Early Access games that didn't turn out to be shit

I know that they are incredibly rare but some of them must exist. Pic related, best purchase of my life.

That was the worst purchase of my life. The game is excellent but I have no friends to make it playable.

How good is this?

KSP, Factorio
that's about it.

FTL
Chivalry: Medieval Warfare
Banner Saga

Depends if you have friends to play it with.

Want to give me your Steam user?

Oh wait, thought you were asking about Tabletop

this one's breddy gud

Subnautica, dead cells (although the brutal update ruined it before foundry came around)

Yeah, pic related
There's also AX:EL which was pretty fun for the little I tried


It's pretty good but the dev is pulling some weird move where the PS4 gets an exclusive improved version of only part of the PC release or something stupid.

"we fixed the netcode" -space engineers 2017

Bought Minecraft in infdev for $10. It's shit now, but was easily worth it considering numerous modded playthroughs and good times.

darkwood

I tried playing it with a couple of turbo autists from here and instead ended up shitposting on Holla Forums and reading doujins with the ingame tablets.

Sounds par for the course

I'm shit at board games and don't know how to interact with people.

...

Subnautica
Darkest Dungeon

Distance is stuck in perpetual early access, but the meat and potatoes of the game is its community levels anyway (and there are well over 1000 of them on the workshop). The actual core gameplay is solid too which helps.

It really is a perfect simulation.

Most of the community maps are garbage though.
This is actually what killed trackmania, although trackmania had good community maps before this decade hit.

I'd also add Prison Architect and The Forest to all the other games mentioned in this thread. Both had consistent updates with deadlines that weren't missed and have delivered good experiences well before they were completed games.

As bad as Early Access has been for the consumer, I'd put the blame on Steam more than the developers themselves. Almost nobody understands how snail-paced most development can be, let alone the differences in the critical path that different types of game follow. The best example is the autistic rage at the slow development of Wreckfest, which this December finally rolled out something that is properly playable after years in development. Steam should have separated Early Access from the entire store and fenced it around autist-friendly/child-friendly warnings that they aren't buying a game.

With Subnautica, The Forest, Prison Architect, and Shenzhen I/O, the development has actually been thoroughly enjoyable and insightful to follow along with.

I'm still not sure what happened with that, but given some of the issues they had, like the machine shotguns causing incredible slow down, I imagine it will be awhile before the PS4 version is up to snuff. The fact that their "small" fixes always require an update on the order of 3 gigs also makes me think they did something real dumb. They must have put everything into the executable file, or something like that, so they had to send out the entire thing each time.

Starbound's devs did something similar.

Does it have scrabble at the very least?

That game's performance has gotten steadily worse as time has progressed.

Yup.

While it didn't turn out to be complete shit, they DID however decide to fuck over anyone who isn't a faggy Steam user after promising a DRM-free version. At least it evolved into something decent. Early versions definitely lived up to the "_ Simulator" name.


Yes. It also has good games.

If it requires a surface to play, it will be there. It even has the Triple Triad minigame from FFVIII.

Someone even made a tabletop version of (((Hearthstone))) if you care about that.

Well that's a shame. I thought it was looking promising.

...

Xenonauts? I think it's more of a Kickstarter project than an Early Access one but whatever.

No.

I'll put forth Heat Signature. It didn't stay in EA for very long and it's quite solid. You steal spaceships.


Don't mean to totally shill out but the medieval spin off is actually better than the space one at this point- They actually included stuff like machicolations which pleases my autism, and the merlons are ALMOST tall enough, which is still above par. I play single though, since the netcode on both is still absolutely atrocious and what little AI there is is gutter trash; if you can get a magnet for it, try it out though, can be comfy. I would, however, recommend creative mode since survival build recipes I think are balanced for collaboration and thus can be expensive AKA time consuming to build much which is a gay.
t. over 500 hours in space one and 250 in medieval one


Chivalry is shit though because of ROH and ballerina moves. I mean yeah, it's amazing from level 1-15 when nobody knows what they're doing and you get standard gameplay, but after that it's just level 50's bending over backwards literally to kill you.

Game technically released, it's Tannenburg that is in EA now. Either way Verdun got a pretty big update yesterday which is mixed. I think the update isn't bad outside of the horrid supression system.

This game is still a buggy piece of shit after years of development. Kill yourself.