Gaslamp Games’ new Empire-building sim ‘Clockwork Empires’ is gearing up for its ‘Earliest Access’ release. What this basically means is that you can buy it now on Steam and get earlier access than the early access and then get upgraded to early access and eventually…..finally…..the full game. Isn’t this getting a bit silly now? Do we really need this much early access?
According to the developers "earliest Access is our opportunity to take our testing to a larger scale than our internal testing while retaining as much of our ability to communicate directly with fans as possible. The game needs more hardware compatibility testing, large-scale bug hunting, and some more UI iteration before we’re ready for Steam."
Correct me if I’m wrong but isn’t that called beta testing? Isn’t that also the usual purpose of….you guessed it….early access? I’ve nothing against Gaslamp Games and I don’t begrudge them their attempt to utilize their audience for testing, but when will this all have gone too far? Will we eventually be paying an extra $300 for ‘still in the womb access’ and promptly be rewarded with a few sketches of the game’s first level and a teaser trailer with un-mastered audio in it?
Either way, Clockwork Empires does look like a genuinely cool game, a weird steampunk colony management simulator with evil, Cthulhu-esque Monsters and horrible cults in it. Its nice to see a developer doing something original in a genre that has become a little tiresome lately and I'll certainly be giving it a go once it is in a more finished state.