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First, we released major updates slowly so that casual players would not experience random bugs during normal play. We took a number of steps to meet these two conflicting goals. We were very careful about how we rolled out changes while also maintaining the position that the point of Early Access was live experimentation, so we would be fearless in that regard. This type of conflict is paradoxical вЂ“ the point of Early Access is to be able to change the game for a live audience and yet players can punish developers for doing exactly that.

Offworld trading company debt update#

A good example of how this can go wrong is the Corpse and Hound update from Darkest Dungeon (see Tyler SigmanвЂ™s 2016 GDC postmortem ) which put the developers at odds with a vocal portion of their community.

Offworld trading company debt how to#

One crucial aspect to doing Early Access right is figuring out how to update the game while also keeping it playable. There is no better argument for Early Access than learning about a problem while there is still plenty of time to fix it.

If we did not have Early Access вЂ“ even if we only had a small private beta вЂ“ we would not have discovered this important issue until it was too late.

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However, the important point is that we made this change a full year before we shipped Offworld, so we had plenty of time to test and balance the mode, write AI for it, and decide how to introduce it to the player. (A counter starts at $200K debt and then goes down in real-time so that players who found earlier start the game with more debt, essentially вЂњbuyingвЂќ their founding location on credit.) This option worked perfectly for our most competitive players and quickly became the de facto standard for online play. The solution was to start with the map fully revealed and then let players choose where to found, with a debt auction determining who gets to found first. These players were concerned primarily with a sense of fairness, which was a reasonable concern for the hardcore community because founding location is so important for high-level play in Offworld. The players argued that if a map had a founding location which was superior to all others, the game would be won simply by whoever discovered that founding location first. We discovered this issue during the first competitive tournament as the scanning system quickly became a point of contention. A great example was player dissatisfaction with scanning the map before founding an HQ this feedback led directly to the development of the Reveal Map option that completely changes how the game begin. Offworld was on Early Access for 14 months вЂ“ approximately half of the project вЂ“ and we learned many things that we would have never discovered internally. We were worried about the potential marketing impact of Early Access on our final release launch, but we still went for it, assuming that the increase in quality from early feedback would outweigh the cost.ДЇeedback is important because it is the best way to learn about a game вЂ“ finding out how people actually play instead of how the team imagines they are going to. Getting good feedback from players before release is a logistical challenge, especially for a game with a major multiplayer component, and Early Access would solve that problem for us, a small indie team making a very unusual RTS without combat. Thus, as soon as I heard that Valve was starting an Early Access program, I knew we wanted to take part with Offworld Trading Company. The logistics of managing this group вЂ“ with NDAs, physical copy protection, and bi-weekly patches вЂ“ were a nightmare but much of what went right with the game can be traced to feedback from this group, which kept us on the right track. In contrast, we recruited a private external testing group from the community to play Civilization 4 over 18 months before we shipped. I saw this first-hand with Civilization 3 and 4 the former had no external feedback before shipping and thus had numerous gameplay and balance issues that would have been easy to fix if we had simply known about them. No one knows a game both better and worse than the development team, which understands why every decision was made but is also blind to how the game appears to new players.ДЄt Mohawk, we believe that games need outside feedback as soon as possible. Basic assumptions about how the game should be played might be wrong, and a community more dedicated to winning can easily find holes in the balance. Often, this discovery is not made until shortly before shipping when the game is finally played outside of the development team.

The most common problem in the games industry is waste вЂ“ wasted time, wasted effort, and wasted money on design ideas that arenвЂ™t actually fun in practice.