The most common problem in the games industry is waste – wasted time, wasted effort, and wasted money on design ideas that aren't actually fun in practice. Often, this discovery is not made until shortly before shipping when the game is finally played outside of the development team. Basic assumptions about how the game should be played might be wrong, and a community more dedicated to winning can easily find holes in the balance.

No one knows a game both better and worse than the development team, which understands why every decision was made but is also blind to how the game appears to new players.

At Mohawk, we believe that games need outside feedback as soon as possible. I saw this first-hand with Civilization 3 and 4; the former had no external feedback before shipping and thus had numerous gameplay and balance issues that would have been easy to fix if we had simply known about them. In contrast, we recruited a private external testing group from the community to play Civilization 4 over 18 months before we shipped. The logistics of managing this group - with NDAs, physical copy protection, and bi-weekly patches - were a nightmare, but much of what went right with the game can be traced to feedback from this group, which kept us on the right track.

Thus, as soon as I heard that Valve was starting an Early Access program, I knew we wanted to take part with Offworld Trading Company. Getting good feedback from players before release is a logistical challenge, especially for a game with a major multiplayer component, and Early Access would solve that problem for us, a small indie team making a very unusual RTS without combat. We were worried about the potential marketing impact of Early Access on our final release launch, but we still went for it, assuming that the increase in quality from early feedback would outweigh the cost.

WHAT WENT RIGHT

1) Learning About the Game

Feedback is important because it is the best way to learn about a game - finding out how people actually play instead of how the team imagines they are going to. Offworld was on Early Access for 14 months - approximately half of the project - and we learned many things that we would have never discovered internally. A great example was player dissatisfaction with scanning the map before founding an HQ; this feedback led directly to the development of the Reveal Map option that completely changes how the game begin.

We discovered this issue during the first competitive tournament as the scanning system quickly became a point of contention. The players argued that if a map had a founding location which was superior to all others, the game would be won simply by whoever discovered that founding location first. These players were concerned primarily with a sense of fairness, which was a reasonable concern for the hardcore community because founding location is so important for high-level play in Offworld.

The solution was to start with the map fully revealed and then let players choose where to found, with a debt auction determining who gets to found first. (A counter starts at $200K debt and then goes down in real-time so that players who found earlier start the game with more debt, essentially “buying” their founding location on credit.) This option worked perfectly for our most competitive players and quickly became the de facto standard for online play.

However, the important point is that we made this change a full year before we shipped Offworld, so we had plenty of time to test and balance the mode, write AI for it, and decide how to introduce it to the player. If we did not have Early Access - even if we only had a small private beta - we would not have discovered this important issue until it was too late. There is no better argument for Early Access than learning about a problem while there is still plenty of time to fix it.

2) Live Experimentation 

One crucial aspect to doing Early Access right is figuring out how to update the game while also keeping it playable. A good example of how this can go wrong is the Corpse and Hound update from Darkest Dungeon (see Tyler Sigman’s 2016 GDC postmortem) which put the developers at odds with a vocal portion of their community. This type of conflict is paradoxical – the point of Early Access is to be able to change the game for a live audience and yet players can punish developers for doing exactly that.

We were very careful about how we rolled out changes while also maintaining the position that the point of Early Access was live experimentation, so we would be fearless in that regard. We took a number of steps to meet these two conflicting goals. First, we released major updates slowly so that casual players would not experience random bugs during normal play. Then, to get feedback on our most recent changes, we created a Steam branch entitled “next_version” which we updated multiple times per week. (This branch was password protected, but we shared the password publicly so that it was essentially an ongoing opt-in patch for our hardcore community.) We felt free to make any changes we wanted to on this branch; if players were upset by a change, they could always just switch back to the main version. Our core community knew that we wanted to hear feedback about this version, so they were excited to jump onto the branch, see what was new, and let us know how they felt about it. Most importantly, they were never blindsided by a change because the next_version branch was constantly updated.

However, when we made potentially controversial changes, we would attach them to game options that the player could disable. For example, our stock system underwent many significant iterations, with some of the changes being more popular than others. In one patch, we added two major features - Destroy Buyout (a player’s buildings are destroyed on a buyout) and Majority Buyout (a player is eliminated when more than half of his or her stock is owned by rivals) - but both were options that the could be turned on or off. Thus, players who hated the changes could play without them while we keep experimenting. To ensure that we would learn enough about these new features, we hosted a community tournament after releasing the patch which specified that both options must be turned on.

Knowing that an upcoming tournament would use these rules encouraged our players to practice with them in preparation, which produced meaningful feedback for us. (In this case, Majority Buyout became a standard rule while Destroy Buyout did not, being replaced in the long-term by the Subsidiary system.) Being able to experiment rapidly and without fear was a major factor in taking advantage of Early Access to improve the game’s design.

3) Building the Community

A vibrant community is important for the long-term health of a game, especially one with a strong multiplayer component. One of the great advantages of Early Access was that we were able to build that community before launch. Although players still find each other on forums, we found that the best place for a community to form is on Twitch. We discovered our best players early by seeing them play on streams, usually ones involving multiplayer games.