Alpha/Beta/Early Access etc

[Shengji]

Thought it may be useful for people to have a post where they can report their experiences with games paid for before the official release - they have been quite the gamble recently with three or four recent early access games failing to live up to the marketing (or outright lying), taking full price or charging a premium for the early access and clearly never having the ability to become the games they promise to be.

As all of us forum users have a particular game experience that we enjoy in common, it would be good to share those hidden gems or warn about the turds; give our honest impressions because the gaming media seems to take the stance that they can't write critically about a game which hasn't yet been released. This results in a lot of money being handed over for games which are given the benefit of the doubt at best by the media and at worst marketing claims are reported as independent critical review.

So post your experiences whether they be good, bad or indifferent, and make sure you indicate how much experience you have had hands on with a game. If you have none, please don't post unless you are privy to information not easily available!

[Gunnerman21]

A few years ago, Lego released a game called LEGO Universe. I was following the development of this game for almost a year, because they hyped it up so much. When it was finally finished enough for a closed beta, I signed up to wait another month to be accepted. Then I started playing... It was the most disappointing game I've ever played.

The storyline was okay at first, but in the actual game the worlds you could go to were really small and repetitive. Don't bother looking up the game, they canceled it literally 4 months after it was released. If I remember correctly, it was $15 to $20 per month to play. So many people quit playing that they couldn't get enough funding to even sustain the servers it was running on. In the end they refunded one month of everyone's subscription and shut it down.

[Locke]

Arma III Lite Alpha: 6 out 10
I got it for free (thanks Shengji) but, I would not recommend purchase if you haven't played the earlier games.

The Bad: There is no tutorial, so all controls have to be learned. In addition realism gets in the way again with low ammo carried in armored cars, so if you plan on going on a rampage, you will not have a good time. In an attempt to balance artillery strikes, tanks only seem to carry two shells.

The Good: No regenerating health means that sucking on your thumb won't regrow your arm, you usually have a health kit, so if you can finish the fight, you can cello-tape your arm back on temporarily.

The Ugly: Again, no tutorial means you have to spend at least three or four lives figuring out how to crouch, roll and even aim down your sights.

In Summary (or TLDR): I wouldn't buy it (I didn't) but it is a game I am keeping an eye on, as soon as there is a tutorial, I may play it!

[Katalliaan]

I've got two: Prison Architect and Kerbal Space Program.

Prison Architect is pretty much a management game where you build a prison, mark out rooms for various uses, and hire staff to keep the prisoners in check. The prisoners come in at a fairly steady rate - usually 8 every day. Each one has a rap sheet and a security level (which can be changed). The gameplay itself is fairly easy to grasp, and the performance is fairly acceptable as long as you don't designate out a massive foundation (it returns to normal once it's built, but is painfully bad while your workers are building it) or get a few hundred prisoners. There's also an issue where sometimes prisoners who were put in lockdown (handcuffed and brought to their cell) stop moving even after their time is up, and no guard comes to remove the handcuffs; it's solvable by re-assigning the prisoner's cell anywhere (even to his current cell). Introversion's releasing an update about every month - every one has introduced a new feature and almost all of them have had bugfixes. I've never gotten very far with this game, sadly, mainly because, aside from prisoner count or prison value, there's not much to gauge your success. Most of my prisons die a slow death once I reach around 40 or so prisoners; at that point my income can't keep up with their demands, and the grant money has dried up. That may change when we get a proper prisoner pipeline - as it stands now, it's a pressure cooker scenario where prisoners keep coming in, and the demands of a prisoner only stop if they are killed or escape. Happily, the devs are very interested in the feedback of their backers, so there's a poll to see what features people want to see most; if they do their features in the order of popularity, we would see the pipeline coming in two or three months.

Kerbal Space Program is a pseudo-sim for a space program where you build your own vehicles. I say pseudo-sim because the devs take some liberties to make the game more accessible (i.e. the whole system is scaled down, ion engines are more powerful than their real-world equivalents). The latest major version added rover wheels, and the goal for the next update is to add resources - for example, the Venus analogue is said to have oceans of unrefined rocket fuel. One of the best parts is the fact that they actively encourage modding - the game makes no distinction between a part made by the developers and a part made by a modder, there's a plugin system that allows for custom behaviours (for example: there's an autopilot plugin, a plugin that completely redoes the drag/lift model, a plugin that added a mineable resource before the devs were working on resources, etc), and they've hired on four modders as devs so far. I personally haven't done much with the stock things, as there are some very well-balanced mods out there with aesthetics that I much prefer (see my posts in the KSP mission log thread for examples).

[FaceFoiled]

A few years ago, Lego released a game called LEGO Universe. I was following the development of this game for almost a year, because they hyped it up so much. When it was finally finished enough for a closed beta, I signed up to wait another month to be accepted. Then I started playing... It was the most disappointing game I've ever played.

I got into the closed beta as well for this, and wow.. it really was not what I hoped it would be or what it could have been.

On the topic of pre-orders:
I almost always pre-order games, if not for the additional stuff you get with it, than simply so I don't forget to buy the game afterwards. This is especially true for MMO's, as they often have some pretty cool in-game benefits. :P Truth be told, this has resulted in me buying a lot of games that I ended up not playing, or hardly played. But oh well :P.

Right now I don't have a whole lot of pre-orders lined up. Not any actually. :D Blizzards "Hearthstone" looks good though.
Actually. I am tempted to opt in for the kickstarter of Shroud of the Avatar: Forsaken Virtues, and get the alpha/beta access. I still have a few days to decide on that though, but I will let you know when and if I get it. ^_^

[Rugaard]

starforge is one that i got, an Im disappointed with what they have available, in the various videos Ive seen you can do all sorts of stuff but in what you actually get all you can do is kill monsters in a pre-made area or explore a badly generated world of rock.

[FlowerChild]

starforge is one that i got, an Im disappointed with what they have available, in the various videos Ive seen you can do all sorts of stuff but in what you actually get all you can do is kill monsters in a pre-made area or explore a badly generated world of rock.

Starforge is a game I wouldn't touch with a ten foot pole. It's got "overly ambitious" written all over it.

[CycloneSP]

Well if we're speaking of hype and pre-releases/beta testing, what are ya'lls opinions of The ElderScrolls Online? I've been following that one for a while now and what I've seen and heard is rather impressive. But that's just the advertising/media at work. Do ya'll think it's being over hyped? Or does it seem legit?

[PatriotBob]

Hellgate: London

I wanted so badly to like that game. So badly. But it was just... bad. Lack-luster skill design, game engine was kinda meh. What game engine in it's right mind let's network latency affect model animation? I mean the game concept could have been fun, but their execution was just off.

[Ozziie]

Well if we're speaking of hype and pre-releases/beta testing, what are ya'lls opinions of The ElderScrolls Online? I've been following that one for a while now and what I've seen and heard is rather impressive. But that's just the advertising/media at work. Do ya'll think it's being over hyped? Or does it seem legit?

I want it to be as awesome as they're making it sound, I really do. I've told everyone I know NOT to let me pre-order it without either playing the beta or letting someone else buy it first.

[PatriotBob]

Well if we're speaking of hype and pre-releases/beta testing, what are ya'lls opinions of The ElderScrolls Online? I've been following that one for a while now and what I've seen and heard is rather impressive. But that's just the advertising/media at work. Do ya'll think it's being over hyped? Or does it seem legit?

I want it to be as awesome as they're making it sound, I really do. I've told everyone I know NOT to let me pre-order it without either playing the beta or letting someone else buy it first.

Yeah, when they started describing the game mechanics with something akin to "... you have X classes to choose from ..." my only though was "oh well..."
Maybe it was just me but it seemed like the ES games I enjoyed playing the most went Morrowind > Oblivion > Skyrim. As the series progressed, undoubtedly polish went up but gameplay seemed to regress into homogenized gruel™ like too many games of late.

[Detritus]

Stupidest preorder I ever made, and one of very very few I've ever made was Impire. I saw it looked really cool in Alpha, but needed work, and then it was released with almost no changes. Very very bad decision.

[Wibbles]

It's not quite the same as alpha/beta/early access but I did pledge for two titles on kickstarter: Elite: Dangerous and War for the Overworld. The original Elite (and Frontier Elite) was brilliant back in the day, and to see it resurrected by the same designer who made the original arouses me in questionable ways. War for the Overworld is a Dungeon Keeper remake, endorsed by Peter Molyneux himself. To say I'm excited would be an immense understatement. So it'll be interesting to see if they keep to their promised release dates; E:D has an established team and a proven track record, whilst the makers of WFTO are somewhat unknown. Both are churning out weekly teasers and concept art and talk a lot about game design so I have a fair bit of confidence with both.

[Shengji]

I guess I should have mentioned kickstarter and greenlight, but I very deliberately did not include them in this thread because:

1) There is plenty of media coverage of them, kickstarters especially.

2) The thread will potentially become a magnet for the kickstarter/greenlight spammers

3) Kickstarting is often driven by very different motives than buying a game before release. I know some people view it as a glorified pre-order, but I have kickstarted many people who I believe should be given a decent chance in the industry, even though I think the project on offer isn't going to be up to standard.

Having said that, once a kickstarter has given it's alpha's or betas to the backers, they can offer their critical opinion for the rest of us!

I'm going to be playing the current build of stardrive later, I'll be telling you what I think soon enough!