Early Access IS Your Launch

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I am going to start off this mornings post by linking a tweet that I read yesterday morning. When I first processed this shortly after posting my blog for the day… I had the immediate reaction of “no it didn’t, that game is old”. Please note I am in no way singling out GameSpace here or picking on them, because much like I did in my own inbox they received a press release talking about how the game was coming out of Early Access. I am not even picking on Fantasy Strike to be truthful, because they are only the latest instance of this to catch my ire. The problem is that in my mind this is a game that launched roughly two years ago.

If game sales are based upon the amount of hype that you can generate for your game, doing Early Access means whatever hype you could have generated was spent on that. For me personally a game launches the moment you start taking money for access to it. I also feel like a game doesn’t get a pass for me while it has an alpha, beta or whatever the next industry catch phrase for “unfinished” is attached to it. Once you start accepting money to let players play your game, you have launched.

I think the core problem here is we have two different offshoots for why games claim to be going into Early Access. The first is as a funding vehicle, and if you are a small studio and need an infusion of cash especially if you are self publishing… then you should feel zero shame about using this. It does not give you the rights to make a big deal about it when you “officially” launch other than maybe a pat on the back and a hearty “good job” for not imploding along the way. I think the ideal scenario was that of Starbound that held back a massive update to release to their fans as a sort of last hurrah for leaving the Early Access system and going into official release mode.

The second route seems to be in a scenario when a game wants the fans to feel like they have shaped the end product. While I have vacillated wildly about on this point… I am arriving at the stance that this is a horrible idea. In truth fans should have very little say in the design of the game and really should only be engaged with the final fit and polish… as was traditionally the role of a closed or open beta process. I will always have opinions on the way things should have been done, but the truth is as a fan and a blogger I have no clue at all what I actually want until I get my hands on it and play it.

There have been many times that a game on paper sounds like everything that I ever wanted. Then I start playing and I realize that it was a horrible idea. Also similar there have been many times I wound up playing a game that I never thought I would like and it ended up eating two or three weekends of my time. My ability to decide what I actually like is flawed… and I think it is similarly flawed for every other gamer out there. We fundamentally do not know what it is that makes an experience that we will enjoy. We are really good at determining what it is we do not like, and tend to focus on eradicating those things rather than actually promoting the things that we enjoy. So in the end you wind up with experienced that have been carefully curated by people screaming at the top of their lungs telling the studio what not to do.

The truth is, if I had my druthers… I would not even know a game existed until three to four months before it launches. I know we have an entire industry built upon the constant stream of hype surrounding the game release cycle, but I am not entirely certain this is a good thing. During the EGM era of games magazines you had a month to month cycle of content to fill… now if you don’t get the eyeballs within the first few hours of an announcement you have lost that revenue. This leads to a very short sighted and hyperbolic approach to trying to be as sticky as humanly possible to cash in on that brief blip when people are hungry for more information.

This has lead to a situation where announcements are timed for all of the major conferences and are comprised of about 90% vaporware and good intentions. The tale of the Anthem development cycle is all too familiar with E3 demos being loosely cobbled together and not representative of the final product at all. Hell this has even become its own kind of content, where you take trailers that were first shown and bash the product based on how much it did not live up to those expectations. We are a snake that is eating itself and I fear that eventually this is all going to end up with an Atari style crash if we are not careful.

Grinds Are Not a Spectator Sport

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I feel like I thoroughly squandered my evening in a delightful manner, as I have done for most of the recent nights. The problem with grinds is that they don’t exactly make for exciting reading material. I closed out the night just a little ways into 57 on the Red Mage. I am still somewhat shocked and amazed that I am enjoying the class as much as I am. However I really have not found a single class design in Final Fantasy XIV that I did not enjoy at least on some level. Probably the ones that I like the least are Ninja and Monk, in part because they also seem the most “fiddly”.

Then again I have not touched either of them since Shadowbringers and I probably owe it to myself to do that. Dragoon used to be on the list of fiddly classes, but the recent changes have greatly improved the flow of combat for that class. Maybe Monk and Ninja got similar tweaks… but I have a feeling that I will still have to memorize a bunch of attack patterns on the Ninja to keep from getting a bunny on my head. Possibly the least fun to play in Deep Dungeon content is the Summoner which generally speaking throws up dots on something and then gets to do nothing with them because it dies instantly to some melee dps.

I am in this weird mode where I just sorta want to level all of the things. I am greatly enjoying the flow of Deep Dungeon, and by that I mean both Palace of the Dead which will take you from 1 to 60 with relative ease and Heaven on High which picks up at 61 and drops you off neatly at 70. The only thing I can really relate it to is Diablo, because it occupies a very similar space in my brain as that of doing Nephalem Rifts or Bounties. I pop in and focus on something largely mindless while being treated to the always amazing soundtrack of the game. It is the perfect level of mindless engagement that I need to clear away a day worth crap from my brain.

All of that said… I am also keeping my eye on the horizon. I know that around August 27th the gates open on World of Warcraft Classic. I’ve more or less stopped playing the beta in preparation of the eventual grind to come. There is no sense in leveling characters that will ultimately just go away when that leveling process is anything but trivial. Right now the target is to level up an Undead Warrior, in part because I know my friend Grace will be leveling something Undead and that makes life a little easier on the connecting and running content together side.

Quite frankly due to the wild success of Shadowbringers I have no clue how many other people we will have with us along for the ride. Had Shadowbringers bombed or largely been a forgettable experience, I figure everyone would have jumped on the Classic boat just for something to do. On a similar note I am not entirely certain how much time I will be devoting to the experience myself. I figure I am going to need a little something less hardcore to keep swapping over to in order to sorta dull the pain of the grind.

I guess at this point… I am curious. How many of my readers plan on going down the dark path that leads to World of Warcraft Classic? I’ve already decided for the purpose of tracking, I am going to treat WoW Classic as a separate game from World of Warcraft given that it will be a vastly different experience. Right now for example I am not touching WoW Live at all and have not been for honestly longer than I realized. The last time I played WoW Live with any regularity was in November some seven months ago. Hell that alone probably is one of the longer lapses in gameplay I have experienced since Cataclysm.

Once again I am posting the most up to date version of the list. There have been a few people who have signed up since yesterday and our totals are up to 41.

Here is a quick summary of the Blaugust 2019 Links as well.

A Drought of Silverware

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One of the things that I have learned about myself is the more responsibility that I gain in the workplace, the less I want any at all in the gaming space. Yesterday morning I was completely gung-ho about getting in and doing some Eden on reset day. I even went so far as to make plans with some friends to try and make this thing happen. However by the time I got off work, I was in a completely different mindset and just could not handle any sort of serious activity.

There are days like yesterday when I leave the work environment completely emotionally and physically drained. A few years back we took the DISC assessment, and I remember being warned by the person going over the results with me that I was operating in the work environment well beyond the bounds of my comfort level. If I remember correctly there was 30 point swing in several of the indicators between my natural and adjusted or “work” states.

I feel like I sorta operate in this weird place as a sociable introvert. I can pretend to be extroverted really well, but it has a pretty significant cost and last night more or less was an example of this. I logged into Final Fantasy XIV but I didn’t really pay attention to chat at all and just spent my time quietly grinding away at Palace of the Dead. I think this is why I have enjoyed the Deep Dungeon systems so much is that it feels like I am doing group activity, but really I am largely just soloing with very limited consequences.

My hope is that as the week goes on I will get the “oomph” required to be a responsible adult and do my tankly duties. I really do want to get some more gear and collect another one of the doodads that will eventually turn into a shiny new axe. What I ultimately did however was head to bed around 9ish do my dailies in Dragalia Lost and play some Final Fantasy V for awhile on the tablet. I’ve played the game for Four Job Fiesta a few times, but never actually played it legitimately the way I would want to play it.

As far as Blaugust news goes, we are continuing to have a handful of sign-ups trickling in. However we are starting to get down to the wire. Next week is the official beginning of the event and I feel like there are a bunch of people that have yet to actually go through the process of signing up. The discord is active once again, but I have not had that much time to check it during the day. Unfortunately when I get home at night I tend to enter a space where I seemingly go blind to social media. I am however catching up on what is happening as often as I can.

As far as participants go, Chestnut is working on another twitter list pulled from the spreadsheet. Basically the information is copied and pasted from the sign up form verbatim, so if there are errors with the way you are showing up in the list that likely means I need to correct how your site was signed up initially. I’ve been trying to triage issues as they arise, but I generally don’t go back and update the previous lists. With that note… here is the most current list of participants to date.

Once again repeating the common links that folks catching up now might find useful.

This weekend I plan on starting some brainstorming about topics that I would find helpful were I just getting started out in this madness. If you have at all considered doing this thing, then please by all means sign up and be counted! Once again I will throw out the disclaimer that the email address being collected from signing up on the form is going no further than that initial spreadsheet. It is only there if for some reason I need to contact you regarding Blaugust. In the past we have had sponsors pop up and give prizes and largely I have used email addresses to contact folks directly for these purposes only.

Sleepy Ramble

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Last night was one of those nights where I did not get much of anything accomplished. Starting around 8 pm I was ready to sleep… even though we managed to hold out until around 9 before actually doing that. Once I hit the pillow I was completely zonked for the night and didn’t wake up until the wee hours in the morning when my brains auto timer seemed to think I had slept enough. I was able to shrug this off however and go right back to sleep… and given the slightest opportunity as I sit here at the keyboard I feel like I could still successfully doze off again.

I feel like I might be starting to fight whatever crud has been going around through the office. Initially I think we all thought it was just allergies… because even folks who do not traditionally have problems elsewhere end up developing allergies here in Oklahoma. The oppressive heat has not helped either with recent days nearing 100 but with a heat index well 15 to 20 degrees higher than the actual temperature. We are finally starting to get a break from this over the last few days, but it is somewhat sad when you consider 85 degrees to be “cool”.

Last night I put some more levels on the Red Mage and even though I am absolutely convinced I am probably playing the class wrong… I am enjoying myself. It is funny how adding a sword to a finger wiggler instantly makes it more enjoyable for me? I remember back in the day one of my favorite party comps in the original Final Fantasy was Red Mage, Monk, Thief and Warrior. I mean it is not a suggested comp by any means but when I was grinding it allowed me to use as little magic as humanly possible. Magic made me go back to town to rest, and my goal was to stay out as long as humanly possible.

I am wondering if this first Final Fantasy game ultimately set my feelings about Magic users from that point out in future outings. My preference from that point forward has always seemingly been to include as few magic users as humanly possible in my parties. The classic comp would insist on a Black Mage and a White Mage, but I often times took a Red Mage just so I could use proper weapons. In Final Fantasy V I am super partial to the Mystic Knight because it is effectively a Warrior with elemental buffs. Side note… I kinda hope that eventually makes its way into Final Fantasy XIV as an eventual job.

As far as dreams went, I did have a super lucid dream where I apparently was visiting the Blizzard games campus in Anaheim and wound up taking some sort of an assessment. I have no clue why I was taking an assessment, because I thought I was visiting as a blogger. I don’t remember a lot of the questions on the assessment, but for whatever reasons various Devs were talking with me while I was sitting there filling it out. I quickly became aware that all they wanted to talk about were the more modern games like Overwatch, and really the only thing I was interested in talking about was Diablo or World of Warcraft.

There was a time when I felt like I more holistically cared about the output of Blizzard Entertainment, and now they really are just the Diablo and WoW company for me personally. I am passingly interested in a lot of the other things that they create, but they aren’t exactly how I want to spend my time. I feel like I got the whole online multiplayer shooter thing more or less out of my system during the 90s, and once MMORPGs existed I was more or less gone. While I dabbled with MOBAs it was also not really my jam.

I feel like during the 90s there are a whole bunch of games that I played more or less because online play was somewhat of a novelty. We were still enthralled by the fact that the internet existed, and if I could play a game with other people over this new fangled invention I was going to try it. Even then… I was way more into making maps and sharing “PUDs” with my friends than I was ever into actually playing Warcraft II. However I do remember some really happy times surrounding that game.

In college, towards the end of my stay there… the campus opened a state of the art 24/7 computer lab. There were many a night when several of us would go there to hang out on IRC, because there was something special about being both in the same room with someone and being online in a shared environment at the same time. Many times however we would wind up installing Warcraft II on eight computers and engaging in a massive 8 way battle. Why? Well because we could of course and because it was new and exciting.

Now online play is more or less expected… and as a result a lot of my hook for playing some of those other games went away. Anyways… today’s post has ended up being a massive ramble. I blame either getting too much sleep or not enough sleep. Here is hoping that I return tomorrow with something resembling a normal and proper post.