The success of the Dungeons & Dragons RPG has kicked off a fiery debate about game development, AAA costs, and players’ expectations
The success of the Dungeons & Dragons RPG has kicked off a fiery debate about game development, AAA costs, and players’ expectations
Maybe AAA games just don’t need to be as large or sprawling. Release one full campaign with everything you need included in the price. Then if it does well offer dlc.
As the article points out, balder’s gate was early access for 3 years, sold at full price, and still has bugs. It’s not an exception to the rule, larian just delivered a good product that had good source material behind it.
I personally like the early access model. You get the choice to play the game now, as-is, or wait for the developers to call it finished. Last Epoch is a great example. In its current state, it is absolutely not finished. It still gave me hundreds of hours of entertainment, though, and I expect I’ll get hundreds more when I revisit it again when it’s officially launched.
The important caveat with EA is that the devs actually substantially expand on the early access experience. If they just spend a year or two doing minor bugfixes and then release the game it won’t go over super well. Especially if they reduced scope during early access. I’m thinking of something like Mount and Blade 2 Bannerlord, where the devs had described so many things they wanted to do with the game, but then didn’t realize many of those goals between when it went into EA and when it released.
it’s good enough so when I encounter glitches I simply laugh and move on.
some of the glitches I’ve encountered so far:
There’s one huge bug in Act 2 where enemies in one really hard battle can shoot you through the floor. They know about it and working on it, but that one damn near killed two of my party members. There was no where you could position yourself where they couldn’t shoot to at you through the floor.
Today there is a update drop so hopefully it got fixed. I probably still have a couple region to clean up before Act2. (judging from the revealed map area. )
The only bug I’ve encountered which bothers me is the one where a PC (normally Laezel for me) gets stuck in cinematic mode and their controls get locked out until I reload.
I’ve had that one happen, and seen it on Let’s Plays. It’s always Lae’zel.
It’s because her cuteness is too powerful. The game struggles to contain it
That’s what Solasta did. (Developer: Tactical Adventures)
Then we got two more fully-fleshed adventures as DLC’s, which I was more than happy to buy.
Find good developers and then (if you can) pay full price so they can keep making great, microtransaction-free games.