Subnautica 2 dev thinks early access teams should worry less about adding features that are "very ugly, incomplete, or prototype"

But acknowledges that "early access" ain't what it was

Subnautica 2 creative director Anthony Gallegos has spoken about what Unknown Worlds have learned over their many years working in Steam early access, exhorting other devs to add new features "as soon as possible" and experiment with them right under the flared nostrils of players. Damn the torpedoes, etcetera.

The original Subnautica is one of the oldest Steam early access success stories, launching in 2014 a month or so after the program went live. Many of the final version's better qualities, including the pivot to horror epitomised by the spectacle of a Reaper grabbing your submarine's face, reflect observation of players and streamers in the wilds.

"Subnautica often launched features when they were very ugly, incomplete, or prototype," Gallegos commented, as part of a group chat about early access with GamesIndustry.biz. "This gave fans a real sense of getting to see game development in progress, in a way few other studios would try, especially for a franchise as big as this."

Unknown Worlds have "cultivated a very empathetic audience through radical transparency," Gallegos continued. "We trust the audience to give us a little grace as we figure things out, and they in turn trust us to make it great in the fullness of time."

Naturally, Gallegos thinks it's vital to keep talking to players and taking their feedback on the chin. "Be honest with them and make them understand how crucial they are to the process," he went on. "Preserve your vision, but listen to them and let them help you bring the best out of your game." Early access remains "core" to the "DNA" of Unknown Worlds, as they continue with the creation of Subnautica 2, which is about to get a nourishing injection of robot frogs.

I'm writing this up mostly because I'd like to know where you all stand as regards the "very ugly, incomplete, or prototype" - which, now that I think about it, sounds like the film Sergio Leone might have made, if he'd gotten into industry documentaries rather than spaghetti westerns. My view on early access is basically that it has become the same things as live service. I'm not sure there's a meaningful division any more between labelling a game "unfinished" and the expectation that devs will keep adding stuff to any release.

Within that, though, there's a lot of diversity, as Gallegos acknowledges in the GI piece. "Early access could mean a game like ours doing long-term open development, or it could be a game three months from a 1.0 release that's effectively doing a paid beta soft launch and using the Early Access term as a way to soften player expectations," he observed.

Not everybody has been as fortunate as Unknown Worlds in persuading players to give them the benefit of the doubt. In a crowded market (GI say that 2,924 early access games have launched on Steam this year so far, citing SteamDB), newer teams may suffer from being compared to older operators like Unknown Worlds, who got involved when early access was still fresh and exotic.

Elsewhere in the GI article, Denis Dyack, CEO of Deadhaus Sonata developer Apocalypse Studios, argues that expectations are unavoidably set by the early access devs with the largest budgets, citing Subnautica 2 as an example.

Back to you, the atrocious buyer of unfinshed games: what do you expect from an early access release? What degree of wobble will you overlook? What are you happy for devs to leave out till the final version? How important is communication, really? Does it just depend totally on the game? Here is some topical music to think along to.