But early access has its niggles. Its protracted nature also invariably invites press coverage, but that’s kind of the problem. All early access games run the risk of becoming “that early access game,” an unintended byproduct of leaving the nest early. Simply put, they may undermine what they’re aiming for by showing something that can’t compare. First impressions count for a lot, and it’s easy for even the most eager fans to lose interest after playing a premature build, their expectations forever soured by an experience with a threadbare alpha. Projects may go the way of the Wii U and wind up losing to their very name. And it’s hard to stop being “that early access game” once you become it, especially when you’re fighting for attention among a sea of completed indie games.
It’s unlikely that anyone would want to put their game in early access over everything else. Nevermind the risk of a negative stigma. The model itself is just a backup plan, the best some studios can do. And that’s just fine. If they need income, they can get some through early access. But if they just want to interact with players throughout development, there are better ways of doing so.
BioWare, for example, has gone to great lengths to gather player input for the next Mass Effect through simple surveys and polls. More innovative was Insomniac Games’ experimental title Slow Down, Bull, the development of which was regularly livestreamed. Slow Down, Bull’s team of half-a-dozen designers would speak with viewers and directly incorporate their suggestions, and that game turned out pretty good.
Just as importantly, being in early access is no excuse for being unplayably broken. Look at Minecraft, a game that’s effectively living in early access. Like its players’ daunting builds, it will never be finished, but it’s always been functional, save for some extremely early alpha days. What’s more, in 2010 when the game’s servers buckled under a ballooning user count following the game’s initial Internet fame, Notch made it free to compensate. ARK: Survival Evolved, which is currently in early access itself, is also perfectly playable, just skeletal. Its maker, Wildcard, is even paying participants for reporting critical issues.
Early access is a way to offer a sample for now and a promise for later, not a cheap cop out for the most basic elements of game design. Arkham Knight would be just as unacceptable in early access, and you can bet Warner Bros. wouldn’t be giving out copies. Be glad we got them to pull the thing, and try not to think about the news that the PC version won’t be fixed for months. Frankly, widespread early access could be the death of the industry. The writing’s on the wall: some people would inevitably churn out the bare minimum to get some sales, set some lofty goals, and then mysteriously disappear.
Early access should not be anyone’s plan A. If it became the de facto model for AAA games, as our earlier theory suggests, we’d just wind up in an ocean of “those early access games,” doomed to vague homogeny. Episodes are no less inadequate a solution to premature releases, simply because they’re tough to pull off and waiting on several games to complete themselves would quickly become annoying.
If I were an indie developer, I like to think I’d be annoyed to see AAA studios emulate my practices. It’d be like hearing the bourgeoisie complain about their lukewarm caviar. Big-name studios have access to the sort of resources and manpower that smaller studios would kill for, yet still manage to squander it. Rather than worry about the success of the little guys, they need to iron out the kinks in their own system. Set reasonable deadlines, control development and marketing costs, and don’t outsource every little thing, much less an entire port of the game. Also, and I mentioned it briefly earlier, but I’m going to mention it again: QUALITY ASSURANCE.
Some of the best games around will never find their way into a top-sellers list. They’d stand a better chance if they weren’t so hard to set up. “Guess Ubisoft’s E3 weirdness” is as popular as ever, but we only get to play that once a year. More topically, Evolve has practically turned “Count the DLC” into a sport. I think they sell tickets. In installments.
A far more disturbing game has been showing up increasingly frequently: “Will it break?” In the wake of such launch-period shovelware as Assassin’s Creed Unity, Halo: The Master Chief Collection, Driveclub and most recently Batman: Arkham Knight on PC, it’s become something of a rite of passage for AAA showcases. Studios flaunt their best pre-rendered trailers and onlookers try to pick out the one that will eventually be dumped onto its creator’s PR department in a state resembling a slinky that’s been through the washer. It’s like a horse race sponsored by Malaysia Airlines.
Naturally, after seeing the previous targets of “Will it Break?” burned at a stake of pitchforks, developers are as eager to avoid it as players. Warner Bros. and Rocksteady Studios ended the Arkham Knight round early by pulling the game from Steam—a commendable but still reactive solution. Proactive measures are what we need. Perhaps like the plans of studios like Square Enix, which will release its upcoming Hitman reboot over time.
We’ve seen smaller studios release games in episodic installments and sequential patches for years now, but the practice has yet to make its way to big-budget games (egregious DLC notwithstanding). This raises an interesting question. Could release strategies commonly used by independent developers, namely early access and episodic models, benefit AAA games, let alone decrease the odds of them winding up as the next technical trainwreck?
It strikes me as something of a flawed experiment, though I do see the logic. Episodic releases such as TellTale Games’ The Walking Dead have several luxuries unavailable to conventional one-of releases. By splitting the game into several meaningful parts, they adopt a key hook of successful television programs—the all-powerful “next time on” kicker. Episodes also divvy up the work load. They don’t decrease it outright, but they do spread it around a bit, which, if nothing else, makes looming deadlines a bit less intimidating. As a result of all this, episodic games also generate more publicity, which generally leads to higher sales and added resources for later episodes.
What episodes don’t do is address the underlying causes of slipshod, premature releases. Although Arkham Knight’s grisly PC fate was largely due to shifty outsourcing, games like Unity and Driveclub simply fell victim to ever-increasing development costs coupled with the decision to over-prioritize meeting deadlines, often of the holiday variety. That and the apparent extinction of Quality Assurance departments, which are really the best solution to all this. It’s in the title, guys: assure quality.
But back to episodes. The theory is that splitting up big games into smaller pieces would lessen the load on developers, thus giving them more time to polish each piece. The problem is that very few games can actually fit the episodic bill, which requires modular design. Hitman, for example, will see a “sizable chunk” release December 8, with additional installments (that Square Enix is going to great lengths to not call episodes, but which are definitely episodes) filling in the blanks in the following months.
Episodes (deal with it, Square) are a reasonable fit for Hitman because they consist of ostensibly easy to pick up, highly replayable and relatively independent missions, as well as story content. We can only guess for now, but it’s a safe bet that they won’t be as tightly knit as, say, Uncharted 4, which could never be released in episodes because that would butcher the flow. And to go back to the previous issue, episodes don’t make the work any easier. If Arkham Knight had been cut up like a Thanksgiving turkey, it probably would have turned out just as broken. And you may as well tear the bandage off all at once, no? Why drag it out?
So if we can’t just chop games into chunks, what about early access? It has some unique benefits of its own, after all. For smaller studios with little starting capital, it’s a way to get revenue flowing early, thereby expediting the final game’s production. Then there’s the early access mantra: player feedback. It lets buyers willing to invest in an early build play an active role in development via feedback and reports. When handled well, this can build up an active community before a game even releases.
