>>264140
>there are many examples of such developers putting out complete products without subjecting development to the early access process
Not everyone has the same life situation and opportunities, yes. In this kind of discussions the tone is usually that anyone who does early access is supid/lazy/greedy/etc. Since players themselves are part of the problem for buying unfinished games, from my perspective it feels like people keep going into ghettos in detroit and then complaining about how evil gun owners are when they keep getting shot by niggers.
>This is a strange straw man, they've had far longer than two years at this point and still failed to produce a competent campaign or robust enemy variety
It's also [insert fallacy] to say that early access is to blame for the changes in their plans. Whether they've been as fast as they should is one thing, but how can you KNOW that Factorio would have released with a campaign if they didn't do early access? How do you know they wouldn't have had very similar changes of plans without early access as they did with it? There's countless examples of non-early access games that get changed inbetween announcement and release, sometimes very drastically, nobody has a perfect design document that they will follow 1:1 all the way. Jonathan Blow, who is considered one of the best game designers who are known by name, says that great games are not designed, they are discovered (tl;dr you start with an idea/theory and then explore it to find what kind of things are actually fun/interesting about it). The reason you even know exactly what changed with Factorio is because early access allows you to see the actual development process (and also because they are exceptionally open about the development process in their blog).
Enemies: On one hand I agree about enemy variety (and enemies in general, I hate that a straight line of turrets is the best defense, but even I don't know how to fix that), but on another hand maybe they never came up with enemies that are interesting enough to be worth adding. If they add a new enemy to Nauvis, they'd inevitably come along the same paths as biters and spitters and then you need to use the same copypaste turret wall everywhere anyway and nothing has changed. If you add a flying enemy that goes over water then you'd just need turret walls everywhere and that would only make the game less interesting because you can't take advantage of shoreline bottlenecks. If you add special enemies that only appear at late-game, that would just be annoying because suddenly all your walls start breaking at once and you weren't prepared. The developers seem to be very conservative about adding things that aren't actually worthy additions, they've even removed features that weren't interesting enough, like pickaxes. You can list a whole bunch of mechanical differences with the spiders on Gleba, but in practice you don't do anything new to fight them, it's mostly the planet itself that makes fighting different because you have new constraints and needs.
Space platform: In my opinion space age is better than what their original plans with the space platform sounded like, so the game might have been worse if they went with the original plan. Maybe they could already sense that it's not interesting enough, so they put it on the shelf until they came up with the idea to make space platforms basically be trains between planets.
Campaign: Maybe they just found the sandbox gameplay to be far more appealing and lost interest in the campaign. Maybe they thought it would split the game in 2 and didn't want that. Maybe they didn't have good enough ideas for it and they just couldn't make it fun and interesting enough.
>Basketball
They changed their mind and wanted the perfect bouncy ball to bounce around (sandbox gameplay) and lost interest in making a team game around it (campaign), is that wrong? You don't get to be the most highly rated PC game if you don't do something extremely right.
>but they promised
According to you the players are the ones who wanted the perfect bouncy ball. There's a lot of developers that change into a direction that nobody likes (which may be happening to Zomboid right now), but this seems like the opposite: they planned to go to a certain direction but instead focused on the parts that people already liked. Whether or not they should have kept on the original course regardless gets philosophical, but as far as objectively measurable things go, the opinions around the game have remained extremely positive.
>tainted their project with asinine geopolitics
If I remember right it was because they quoted some programmer who, unknown to the developers at the time, also happens to hate the gays or something, and the developers told reddit to shove cancel culture up their asses because the quote is good regardless of who said it. Not 100% sure if that drama was the first one though.