Moon Studios CEO Thomas Mahler has defended the studio’s decision to launch its latest game No Rest for the Wicked in early access.
The dark fantasy game launched last week, but was criticised by players for its poor performance, which Moon Studios pledged to improve.
In a lengthy statement on social media platform X, Mahler discussed the benefits of an early access launch and said he’s “confident” more games will be released in this way in future.
“We’re not even a week into early access and it’s already pretty clear that going with EA is one of the best decisions we could’ve made,” he began, before noting some players are “irked” by games releasing like this.
“I think as games become more and more complex and sophisticated, we’ll see some form of early access happening more and more often,” he said. “Speaking from our own experience, there is just no way we could have ever shipped Wicked 1.0 without being able to see all the data we’re seeing now and getting all the feedback from users. And I mean actual users, not a Focus Testing Group.
“Even if we’d have two to three times the staff, it would have been quite simply impossible, the product is just way too complex of a beast to reasonably expect that. Nine women can’t make a baby in a month and all that.”
Mahler went on to suggest Dark Souls would’ve benefited from an early access launch, had that been available to FromSoftware.
“Imagine Dark Souls 1 would’ve been in early access – instead of From rushing to ship a boxed product in a somewhat unfinished state, they probably would’ve been able to look at the second half of that game and still fully form and polish the less polished areas like Lost Izalith, etc,” he said.
He also said the sort of amendments early access allows for would not be possible with DLC or updates.
“Shipping games is always incredibly difficult and stressful and most of the time it means making quite drastic compromises, especially if your product is trying to accomplish something new,” he said. “And if you don’t know that it’s okay to bring in certain features and scope after the fact, you’ll just end up cutting before you hit the market.
“So, even if you dislike the idea of early access: It’s one way to allow developers to truly perfect a product over time, so please try to understand that there’s value in that.”
In a follow up post, Mahler stated PlayStation and Nintendo need to “embrace” early access.
“The industry is just changing at a rapid pace and holding on to things that were the norm 5-10 years ago is too restrictive,” he said.
“Ultimately people just want to play great games. It shouldn’t matter how the game was developed, just that it was and if players can’t play some great experience on your platform, you’re doing your audience a disservice.”
Plenty of high profile games are launching in early access, perhaps most notably in recent years the likes of Hades and Baldur’s Gate 3, which both went on to massive success.
Larian’s Michael Douse recently said early access is “the only way to do it now” and that the studio’s next game will likely follow the same model.
Meanwhile, Hades 2 has just been released as a technical test, with an early access launch expected some time this year.
No Rest for the Wicked follows Moon Studios’ acclaimed Ori games, and is inspired by the likes of Dark Souls and Diablo. You can check out gameplay in the video above, or read more about its graphics technology from Digital Foundry.
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