Amplitude have always used early access for their games, even before Steam Early Access was a thing. Ahead of Endless Space’s release in July 2012, players who preordered the game got immediate access to an alpha build that was steadily patched and updated on the lead up to launch.
To this day, the studio still uses its Games2Gether program, where they discuss design issues with players and poll them for thoughts on how to proceed. Right now, there are a small group of players giving feedback on the recently announced Humankind 2.
However, as Amplitude prepare to launch Endless Legend 2 after a year in early access, co-founder and CEO Romain de Waubert de Genlis readily admits “The whole thing has changed over time.”
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Image credit: Iceberg Interactive / Amplitude Studios
“With Endless Space, we were one of the first games in Early Access on Steam, before it was called Early Access,” de Waubert de Genlis recalls. He remembers the trouble getting journalists to play and cover their games – “The game’s not finished. Why would I come? Let me wait for them to be finished and then I will write an article on it.”. This was also a time before influencers were what they are now, so it was a more private relationship with dedicated players. “It was just between Steam players and us. Undercover.” When their games launched out of early access, that’s when they would see an “avalanche” of players.
“Nowadays, it’s a bit different,” de Waubert de Genlis says. “More players come in early access, more journalists, more influencers. What we don’t know is that if they came for early access, will they come again?” He says that journalists may preview a game in early access but that’s no guarantee of a review. (Edwin previewed Endless Legend 2, for example, but we aren’t currently working on a review.) “Will we have that avalanche of players coming in again or will it be a small batch?”, he wonders.
Like other developers, they’ve taken to holding back a big update for launch day to give players a reason to turn up for 1.0. Endless Legend 2’s full launch sees three new factions added to the game, taking its roster of five to eight, and there are many other changes being made across the game. “There’s a lot of stuff,” de Waubert de Genlis says. “But we don’t know if everyone sees it that way.”
Image credit: Hooded Horse
But it’s not only their approach to early access development that has changed, attitudes towards the release style have inverted. “Going back to 10, 15 years ago, people understood very well it was an unfinished game,” de Waubert de Genlis says, adding that if a game was too polished then players would complain – “They were like ‘This isn’t early access, you should be making the game with us.'” That attitude is very different now. “Now if you come to early access with an unfinished game you’ll get crushed,” de Waubert de Genlis says. “‘I paid you 50 euros and you give me an unfinished game?’ The expectations are not the same at all.”
That change is a challenge, de Waubert de Genlis says, because it doesn’t allow for experimentation. “Originally, I was still seeing it as we could try things, and trying things means you’re allowed to make mistakes because if you want to be creative you have to try things and sometimes it will work, but sometimes it will not work. You learn from that and you improve and in the end you have something solid but the path could be a bit rocky, or else you have no risk and and you have something flat. So it is tricky.”
Over the course of Endless Legend 2’s early access, de Waubert de Genlis says the team’s released around 60 patches and ten major updates. Though, the expectations of those patches is that the game is always improving. “People can be a bit unforgiving if in one of these updates something is not perfect,” he says. “It’s like, ‘Guys, we’re trying something. We’re working on it.'”
That said, de Waubert de Genlis says the response to Endless Legend 2’s initial launch, which introduces a new system by which receding waters reveal new territory for the grabbing, was “overall, tremendous”. But, while broadly enjoyed, it had problems that players pointed out. “At first, when water was receding, we had way too much land,” de Waubert de Genlis says. “People could get lost and bored. We had to create land generation which was more interesting.” Now when the new land is generated it features more chokepoints to create the sense, as de Waubert de Genlis describes it, that “I have to fight for that little piece of new land that just appeared”. Those changes, he says, all came from player feedback.
Even if it was a little blunt.
Image credit: Hooded Horse / Amplitude Studios
But, despite these shifts and changing expectations, Amplitude studios are following the same model for Humankind 2. Right now, there are players playing a private alpha build and giving feedback to the team. The team better understands what players want from an early access title now, Humankind 2’s game director Benoit Humbert, tells me. “We know players are expecting something that at least seems finished and works well.” What will be released in early access “will be a kind of finished game,” he says, they will still “change things alongside what the players tell us.”
As for de Waubert de Genlis, even a changed early access is better than the old ways. “Before, when you had print your disc, a long time ago, the month prior to shipping was a bit of a waiting moment,” he recalls. “You don’t hear anything from the press. You don’t hear anything from the players. For one month it was really waiting with stress building up.
“Right now, in Early Access you hear from the players. You know exactly what people want, exactly what you’re delivering. The game’s being played already. You work until the last minute and suddenly you press a button and everyone comes and plays. You don’t have that waiting time. No more wasted time.”
Accommodation and travel to Gamescom were paid for by the organisers.