So basically, a AA studio, combined with a publisher that is still currently being sued by Nintendo, managed to make a game that Ubisoft spent half a billion dollars and a decade to fail at making.
In other news:
So basically, a AA studio, combined with a publisher that is still currently being sued by Nintendo, managed to make a game that Ubisoft spent half a billion dollars and a decade to fail at making.
In other news:
Ah, yeah, I thought you meant EA as the company EA, not Early Access.
My bad!
Other than that, I don’t think I disagree with anything you’ve said.
Yeah, I don’t /do/ early access games myself anymore, I let other people be the beta testers… far too often a game will go to early access too early, and then basically over the next year or two it becomes evident the dev team is only moderately competent, not really good enough to fix problems, add features, and do something, or at least a combination of somethings that is well orchestrated and actually unique or better than what’s come before.
I also view Valheim as essentially the gold standard for the gameplay genre, but yes, it could be so much more, if they actually took the time to do a more serious revamp.
But, thats the problem with an early access approach: To do that, what you’re describing with more extensive biomes and such… well, they basically have to rewrite and expand a foundational layer of the game, and then make sure all the other layers of the game built on top of it, that they’re all compatible.
Whats much easier to do is not futz with the foundation, and add more layers on top, or tweak them and how they work together.
Perhaps ironically, I’ve been tinkering with setting up a proc gen terrain system in Godot, and uh yeah, its actually pretty complicated to get something that both looks and plays well, and can also actually run reasonably well on most people’s computers.
I could build more of ‘game’ based on what I currently have now, but… if I wanted to go back and refine/overhaul it later… I’d probably end up basically redoing just most of the game, in general.
(Though I’m not personally aiming toward ‘open world survival craft’, proc gen maps/levels/terrain/buildings do have more use cases than that.)
Yeah, I’m pretty sure we’re closely aligned on this stuff – though I’m more of a “fuckit, I’mma beta test this shit” type.
The ability to release a ‘new’ game, which has done that fundamental rework of underlying mechanics, is one of the things we lose when we see an extended EA approach – I totally get that its a bunch of work to refine those systems, and its a right pain to try and backport it after you’ve done a bunch of the other bits. Which is why I’d be supportive of a small shop that released a game for $20-30 every couple years, which was just iteratively improving on those back end components., rather than paying $20 once and getting 5 years of very slow, relatively inconsequential content drops.
I still have some hope for Light No Fire, though that’s largely based on hoping that Hello Games learned a bunch of lessons in regards to world building / plot progression type stuff from No Man’s Sky. If it turns out to essentially just be a reskinned NMS on a single world, that’ll be real unfortunate.