![]() ![]() ![]() 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 – even if we only had a small private beta – we would not have discovered this important issue until it was too late. 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 “buying” 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 – approximately half of the project – 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.įeedback is important because it is the best way to learn about a game – 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 – with NDAs, physical copy protection, and bi-weekly patches – 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.Īt 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 – wasted time, wasted effort, and wasted money on design ideas that aren’t actually fun in practice. ![]()
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