Sorry if this is redundant, I didn’t see another thread focused on reactions to the game itself (just the Pokemon-ripoff news cycle).
I tried it on GamePass thinking, why not - might as well see how overhyped it is. And unexpectedly, I put in about 8 hours this weekend.
Despite some rough edges and some very clear inspiration, I am actually enjoying it. It has a very satisfying gameplay feedback loop and is an overdue (if involuntary) “modernization” of the basic monster-collector format.
I haven’t played it, and not trying to squash anyone’s fun, but this is what turns me off to the game entirely. Early Access often feels like a lazy way to get funding and get free QA testing. They get to make a game without really making any kind of solid commitment to the game or the community. Bugs? Who cares! It’s early access, so they can be forgiven!
And based on some of the images where it looks like they just dropped a generic Kalash model they bought from an asset store (for example), it’s a second red flag of possible laziness.
I hope this turns into something amazing for people who are enjoying it, but I’m going to wait to see where development goes before I give it real consideration.
Admittedly, I’m guilty of buying EA because there have been dry periods in the GameDev pipeline and I was desperate for something new, but I’m okay with it for smaller devs that don’t have the budget for the kind of QA that bigger devs do. That said, the fact that some of these games have been in EA for over a decade (putting aside whether or not they’re effectively a functional product at this point) is a pretty egregious abuse of the community goodwill, and bigger developers shouldn’t be using it at all because it’s encouraging the trend of pushing out buggy messes with 60GB day-1 patches that still don’t make a game playable.