Work In Progress

V Butthurt at 6'clock!  :3

WIP = Work in progress

-D

The problem isn't testers. It's people who don't know about the game seeing alpha footage and not knowing its alpha. 

Umm. Thanks. I should have known that.

I'd say that given Stardock is taking a page out of the Klei handbook of only releasing 'early access' to really hard core fans who actually understnad wtf is going on is a good one. It should limit the amount of 'omg the game sux' comments.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JRDwA3cQmlc

It's interesting to see the different approaches to Early Access. It's worth a wtch even to just watch the Uber and Klei guys spar over their various decisiosn concerning Early Access.

I'm part of Klei's "Invisible Inc" alpha as well as Prison Architect. I think the concept of doing Early access to yoru core fanbase first, works great to iron out a lot of the egregous stuff and the hard core fans will be more forgiving and understanding of the state of teh game. Then as you get a really solid workng game, to go to "Steam retail" early access. Klei's Invisible Inc alpha is still distributed by Steam only, even though you can't buy it on Early Access on Steam itself, only via their Humble Store where you get a Steam key.

This "Hidden Early Access" model I think would work great for GalCiv3. Rather than releasing an Early access with a $100 and $40 price point package, which inevitably will draw the ire of Steam idiots who will re-hash the arguments that Planetary Annihilation had with their game pricing on Steam. And god I do not want to go through that idioicy.

Wacky Insane Person WIP

It's simple:

They need to have a pre-Beta Beta to make sure the game is ready for the general public for Beta release. A Gamma, if you will.

Duh!

I think games from Amplitude (Endless space/dungeons) are pretty well-made in their "Alpha" status. Some big companies should learn how to make their "stable release candidates" that stable as Amplitude's alpha's were.

Good to know I am sure all 7 of my youtube subscribers would love seeing some alpha game play.

The story I've heard from some of Amplitude's VIPs is that Disharmony was a rush job. They went between their internal alpha and release in a matter of weeks. Most likely a large part of the staff was already on Dungeon of the Endless or Endless Legend.

They clearly underestimated how much work an expansion is, and it showed in the final product. I mean the UI design failure that could block you from building certain classes of ship parts entirely if you lost the resources for one of them could be game breaking on its own, and it was only the first in a long list of issues. The massive drop in Metacritic scores between vanilla ES and Disharmony tells the story.

Performance sucked horrifically on release too, and that was really surprising considering how good Endless Space performance was. It's the rare expansion where turning it off and playing the original version makes the game better.

Sadly, the experience really soured me on Amplitude.

We'll definitely need an overlay on the alpha.

The biggest problem I see in alphas is people will find them boring. Alphas ARE boring. 

Take your favorite game, doesn't matter which game, change the balance a little and it's terrible.  Imagine Civilization IV if it took 50 turns to build a settler. That one change would ruin it.  An alpha of a 4X game is like that. It'll be horribly boring to play and if people try to judge "fun" on an alpha it takes us all to a very bad place.

The Alpha exists for these reasons:

1) Compatibility (it's a 64-bit, DirectX 11 game, there's going to be problems)

2) Game mechanics. What gotchas do you imagine seeing going forward?

3) Game ideas.  What things would you like to see in there? 

Is this a change in the requirements? Many people expect it to work with graphics cards that support DirectX 10.

If you sell a game for real money on a platform where public reviews are allowed and where it doesn't do a particularly good job of screaming at people "this game may  not work very well when you first get it", that is the inevitable outcome.

It's not a surprise at this point when it happens. Steam is not the best place to put something up that doesn't have the "fun" part nailed down yet, alpha label or not.