How Early It Was, How Early...

I nearly gave myself a day off from blogging today, what with Blaugust just around the corner and my having spent a couple of hours moving the modem and router to a different part of the house, which was a hot, sticky and annoying job. Also, if I was going to post something, it would have been Neverness To Everness again and I thought perhaps three posts in a row might be a bit much.

I have a few things bookmarked to write about so I figured maybe I'd fling together a Grab Bag. I made myself a coffee, sat down at the PC to get started on that (It's working fine after the router move, thank you for asking.), which was when I saw on MassivelyOP that Stars Reach is going into Early Access in a little over two weeks.

Not just Early Access, either, but as MOP puts it in the headline "paid early access". Ohhh boy... Might as well say something about that, then.

Before I get into any editorializing about the wisdom of the decision, let's talk about the important part: how much is it going to cost and what do you get for your money? I can answer the first part of that question but not the second.

There are three tiers, coming in at $30, $50 and $80. Obviously, all of them will get you the game but what else you get for your increasingly substantial investment is yet to be revealed. I just checked the Steam Store and there are no pre-orders up as yet but there is a "Why Early Access?" spiel that I'm guessing is new? It seems to be the trigger for the MOP post, anyway. That's where their attribution link goes.

Most of it seems to be the usual set of reasons/explanations/promises every developer gives when pitching Early Access but there are some interesting specifics, one being that Playable Worlds only anticipates the game remaining in Early Access for six months. 

Okay, what it actually says is:

 "Our current goal is to remain in Early Access for at least 6 months." 

which isn't exactly the same thing but six months is going to be all anyone hears.

The other line that stood out for me was on the future of pricing after launch: 

"We plan to sunset founders packs and transition to free-to-play at 1.0." 

For some reason, I thought there was going to be a subscription when the game went Live. I remember the thing about only subscribers being able to build homes, for one thing. Now its confirmed as F2P, apparently. Presumably that includes all the game, not just parts of it. If not, it won't really be free to play as such. I guess that would qualify as a Freemium offer but who can keep up with the jargon?

Let's assume Stars Reach really will be completely Free to Play when launch day comes. Not even Buy To Play, although it looks as though Early Access is B2P, what with those pack prices. It's a weird quirk of of the Early Access process, they way developers believe players will pay for an unfinished game that they plan on giving away for free when it's done. And players frequently prove them right, too, which is even weirder. 

If the game is F2P, how is that going to affect the way people play? There's been much discussion over the potential for griefing in Stars Reach (Okay, "much" is pushing it. Wilhelm's mentioned it a few times...) due to the way you can terraform planets with few restrictions or comebacks, other whatever's provided by by local, player-run governments. I'd imagine making the game F2P could stretch the boundaries of player governance to their limits and probably far beyond. The cosy SWG fantasy might not survive the barbarian hordes of F2P. Not to mention the bots.

As for the game itself, it seems it'll be much the same in Early Access as it has been in pre-alpha.  There's a description of available content in the announcement:

"The Early Access version of Stars Reach delivers the core experience, including combat, building, government, crafting, and trade. Players will have the opportunity to create their homestead, defend it against hostile creatures, create and participate in galactic commerce, and travel between planets using spaceports and wormholes. Players will also spend time in space, which features the same core experience as terrestrial gameplay"

Seems about right from what I saw during my intermittent visits, although I found very little of it engaging enough for me to hang around long enough to test the depth of any of those features. I found the appeal of all of them wore off in a matter of hours.

My main problem was that, while the basics of a potential game were certainly in place when I played, I couldn't see much that I recognized as a gameplay loop. There were a few things you could do but no real sense of why you'd want to do them for long. But, hey, that's what testing is for, right? Sorting the basics and honing the gameplay

Early Access, though, is not testing. Oh, I know developers think it is but players don't and they're the ones paying the money so what they think is probably more important. 

Players think Early Access is The Game. You can tell them it's not as much as you want but they won't hear you.

All the caveats and provisos in the world won't stop people seeing whatever's there when they log in and start playing as The Game. They may understand that it's not the Finished Game but it's still The Game and it better be fun and engaging and worth the money.  And if it's any kind of Live Service game, let alone an MMORPG that's meant to be played for years at a stretch, it better be consistently engaging.

People generally don't cut EA releases slack for still being in development. They also tend not to hang around when they run out of things to do and they often don't come back when more gets added. That happens with games that launch officially, too. Retention is always hard. But retaining interest in an unfinished game is harder still.

Early Access is always a gamble but it can pay off if there's a gameplay loop people find attractive. If it feels like a finished game, in other words, even if it's obviously not.

Valheim is a shining example. That game came out with the first half of the game effectively complete. It was a little rough around the edges but all the important parts worked and worked well. What's more, there was a linear progression through four biomes, each of which felt complete in itself. You could start at the beginning and play through to the end of what was there and it felt like you'd played a game. Millions did.

That's a good way to approach Early Access. Give players a shortened version of what the whole game will be. Then the rest, when it arrives, will seem more like an expansion or even a series of expansions. Players leave satisfied and come back to see what's new. (Granted Iron Crown screwed that up by making the second half of the game ten times harder than the first but the principle stands.)

Going into Early Access with substantial systems and features unfinished or entirely missing is asking for failure, especially when you're charging the price of a complete game. And $30, $50 and $80 are full game prices in the AA and indie market. 

So what do you get for the money, anyway? Other than access to the game, which you could already have had if you were interested, back when Kickstarter pledges were on sale.  

We don't yet know and I have some difficulty imagining what extras there might be. A quote on MOP, unattributed but presumably from Raph Koster himself (Hi Raph, if you're reading...) mentions “increasing rewards and cosmetics”, which is about as vague as it possible to be and still say anything at all. 

And "cosmetics"? What's that about? In a  game that hasn't even nailed down full customization in character creation yet? I mean, it's there, sure, but it's extremely basic by the standards of almost any modern MMORPG. What cosmetics could there be?

I realize I'm jumping the gun by posting this. Playable Worlds is assiduous in sending out emails filled with detail about what they're doing or what they plan to do. I imagine I'll be seeing three copies of a PR release in my inbox any day now. (I still get three of everything they send, even after the supposed purge of unused IDs.)

I could have waited for that before I wrote this post but this way I get two bites at the Stars Reach Early Access cherry. Or three. Blaugust is coming and I'll be glad to have a new topic to cover. The actual Early Access launch, when it arrives bang in the middle of Blaugust, is going to be very interesting indeed. 

There should be plenty to post about then, not least how many people EA brings in and how long they hang around. Stars Reach is only available through Steam so there won't be any secrecy over the  numbers. It'll all be there on the Steam Charts where, as I write, no-one at all is playing, presumably because the server is down. I can see the 30-day average, though. It's ten people.

Early Access has to bring in a few more, doesn't it? But how many more? 

Not long to wait before we find out.