No Man’s Sky’s Atlas Rises Update exemplifies a new kind of Early Access

Yes, I know what you’re thinking. “Not this game again. Hasn’t this horse been beaten enough already?” I know, it’s probably a sin to start my first-ever blog post with the most-blogged-about-game-in-history. So, I’m going to distract you from that sin with a sin that’s even worse: I’m going to write my first post about a game that I’ve never even played.

Not yet anyway. But I do have No Man’s Sky in the post and on its way. The reason for that can be put down to the awe-inspiring Atlas Rises Update that just dropped yesterday. Thankfully, I was cautious enough to not buy this game at release and by buying it a year later, I am finally rewarded with the game that was originally promised by Hello Games all the way back in 2013. In this, I am reminded of recent games like The Crew and Final Fantasy XV, games which were similarly released in a mostly complete state but missing a few key mechanics that were promised to the players during the pre-release hype (or, in the case of FFXV, missing swathes of narrative in a game series that awkwardly insists it is story-focused).

Now, there is nothing necessarily wrong with this approach to releasing games; indie developers (and even a few bigger devs) have been doing it for years under the banner of Early Access. The difference between garnering a millions of happy players and a silo’s worth of awards like Minecraft compared to the bloodthirsty, pitchfork-wielding customers of No Man’s Sky is a simple matter of communication. Minecraft’s early customers knew from the very beginning that they were trialling an incomplete product, with no guarantee of it ever actually being finished. Infamously, those who bought No Man’s Sky only discovered this after paying £50/$60, which is understandably a bit of a strike to the bollocks to say the least. AAA developers often neglect to tell their customers that they are paying for an unfinished product.

The Crew: Wild Run was a paid expansion but it brought a lot of free content to players too, including graphics that actually belong in this decade (woops).

So the answer is obvious, right? We just slap an Early Access sticker on any AAA games that are released before they are ready, surely? Well, no, not quite. The problem is that there are inherent differences between true AAA early access games like, say, LEGO Worlds or Dota 2 and its fresh, funky, modern cousin which can be found in No Man’s Sky and The Crew. Those differences are:

1. Money spent on the product before selling it
2. Development time spent on the product before selling it.
3. The money you, the customer, pays for the product.

If you bought a copy of LEGO Worlds when it was in Early Access, you were paying £20 for a game which was little more than a proof of concept at the time of release, a game with little money or development time pumped into it, with the hopes that the Early Access sales will provide enough income (or enough motivation for the investors) to be able to spend more time and money on the project.

On the other hand, if you bought a copy of No Man’s Sky at release, you were paying at least £45 for a game which had already had years of development time and millions upon millions of dollars pumped into it. Your money wasn’t going to an unfunded project, it was going to a project which had blown all its deadlines and budgets and now needed an extra boost from customers. This is not Early Access, because the game is not in an early state. In contrary, the game is actually dangerously late in its development cycle.

Issues aside, No Man’s Sky is absolutely stunning to look at.

My point is that we need a new term for games like these — Early Access just doesn’t cut it. We also need to understand that development cycles like these aren’t necessarily conjured up by cackling bean-counters in a plot to steal your money — they are just an unfortunate byproduct of the cosmic amounts of money required to create modern AAA games. What is malevolent is the lack of clear communication with the public, and that is why we need a shiny new sticker to slap on the box of games which are pretty good now, but I swear they will be absolutely incredible in a year’s time, no — really, I promise…

I would offer a name for these kinds of games myself, but I know that if this actually did happen, some marketing suit would declare my (probably very sarcastic) phrasing as being “unmarketable” and would call it Exclusive Access Via Generous Donation or something equally daft.

P.S. The Crew is actually really good after all its updates, and it’s dirt cheap. Give it a go, go on, it’s good, I promise.