “Implement system, get player feedback on it, adjust based on that feedback, implement those changes, get feedback, repeat on and on”. That’s not a type of QA that every developer would be comfortable doing, but it works for Larian, if their most recent games are anything to go by.
And go by them I shall. Divinity Original Sin 2 is the shining example of Early Access done right.
The most important part in successfully launching a game into Early Access in my eyes, is having a fundamentally enjoyable base experience. When it was released into Early Access, it had the full Act 1 of the base game. If you ask anyone who’s played the game, they’re likely to say that Act 1 of the game, Fort Joy, is the best part.
I think that did a lot for them. The fact that what a lot of people say is the best part of the game now, was playable from the beginning, really helped them out. That’s not to dunk on the rest of the game, but Fort Joy is an encapsulation of everything that’s great about Original Sin 2. Interactivity, exploration, interesting characters, and a whole lot of unique experiences waiting to be uncovered.
It wasn’t a scenario where a game launches into Early Access and the developer has to lay out all their promises for the game when it comes out in 4 years. Larian had already done a ton of work on the game and you could see the greatness in it even at that point. The proof was in the game itself. You didn’t have to buy it on a promise that one day it’ll be good. It was already good.
But of course, that wasn’t the whole game. They still had 3 other acts to finish.
And here’s where we get at a fundamental problem of Early Access, at least when it’s done the way Larian did it here. People spend dozens of hours playing the same section of the game over and over, giving thousands of lines of feedback, to polish Act 1 until it’s absolutely perfect. But where does that leave Acts 2 through 4?
It resulted in the game getting dramatically easier in those later acts. They only wanted to release Act 1 into Early Access, so they had to rely on internal QA for all of the testing on Acts 2 through 4. During that process of internal testing, QA started playing with 3 party members instead of the standard 4 party members. But they didn’t tell the developers that they were doing that, so Larian started balancing the game imagining QA using a full party when that wasn’t the case.
On release, Larian received a ton of feedback mentioning how the latter half of the game was too easy. This led to them implementing simple difficulty spikes a few days after release, and it seemed to fix the problem. That scenario isn’t something that affected them too terribly in the grand scheme, if at all, but it showcases one of the many flaws of Early Access.
Despite all that, the game reviewed phenomenally well. It’s kind of insane how much people liked this game. I saw a fair amount of people talking about how it was probably the best RPG of all time. Not just comparing it to games like The Witcher 3 or Skyrim, but older prestige titles like Planescape Torment and Baldur’s Gate II. It was that good.
Needless to say, Early Access worked out extremely well for Larian with Original Sin 1 and 2. So when their next project rolled around, I’m sure it wasn’t much of a choice at all whether to launch it through the program.
Baldur’s Gate III. A title that many thought would never get made. A title that would no doubt come with intense player expectations. A title that many had approached Wizards of the Coast to develop. But there was only one that they thought was worthy of attempting the monumental task of making Baldur’s Gate III. Larian Studios.
It’s one of those dream combinations that you hear people talk about. Bethesda making an open world Pokemon game, Bluepoint games taking on a Metal Gear Solid remake, and Larian Studios making Baldur’s Gate III. I don’t think there’s many developers you’d see people hope to make a new Baldur’s Gate, other than Obsidian.
Simply titling the game “Baldur’s Gate III” sets player expectations sky high. And Larian knows the weight of the situation they’re in. They want to make the best game they can. For them, that means launching the game into Early Access.
As far as I can tell, it’s been working out great for them since they launched a month or so ago. I haven’t played it yet (for a reason I’ll talk about later), but it seems like a lot of people are happy with it so far.
Notice I said “a lot of people”, not “everyone”. There are definitely a non-zero amount of people that are not happy with the game. A common criticism I see brought up is that people claim it’s just a Divinity: Original Sin reskin. It’s hard for me to say if that’s a valid criticism or not, since I haven’t played it yet, but that gets at another fundamental problem of Early Access.
There are just some things that Early Access can’t fix.
A game being too easy or difficult is a simple thing to fix. Okay well it isn’t simple per se, but it is when compared to other, more abstract problems.
When someone says “This game feels like a Divinity: Original Sin reskin,” what do they mean? Because that’s a question that could have a ton of different answers. Is it something as simple as the UI looking and feeling too similar? Or is it something as fundamental as Larian not properly transitioning from the writing style of Divinity to Baldur’s Gate?
If it’s the UI, then that’s something that you could assign a handful of devs to make feel more “Baldur’s Gate-y”. But if if the whole script is the problem, then we have a much more serious scenario on our hands. This doesn’t call for “a handful of devs” this calls for all hands on deck. They need writers to comb over the entire game and touch-up dialog, get voice actors back in the studio, redo all the translations, and do all the normal bug-testing stuff that comes with any update, except on an unprecedented scale.
Again, I can’t really say if that’s the case or not, but I can say for sure that there will be aspects of the game that Larian wishes they could fix, but just can’t budget out the time to fix it. Early Access is about prioritizing what should be done to make the best possible game you can, in the most efficient way.
Even then, even if the build released to Early Access is perfect in every way and wholly representative of the game that’ll be released at 1.0, people will still not play it. And it’s the reason I won’t play Baldur’s Gate III in Early Access.
Simply put, I don’t want to play a game that has a large focus on the story before it’s all in there.
Note that I didn’t claim that was a problem with Early Access. It’s a preference, a difference in attitude. I don’t want to play Baldur’s Gate III right now because the story is the main draw to me. And getting invested in the story, only to have to stop playing at the end of Act 1 until it’s fully released in like a year, isn’t something I want to deal with.
I do realize that not everyone thinks that way though. Some players enjoy the idea of helping to shape the final game. I said earlier that Early Access helped Divinity: Original Sin 2 become a better game, and I’m glad that other people were willing to play just the first act of the game for like a year. But that’s not something I’d ever do.
I’m not wholly against Early Access though. I only hold that stance for games that I’d want to play for the story.
I’ve been playing a lot of Tower Unite lately. It’s basically a social space game where you hang out with your friends and strangers, play games like minigolf and kart racing, and make money to buy furniture to decorate your own player house. It’s a great game to play if you just wanna chat with your pals while doing something small on the side.
It’s been in Early Access since 2016. Yeah, It’s been one of those games. But it’s something I feel comfortable playing in Early access. Because there’s no storyline or lore to worry about. The only thing PixelTail Games adds is new gamemodes or furniture.
It’s a game that really benefits from having an active community. It’s great coming on the server at any point in the day, and recognizing a couple of people. And that feeling is made even better when a new update comes out, and everyone’s playing the new game or grinding for new furniture.
But it would be misleading to imply that it’s all been sunshine and rainbows. Tower Unite is a game with some big problems. It’s always struggled with performance. There’s a lot of crashing going on right now. And the network connection in the plaza can get real bad at times, no matter what your internet is like.
Those are all things I put up with to play a game I still feel is enjoyable at its core. I love decorating my condo. There’s a lot of freedom when it comes to really customizing your house the way you want it. The negatives aren’t enough to detract from my enjoyment. And I think that speaks to how good the core of the game is.
You might notice that I spent a lot of time talking about good games that went into Early Access, but what about the bad ones? Cause there’s a lot of those.
I don’t think there’s a whole lot to say about them really. In most cases, if a game launches into Early Access a mess, and stays a mess after multiple updates, it’s very likely that if it didn’t go into Early Access, it would have launched a mess anyway.
Take the OG Early Access game, DayZ. It lead the charge of Early Access survival games and it was in the program for quite a long time, it launched in December of 2013 and hit 1.0 5 years later in 2018. I never played it, but I remember hearing so many people agonize about the snail’s pace of updates and how buggy the game was throughout the whole process. It’s hard to say for sure, but I think it would be stand among the other big battle royales today if development was handled a bit better.
And uhh… Cube World. Anyone heard of that? Not the most traditional quote “Early Access” story, but still interesting. I’m not going to go into the full development story for it, you can find that from your local Cube World historian. I’ll just give a short rundown. It seems like it started development in 2011. A playable alpha was available to purchase for a bit in 2013, but was shortly taken down after the singular developer, Wolfram von Funck, was on the receiving end of a DDoS attack. He still continued development on the game though. Throughout the next six years, he’d only post like a dozen updates on the game.
People maintained interest in the game though, if only for the potential they thought it had. The alpha that he sold was still in circulation around the web, so people could still play it, and a fair amount of people enjoyed it.
To everyone’s surprise, he announced in 2019 that it’d be coming to Steam. The steam release rolls around on September 30th, and it’s… uhh… kind of a mess.
Von Funck had fundamentally changed the game’s systems, for the worst as most would say. Again, I don’t really want to get into the thick of this whole debacle, but needless to say, people weren’t happy. Not only wasn’t it the game everyone imagined it would be, it wasn’t even the game they played back in 2013. And as far as I know, it hasn’t received a single update since it launched over a year ago.
The point of that whole story is to show that while he never went into Steam Early Access, a game can only be improved by the developer. The fans can give as much feedback as they want and throw out all their hopes for the future, but it’s all on the person or group making the game to live up to the player’s vision.
Early Access is at it’s best when the developer has a great core for their game, but they just want the player’s help on sanding down the edges. Larian can hire a fair amount of QA testers, but they could never come anywhere close to hiring all the fans who love (and are willing to break) Baldur’s Gate III.
Swen Vincke’s first slide in his Divinity Original Sin postmortem states “Broken boring games don’t sell”. And I think that’s the core of it all. Early Access isn’t going to do anything for you if your game is still bad at the end. But that also means to me that games in Early Access can be great. I’ve played a ton of games that I didn’t even realize were in Early Access. Some developers, like Zach Barth, Hopoo, Klei, and Unknown Worlds just make good shit. Early Access isn’t what makes them succeed, what makes them succeed is that they know how to use the concept of Early Access to both better their games and provide an enjoyable experience to early adopters.
To finally address the title of the video, should you play games in Early Access?
If I were to give you a wishy-washy answer like “It depends” after priming you that hard, would you be mad? Ah. In that case, it depends.
Early Access shouldn’t be the be-all, end-all of your decision. Like I said, I don’t want to play a game that has a focus on story before it’s all in there. But some people love replaying games, especially one with a lot of choice like Baldur’s Gate, so I definitely see why someone would get in early on that. And I’m glad those people do get in there and comb over the game with a magnifying glass, finding every single bug and bad design choice.
So don’t worry if a game you want to play is in Early Access. Go get your hands dirty, help the developers in making the best possible game they can.
But that’s… just me. Do you see that like button down there? Huh? It’s right there. Yeah, yeah, no no no god not that button.
Do you have a blanket “No Early Access” rule when buying games? Are you the type of person to join the forums of a game you get and talk with the devs about design decisions? Let me know how you see Early Access in the comments. I have this feeling that the general sentiment around the concept of Early Access has changed in the past 4 or 5 years, but it’s hard to tell.
Also, I hate saying the word “Early Access” and will never say it ever again ever ever. Thanks for watching, see you on the flip.