Battlefailed 4 (It got better, but it's still a fail that I paid $84CAD for)

[Dwood]

Good to hear it's better! It just sucks that a AAA game dev can release a game while it's still in beta!

[Amit]

Congratulations DICE. After 4 years, you've finally managed to put aside your arrogance and let players actually tell you how to fix your game. It's too late, though. I already uninstalled the game 3 days ago with no regrets.

Also: DICE considering an early access model for future Battlefield games

Is that a good thing or a bad thing?

[Tnnaas]

Wait, they haven't been doing Early Access? I thought that's why people were getting the game because it wasn't finished yet.

[Donut]

This whole "Early Access" trend is made of bullshit. There are so many games on Steam Greenlight with the "Early Access" tag stuck on them. Many of them are no longer in development, and some that are have seen next to zero progress. There are a metric fuck-ton of indie titles that never see the light of day because the developers run out of time or money to spend on making the game. Indie devs have been using Early Access as an excuse to put out a game that's not functional yet to help them get some more money flowing. The result is that many of the titles we see coming out with the Early Access tag are those same games that would never see the light of day without the Early Access tag. The developers of these games are still just as unable or unwilling to complete the game as before, except now we have the title in the public's hands and an exchange of money has taken place.

On that note though, Early Access is basically what they've been doing with BF4. They released a game that clearly wasn't ready, then supplemented that with DLC content every 2 or 3 months. That's essentially what the Early Access model entails, except now they can get away with something like "Oh well the recon class isn't in the game yet because it isn't done, but it's in early access so it's ok!". It's just a bad thing to do all around. It's not helping anybody.

On an unrelated note, I just went on the Steam community page for Starbound (an early access title) to see if they've actually made any significant amount of progress in the past 6 months, and the first post I see is from a person marked as a developer who's also been banned from posting. Dis gun b gud.