Fee-fi-fo-fum! I smell the beta of an expansion! Honking great giant beasts are now stomping merrily around Don’t Starve as its expansion Reign of the Giants is out in beta on Steam Early Access. No, I hadn’t realised DLC could be released that way either.
As one would expect and fear from an endless nightmare where the only release is sweet merciful death, Reign of the Giants adds a few more survival tools but mostly new ways to die horribly.
To quickly rattle off a list of new features, expect extra seasons in the form of rainy spring and scorching summer, new items, biomes including a desert, friendly creatures, and hostile animals. It also brings another two playable characters, a boy inside a spider who’s chummy with arachnids and a method-acting carnivorous Valkyrie. The eponymous giants, by the way, are terrible chimeras such as a goose-moose and badger-bear.
Reign of the Giants will run you £3.19 on Early Access, knocking a grand 80p of its official launch price. Klei plans to add a little more to the expansion and bash out bug fixes during Early Access, just as it did after the base game’s beta launch.
04/04/2014 at 10:07 pakoito says:
FTL, Divekick and now this, all getting expansions this couple of days. It’s last year all over again.
04/04/2014 at 11:19 CookPassBabtridge says:
“Fee-fi-fo-fum! I smell the beta of an expansion!”
0.0 *gasps in awe*
Its like that scene in the first matrix, where Neo suddenly cheats death and becomes a being of pure light. Alice .. is The (Pun) One!
04/04/2014 at 11:32 SominiTheCommenter says:
Oh look, a Ohm.
04/04/2014 at 14:27 ravencheek says:
I think you should possibly consider changing the title.
I for one don’t agree with the whole ‘early access/unpayed beta testers’. I’d much rather pay full price for a game when it’s ready to be played.
Any idea when it will actually be released and ready to play?
04/04/2014 at 16:22 wu wei says:
If only you had the choice…
04/04/2014 at 16:34 Vinraith says:
I know what you mean. The idiotic early access model basically ensures that by the time it’s released it’ll be 75% off. I’ve come to just accept the idea that developers apparently don’t want the money of customers who don’t want to beta test for them. I don’t get it, but there it is.
As to when it will be released, it’s early access so who knows? In general there’s no guarantee that any early access game will ever be finished, though obviously in the case of something like a Don’t Starve expansion I’d say the odds are very good.
04/04/2014 at 18:06 lomaxgnome says:
I think it’s more like Devs have realized that most customers aren’t going to buy their game immediately for full price, but the ones that will would like to have it as soon as possible, including in a beta stage. Quite frankly the early access model is much less damaging than the AAA model of releasing “finished” games that are often full of bugs and then having massive sales within six months.
As for this specific example, Don’t Starve did early access right before early access even existed, and the Devs have been dedicated to adding features and adapting the game for quite a while now both before and after release. They’ve given away multiple DLC’s worth of updates for free in that time. So releasing this DLC in early access makes perfect sense to anyone who is already a Don’t Starve player, and anyone else is fairly meaningless.
05/04/2014 at 04:58 The Random One says:
Of course they want the money of customers who don’t want to playtest. But they want the money of customers who do want to playtest even more, because those are people who are paying to work! And unless the game is multiplayer (in which case the early-acessers will eat your skeleton when you show up to the complete game on release day as a noob), the full game will be more stable, have more features, and will likely go on sale sooner. We all win!
04/04/2014 at 17:25 Nicodemus Rexx says:
“The king is having a party at the palace tonight for his pet bear. ”
“You mean platypus bear?”
“No…it just says bear.”
“Certainly you mean his pet skunk bear?-”
“- Or his armadillo bear-”
“-Gopher bear?”
“Just…bear.”
“This place is weird.”
04/04/2014 at 18:00 CookPassBabtridge says:
I do not know what you are quoting. I feel unknowledgeable and lacking in hipness, which makes me feel resentful and ashamed,
04/04/2014 at 18:39 Hahaha says:
Hits are from 2012 so I think it’s more they are stuck with some past meme.
04/04/2014 at 20:41 Diatribe says:
Avatar: The Last Airbender (the cartoon).
05/04/2014 at 01:19 Nicodemus Rexx says:
Diatribe is correct! It’s from the second season of Avatar: The Last Airbender; a show which anyone who likes animated programming should do themselves the favor of checking out at some point (as i’ve recently discovered.)
08/04/2014 at 10:22 Fadari says:
Doesn’t early access mean that you’ve purchased the game and wait patiently for updates and changes? Why are you calling it DLC? This isn’t a released, fully produced game. Is this a way to get more cash? Slippery slope here.