Games

33898 readers

1284 users here now

Welcome to the largest gaming community on Lemmy! Discussion for all kinds of games. Video games, tabletop games, card games etc.

Weekly Threads:

What Are You Playing?

The Weekly Discussion Topic

Rules:

Submissions have to be related to games
No bigotry or harassment, be civil
No excessive self-promotion
Stay on-topic; no memes, funny videos, giveaways, reposts, or low-effort posts
Mark Spoilers and NSFW
No linking to piracy

More information about the community rules can be found here.

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

975

Steam now warns about Early Access that have not been updated in months. (bsky.app)

submitted 1 day ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

102 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Excellent feature. One of the first things I check anyways when buying early access games is when the last news post was.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 day ago

My only real counter to that is Project Zomboid. It's a complete game. It's in EA due to them wanting to add many more gameplay systems to the existing complete sandbox. They have a roadmap somewhere. They don't release major updates without multiple ones being added.

Last major update (41, a few years ago) was drivable cars (and all the spawning systems, loot, and map changes to make them fully fleshed out) and multiplayer. I'm sure there was more, but those were the standout things.

The new major update (42, available through a public opt-in beta branch right now) is a complete overhaul to gunplay, liquid management/mixing, crafting systems, lighting engine, and the addition of NPC animals with a full husbandry system. And that's only the highlights. It will stay in beta as they get better data for balancing the new features and the absurdly increased player count surfaces bugs they didn't find through internal testing. Once it's balanced and stable (maybe a year), they'll push this update to the main branch where it will continue to get minor bug fixes as things crop up (usually bugs surfaced by the modding community by the time it hits stable).

Then they'll keep crunching away on work on human NPCs and simulating story stuff with loot generation, which I believe will be the next major update in a few years.

Each intermediate release is a complete game, it just doesn't have the full set of features on the roadmap. It still is the best zombie survival sim on the market as is.

But it is absolutely a unicorn of early access.