Examining Early Access

This week on the cast, returning fan of the site Paul Tobia joined me to talk about a topic that hasn’t been brought up much: How to handle a game that is coming out of Early Access, and looking at two games that launched recently.

We started with catching up and seeing what Paul was currently playing. Funny enough, we recorded this before the Payday 2 troubles and I got to hear myself talk about how excited I was before all the bad news dropped…it was a simpler time back then.

After that we got to big topic regarding early access and examining Prison Architect and Planetary Annihilation Titans. We started with Titans and our thoughts on how Uber had handled the early access and post kickstarter development of the game. Talking about Planetary Annihilation, we examined how much we both had trouble with the original launch and Paul brought up the changes Titans brought to the formula and how it does feel like what the original release should have been.

Then we talked about Prison Architect, which both Paul and I had been really,really, looking forward to. We examined how Introversion did a lot right with how they handled expectations and Early Access management;becoming the poster child for the program. With that said, we also talked about some of the issues we had with the game and things we wanted to see either fixed or added post-early access.

For more on Prison Architect, you can watch several videos I put up about it
Here are the reviews from the original Planetary Annihilation and Prison Architect here
And like I said before, I really need to hit the first goal of my Patreon campaign and would really appreciate either donations or spreading the word if you like the podcasts that we do.