As long as you’re content with playing a possibly bare bones product that is buggy and could CTD often.
I mean lets be honest, “Early Access” is simply a marketing term that developers and publishers came up with to rebrand the “Beta” days of gaming. When we played games in Beta, we knew they were a buggy mess. Even DCS in their early years- Black Shark and A-10C- were released as Beta. By renaming it Early Access, it steers away from the stigma of Alpha/Beta and gives the average consumer that sense of "oooh I get to play the game ‘early’. Now it’s basically automatic with games on Steam these days to be early access. Then in the fine print is all the legalese and disclaimers the game is far from done.
Thanks. I got a copy from GreenmanGaming. Billet and Fanatical were sold out.
fully understand. looking at the “EA” phenomenon I just dont like the “pre-order EA” stuff.
I mean you pay in advance for something you will get sometime in the future and it will be bare bones and buggy mess !?
if I have to pay for bare bones buggy product then I want that piece of ‘software engineering’ right away.
pay to play ( even if limited ) rather than pay to wait.
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It’s a preorder at a lower price. You can also decide to use it now in early alpha version (it’s not a beta unless it has all the features of the final product) if you wish, or you can wait till release.
If you don’t buy it until release, then you’re paying more.
So you can just skip playing it now if you don’t want to deal with an alpha and wait for 1.0, or at least for it to get closer to release configuration, but you get the benefit of the lower price. I still don’t understand what it is about this situation that people get all bent out of shape over it?
The only downside is if the product never is finished because of lack of funds or whatever. In the old “standard” preorder days it was only a few months before release at most so you knew it was coming. However, the discount was much smaller and even then when it came out you never knew if it would be a buggy mess, if it would ever be fixed, or if it would be abandoned.
I feel like the people who dislike EA are like the ones who think credit cards are some kind of con or scam, or worse “free money.” Don’t buy more with it than you can afford to pay, then pay the entire bill at month’s end, it’s that simple. It will cost you…nothing. Just don’t assume you can take forever to pay it off or max it out because they’ll let you, that’s the dumbest attitude ever.
Or the infamous “Why does it say Chicken of the Sea? I know, it’s tuna, but…why is it chicken?”
for me its not, cause you know what you paying for and you actually can play it wheter it is called alpha beta gamma.
with DCS module pre-order there is nothing I get for my money except some promise of future things.
interesting, didnt know that also tuna fishes are already farmed like chickens. thought that it was only salmons.
DCS does both preorder and EA, sometimes on the same product. That is not the standard. I also don’t know of any others who do that because it could create false expectations. For every preorder leading to a 1.0 release in DCS, there are 5 preorders opening the day EA begins.
For most games it is one or the other. Preorder with maybe a couple of days’ prerelease access (mainly AAA games like Assassin’s Creed, Indiana Jones, etc), or EA from the minute the preorder starts (smaller studios who need the money to finish development so let you mess around with earlier builds, like EVO).
To put it straight, games with EA like EVO would likely never be released under the standard model because they would lack the investment to pay for development until release day. Nick pretty much admitted that applies to DCS a couple of years ago.
You don’t have to like it, you don’t have to buy it if you want to wait till release, but there is no world in which every game can be treated like a AAA release with a $100m budget that can wait to take anyone’s money until the day it comes out. Programmers can’t afford to work full time on a game for 2 or more years without money coming in to pay them.
I stand corrected. I checked again and yes, there are DCS modules which are discounted in EA after the PO.
I took it for a spin. My only negative is the poor VR support, specifically the poor image quality and the artifacts and flashing around the peripheral. I assumed that they would be pretty far along, given how good ACC looks, but I didn’t account for Kunos building the sim on a new game engine. At first the flashing and ghosting were so bad, that I was having trouble just navigating the UI. Like they had pushed the wrong version on launch day. But there was a small update that solved the navigation issues. There are still a bunch of graphic weirdness in the menus and the showroom. Forget about the replay system in VR. It just looks bad.
No major complaints otherwise. The physics model was at least on par with ACC in the two cars that I drove, the raciest spec Camaro and the Ferrari 488 Challenge EVO.
The Camaro is a delight to drive with no assists, even with a sequential or wheel shifters due to the heavy flywheel braking, dictating heel and toe during downshifts. Navigating the corkscrew at Laguna Seca with any kind of speed is initially a challenge. The blind approach, followed by trail braking for the right-left-right over the top for an off-camber descent, all the while using proper heel-toe technique, gives a driver much opportunity to get it wrong. But four of five laps in and it becomes natural. The car feels heavy and leaves little room for error if the driver pushes too deeply. Brake early, hit apexes accurately, and then get back on the gas quickly for some glorious V8 acceleration and roar. I ended up liking the Camaro a lot.
The Ferrari, as it should, feels much nimbler and has almost no flywheel effect. It is easy to throw around and leave braking to the last moment possible. I felt quicker, earlier in the 488. but it wasn’t nearly as rewarding to drive as the Camaro. Not in a bad way, just not as much character.
I look forward to how the game develops. Kunos has a long and sound track record. I have confidence that in the future ACE will be a good, maybe great racing sim. Having said that, if you are on the fence suffering FOMO and worried about missing the discounted price, fear not. With the excellent sims that we have now, ACC, AMS2, and LMU, you’re in a good place to watch from the sidelines. I sort of wish that I would have waited. As it sits, I’ve got what is not much more than another distraction from driving those other sims taking up valuable drive space. With the Rolex 24 almost upon us, I’m fine running laps at Daytona, Sebring, or Spa in AMS2 or LMU.
Looking at all of the new IMSA liveries including Corvette racing coming back for 2025, I’m wondering if any of the sims will get updated skins.
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I will say the biggest mystery to me has been the engine hopping. AC was their own engine. Ok.
Then ACC they switched to Unreal. I thought it an odd choice, but others have since done the same (WRC being absolutely astounding on UE5) so I thought maybe they were just early to see the potential.
Now EVO is back to their own engine?? I’m not sure if it’s a derivative of what AC had or totally new, but either way seems like they should have skipped Unreal for ACC then, no?
Or it a “grass is always greener” thing, and they have issues and think switchinig will resolve them only to find it has different issues so they switched again?
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Maybe they calculated a better ROI given the very long legs that the original AC had. Damn, for non VR players, it’s still a viable sim due to the inestimable number of mods and 3rd party add-ons. The Energizer bunny of racing sims.
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Does The “Unreal” Engine allow…or make it Very Hard to use VR? Perhaps this is why they went with a new game engine?
I still have AC installed and until some other ‘game’ has a Nordschleife Bridge to Gantry and quite a few of my favourite ever cars (e.g. Porsche 917/30) it will remain on my HD.
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ACC’s page on Steam says VR supported. So while I’ve never had VR to try, apparently it can be.
Now the main difference of course–Epic charges for Unreal, a homegrown engine is “free” besides the cost of labor. I know some devs have said the reason they don’t switch engines is because with the amount of work they’d need to customize it they could just update what they’ve been using and have fewer problems to fix afterwards.
So few engines are truly plug-n-play, you’re spending hours on customizing it anyway, but if you’re paying another company licensing for one and not the other, I can understand the appeal of keeping it in-house.
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They had a lot of issues with making Unreal work like a proper racing sim. It doesn’t really seemed to be very conductive to vehicular movement from what I’ve heard and read throughout the years.
The VR is awful in ACC, runs really badly for almost everyone no matter what sort of machine people have. Never really enjoyed it compared to AMS2 which is beautiful and smooth out of the box.
I suspect they just went back because they have some experience with engine design and it may as well have been easier then to try and wrestle the unreal engine once more to work with cars.
So far EVO runs fine just doing laps solo but just crashes to a halt as soon as I add some AI. I am sure they will work that out eventually, happy to support Kunos in building more AC.
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I guess the only surprising thing then should be they didn’t abandon it during ACC development and go back to their own engine instead of sticking with it.
Still too rough for me, especially in VR. The potential is there and I bought in at EA knowing I could be in for a bit of a wait.
However… AC with CM, CSP and SOL (still need to look at moving to PURE) looks and feels great in VR with my new Quest3 setup! I’m looking forward to spending more time in AC while awaiting ACE to get ironed out.
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Yep, I tried it a few days ago and VR was worse than release day. Not sure what’s up with that.
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Uh new toys. I bought on day one of EA but haven’t installed yet. Still waiting…
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