Extreme(ly Ill-Advised) Early Access

How to show your ass. Or Ken-doll like crotch.

My first response to the news that the studio behind Lawbreakers, days after announcing that Lawbreakers tanked hard enough to not even warrant going free to play, was announcing their next game, an 80s-Retro themed battle royale shooter, my exact words were "DON'T TRY TO GO INTO YOUR OWN TUNNEL, WILE E. COYOTE, NOOOOO!"

Then, the very next day, when it entered "extreme early access" out of nowhere, I found any sympathy I might have had for a dev studio caught in a vicious cycle evaporating. Fuck that stupid not-a-wolf, let him cave his fool head in. I thought they'd be working on a game that was bound for an oversaturated market a year after it was considered oversaturated, with a spin that only seemed to be there to tap into a popular summer blockbuster.

I WASN'T EXPECTING THEM TO DUMP IT OUT THE DOOR, SQUALLING, NUDE AND MOIST, RIGHT THE GODDAMNED NOW.

There's a term, it used to mean something in games, but I guess fuck it, they don't exist any more if we're in the age of "extreme early access." It's called an Internal Alpha, and it's the thing Boss Key put up on steam yesterday. Like you might imagine by the name, it's not actually a thing the public is meant to see in its entirety before its release, because it's very not done. Internal Alphas are road frames with an engine, wheels and controls, which can be photographed with non-final facades to make it look like a car ready to drive off the lot. The Radical Heights "extreme early access" build was just that, a frame, except they tried to roll it onto the lot and all the facades fell off, exposing their priorities. The microtransaction system is functional; physics and women are coming soon.

I could go on and on about the many awful mistakes that are readily apparent at the foundational level of this game, and the shamelessly unplayable state this game is in at this early juncture. But this shit is such a disaster without precedent that even going into those seems like unimportant nitpicking, there to just bag on that which is self-apparently wrong.

Which is fun, mind, I'm not above that at all, I'm just saying, priorities.

But doing that would be suggesting solutions to problems that aren't the big problem, because the big problem presented itself yesterday, when the world at large laid hands on this thing, and a game nobody had heard of until literally the day before rocketed up to near the top of the Twitch charts.

And exploded. Into farts.

That's the fact that I believe this game is somebody's shady exit strategy. I believe this is a restaurant fire under mysterious circumstances. It is my assertion that this is some videogame Cayman Islands shit. I think it's hinky, is what I'm saying.

Buy Radical Gems to Get Sick Loot Now!

And you can think this is me sensing conspiracy in matters, but fucking go ahead, it's the game industry, you can't swing a dead game without hitting one. Regardless if you think I'm reading too far in, there's a reason why you don't do Early Access this early. It's because when you play a game that's not done, it has to be very close to being done to not feel like a huge piece of shit. The reason why Open Betas are betas, and not alphas, is because beta builds are feature complete, ready to be tuned and finalized on the way to gold and shipping. Alphas are not feature complete, and in fact, in the case of very early ones, are quite incomplete and poorly optimized.

It should probably be mentioned that Radical Heights has had a total of 5 months of work on it at this month. In other words, guess what it is?

An incomplete and poorly optimized game does not make a good impression. It's not done, so it's not got all the stuff it should have, at least by the metric of the design doc, and it's not optimized, so it probably runs like it's wounded. Thing is, when you slap a thing that is this jank and incomplete out the door, into the hands of a public that more than ever wants bang for their buck, and then say "oh, but we'll make it better," it doesn't really work. Because it comes off as disingenuous. Because even if you're a really good dev, one with an actually good reputation, rather than the dev that made that thing called Lawbreakers, they aren't actually going to believe you can make this better. They're just going to see what you thought was acceptable, what you thought would make someone happy when you put it in their hands.

But see, that's exactly the thing. Because every game is someone's favorite game, right? Some people have favorite games that nobody has ever heard of, games that they spend an unbelievable amount of money on, because they scratch an itch in that person's brain whenever they buy a microtransaction. They get the satisfaction of a transaction, and then, you play a game. Repeat, until individual is broke and you have taken their money without really any effort, allowing you to pay off a bigass house, life by financially broken life. Individuals who get exploited like this are called "whales" by people who think they can dress up their own atrociousness with cute terms. The rich are edible, but you shouldn't, because they're bad for you.

Now, I'm not going to say that Radical Heights is "whale" bait. I'm also not going to say that it isn't, either, because frankly, my brain needs a solid reason for this game to exist. Otherwise I start to feel like I'm going Hollywood-insane when I talk about it. What this game actually could also be is a major panic move by a studio that wasn't expecting to be so utterly rebuffed with their first outing. Lawbreakers made the mistake of mentioning Overwatch in its own press- CliffyB couldn't not resist the urge to say that it's Overwatch for people who want blood and swearing. Yeah. The end result of the collision between the two could be described as being similar to a collision between a Ford Focus and a crash test ram: Lawbreakers is the obliterated Focus; Overwatch continues to break lesser automobiles. It was like watching Goldberg spear Nunzio in the Rumble, just BAM, and OHHHHHHH! and then all anyone can talk about after is "oh, jeez, I hope they're okay." What we could be seeing is a wounded animal move, like as one they're saying "well that didn't work, but how about this" and not realizing 'this' isn't ready yet.

But if that's the case, why the microtransactions? That's the part sticking with me here. It's reinforced by the fact that the loading screens in this game are, themselves, ads to buy in the in-game currency.

Pictured: How to look fresh. Not pictured: Effort.

When you sell a thing, it's only a matter of time until someone comes by that will want to buy it. The problem with this is that, at least it used to be, it all depended on how much time you were willing to wait and how much money you were willing to spend in order to sell that thing. Making a game is a big involvement, and it costs a lot of money to make even a small one, even if you aren't actually putting direct expenditure into the game. Remember, time is money, especially under this system, which is why folks living in poor times want to make sure they waste neither of theirs. So when you download a game that's supposedly free to play (which is bullshit, we all know this; there are outliers, folks who don't actually pay a penny on their F2P games, but eventually, most folks are going to pay something, and the important part of this is: nothing's actually wrong with that as long as it's not leveraged unfairly and the buyer is satisfied), and before you even load into your first match, it's already telling you how to spend to get ahead, you get a little skeeved. And when you load in, and see this game that looks like something Jim Sterling would montage over a bad midi of Chains of Love, you get to thinking: is this a scam? Seriously, is it?

Because even if there's no foul play at work here, something is terribly, terribly wrong.