In Paradox defence they released a patch pretty quickly once it was released to the masses with miriad of different hardware configs.
To be honest, they prob should have just beta early released it.
This way they could have caveated any issues and allowed the feedback to refine the codebase.
£70 ish quid for the premium edition to run like shite takes the biscuit.
But yet if they released it Early Access to crowdsource their QA, people would have dogged all over them about “what’s with the EA bullshit, just release the full game when it’s finished”
Personally, I’m a huge fan of Early Access, I like playing 3/4 finished games and having actual tangible input on the finishing touches. It’s made several games that I already really liked in their EA state, into masterpieces.
But your average gamer just wants to buy a game and have it work perfectly. When it doesn’t, tantrums happen.
I feel like if they:
- released earlier with Beta: tantrums
- delayed to get perf up: tantrums
- cut features/details to get perf up: tantrums
- released on time w/perf issues: tantrums
I just ignore it. I have a fairly new setup and turned a few things down, so I can get 70 +/- 10 most of the time, but I trust they’re working on it so I can turn them back up later. Perf testing on a huge myriad of different system setups is hard to do. At least they didn’t pull a “here it is, we’re done.” Like some other groups might have. They acknowledged it, they announced the low perf and their continued work, and they released anyway so people who want it and can play it, get to.
I used to hate early access - why should we pay to test an unfinished game, when that’s an actual job that people get paid to do?
but I’ve come to recognise that it’s am important avenue for funding for many developers, and tbh, I don’t think any of the early access games I’ve played have felt “incomplete” - perhaps lacking polish, perhaps in need of more content, but that’s true of many full releases, and early access not only gets you these games at a reduced price, it effectively guarantees a large amount of free DLC as the game gets made more complete.
my only real complaint now is sometimes I like early access features which end up getting cut from the finished game.
