Let's take a trip back to 2008. The first real beta I played was Call of Duty: World At War. It was a fun experience playing a game that I was looking forward to. Since I was 13, I didn’t really understand the concept of a beta and why it existed; I just wanted to play the game. Betas for games were mostly feedback tools that were used to find out the problems with a game, as most people left feedback and the developers solicited the feedback from the players (especially in closed betas). That, combined with constant patching and balancing, leading to a game experience that was always top notch. Games such as League of legends which instituted patches every 2 weeks also brought a level of stability due to the fact that the community was invited to test future updates early and give their feedback. Even though I didn’t always agree with some of the changes, I knew that they came from a place of player input and feedback.
Betas have since transformed from being a way to test out a game before release and give feedback to now being an opportunity to play an anticipated game before release. Some devs will even give access to betas only if you pre-order the game, which turns the whole process into a money grab. While this is annoying, this can be mitigated by simply just waiting until the full release of the game and buying it then.
Now, let's fast forward to 2018. Betas have since remained unchanged, but there seems to be more of an emphasis on the closed beta, which allows for more genuine feedback. Public betas remain as a way to access a game early, but the popularity of the Steam Store on PC has spawned a new genre of testing and exposing games to the public prior to release: Early access. Early Access is a hybrid of both testing a game by having gamers play it constantly to provide feedback, as well as give people that believe in the game an opportunity to play the game before its final release. This is great for developers since you avoid a lot of QA by having people test for free and provide (or complain about the game) free feedback. This model worked flawlessly until a game called H1Z1 was released. H1Z1 is a zombie survival game (as if there isn’t enough of those) which also had a Battle Royale component called King of the Kill (or KotK for short). The game had extensive use of cosmetic items that can be bought and traded for steam store credit, and the popularity of KotK lead to many people, including myself, buying into this early access. It was a win-win for everyone…until you ran into the bugs.
Boy did this game have a lot of fucking bugs. But its early access right? This would be an acceptable excuse if the developers actually paid attention and fixed the bugs when they were reported. But they didn’t. For years. Which leads to the second fundamental flaw of early access: since devs already took peoples money, they have little to no incentive to fix their games flaws since they made money so quickly and profited even more off of the cosmetic microtransactions. Combined with the fact that the game stayed in early access for years, it leads to an aggravating experience and one that soured the taste of many gamers. But many just accepted this since it was early access. But after what amount of time does a game become less early access and more paid beta experience ala Star Citizen? Well, apparently the answer is it is in Early access indefinitely because since the battle royale (KotK) and survival modes (Just survive) have been split off into separate games and put into early access until further notice. This has opened up the entire battle royale genre open to being taken over by games such as PLAYERUNKNOWN'S BattleGrounds (PUBG), which has essentially cannibalized at least half of former H1Z1 players. Last year, Epic Games (of Gears of War and Unreal Engine fame), decided to throw their hat into the genre by releasing Fortnite, which, like H1Z1, has two components: a survival game mode which has a price, but also a free to play battle royale game mode. Also like KotK, it is in early access and in many ways surpasses the H1Z1 in terms of the quality of the product. Let's break it down:
Fortnite Battle Royale automatically misses a lot of criticism that might be aimed in its direction because of the fact that it was free to play. However, it makes up for this due to the fact that its survival mode does cost money (though itself is also in early access) and because of the skins. And boy, do they have skins. What's more is that there are a lot of aspects that give the impression that the game is actually complete. This includes:
1. A tiered system for getting a handful skins and emotes, with the option to buy a "battle pass", which introduces a separate paid tiered system which unlocks exponentially more skins and emotes not available normally
2. A season structure that gives you a set time to unlock all rewards mentioned above (and more microtransactions to help gain the aforementioned paid tiers quicker)
3. Seasonal items which match holidays
4. Special game modes
5. Heavy game advertising
6. A heavy focus on getting streamers to play
But yet, it is still hidden behind this screen:
Sounds familiar to kotk right? Cause it is. And just like daybreak (h1z1 developers), Epic games is milking the money train for all it is worth. Getting feedback on the game is such a low priority, that the button to leave feedback is so incredibly easy to miss.
And just like kotk, there are bugs on top of bugs in the game. The most egregious of which being double-pump shotgun bug. This bug allows you to switch to another gun and fire immediately, making pump shotguns into very effective killing machines. Combined with the fact that pump shotguns do incredible amounts of damage at mid-life range, means that this bug essentially turns fights within 30 meters of enemies into a flurry of jumping and spamming weapon switches.
I call it a bug because you should not be able to shoot a gun immediately after taking it out. Even call of duty recognizes this. This can be simply fixed if you simply introduce a second of delay when switching weapons to fire. But epic won't do this. Why? Because streamers love it. Because it has become part of the game. It reminds me a lot of another gameplay changing mechanic from, ironically, another Epic Games game: Gears of War.
Gears of War had the wall bounce, which took advantage of the cover mechanics and quick reflexes in order to traverse a map really quickly. The side effect of wall bouncing is that it made the Lancer an n00b weapon and made the shotgun the default gun to use in the game due to the fact that you can use wall bouncing combined with the cover mechanics to close the distance between you and an assault rifle user very quickly. Back then, Epic balanced this out by having power weapons on the map as well as the sawed-off shotgun in gears of war 3, which completely countered wall bouncing by making it near impossible to kill up close without being instakilled by the gun (fuck that gun). In fortnite, there are no such counters. One may argue that you can simply use an assault rifle, but the counter to that is to simply rush an enemy by building in front of yourself to absorb bullets. This combined with the double pump also turns the game into a shotgun fest.
These are all issues that can be fixed but won’t. The priority for Epic is to keep making as much money as possible since people are buying skins at insane rates. And why should they care if people are still buying into the game? I mentioned this in my video rant on the same topic, but there are two ways that this game can avoid the same fate that H1 suffered from. The first is to STOP BUYING SKINS. When you keep buying 20 dollar skins and paying more than that for V Bucks, you create an incentive for the devs to….make more skins. And not fix bugs. It’s called voting with your wallet. The second thing you can do is to provide feedback on the game. The game is early access, so treat it as such. Use the feedback button. Report bugs that you find so they can fix them to make the game we want to see.
**UPDATE**
When I originally wrote this post, everything j said was true. However, by the time I published the post, Epic games has changed the game in a lot of ways, including bringing up the game's performance on the console to match that of pc, as well as increase the delay between switching weapons to being able to shoot, which has eliminated the double pump exploit. This has made the game a much more enjoyable experience and I'll give Epic their props for making changes. However, this does not invalidate my thesis on early access games or how it can be a money grab. Especially with all the new 20$ skins being released. But hey, progress is progress. I still hate shotgun damage though (not the use of them, but how inconsistent the damage is).