Making History: The Great War Developer Diary 4: The Steam “Early Access” Experience

With the game about to officially release on Jan 29th, lead engineer Dave McCool, MH designer Ralph Gerth and I (Chris Parsons, product manager), were reflecting recently on our experience having a game available to the public on Steam’s Early Access. We’ve been hearing a lot about Early Access lately, including some criticism from players who bought in and then were unhappy when the title they purchased remained in Early Access too long, or, in some cases, never emerged. These are perfectly valid concerns. Like Kickstarter projects, buying into a creative process in the early stages of development isn’t a sure thing. So what’s the view from the developer side?

All of us found the feedback from players invaluable to our development. Having thousands of people playing your game and talking about it with us and each other during development was something none of us had experienced before in other games (TGW is our first title to participate in Early Access). It literally changes the development process because these people are not beta testers. They are customers. They paid money for the game, and so to some extent that makes them partners in the process. We all share the same goal as well: to have a great game and get it done right.

Ralph noted that being part of Early Access really exposes developers, and that there are risks associated with that. Players have differing expectations of what they are getting. Some easily accept the game they purchased has incomplete systems and interface, understanding fully that they are buying a game that’s still in development. Other times people could get impatient that things weren’t moving more quickly. We found the best way to address this was through constant engagement; setting expectations for fixes and updates and being as transparent as we possibly could about the process.

Dave said the ability to receive crash files or saved games with bugs gave us a chance to fix and improve the game much more rapidly. Often in a strategy game as complex as TGW reproducing a bug or crash in-house can be very difficult, and those files allowed us to be much more efficient at fixing things and moving on.

I found great value in all the reviews we received. We’ve consistently had a rating of “Very Positive” and of course it’s great to see people are having fun and enjoying the game, and care enough to tell others about it. When people indicate places where they are confused or something is not clear it gives us an opportunity to look at this area more closely. Is there a way we could improve the interface or give more information to prevent that? Is it simply due to a lack of experience playing that might be solved with a tutorial? Often it was something that we already knew about but just hadn’t implemented yet.

Perhaps the best part about the Early Access experience was that we all got to respond and communicate with our community to ask followup questions, get more information, and give them a look at the development process. This, I think, is why Early Access is so popular. After all, doesn’t everyone want to be a game designer, at least a little bit? Well, our community of Early Access players/designers will get to see the results at the end of January. Not that we will stop working on the game! As with all our games, the polishing, the balancing, and improving will continue for Making History: The Great War long after the January 29th release. We feel confident we are ready for the next step, and we can’t wait to see what happens with multiplayer and when people get their hands on the editor and start creating mods.

So overall, here at Muzzy Lane, we found Early Access very positive indeed and we think the players who chose to participate will generally be happy with the result.

Written by Chris Parsons, Product Manager for Muzzy Lane Software.