DayZ video essay 1 - When early access is too early

hello internet it's me soviet you know the guy who turns up in your youtube notifications wants a blue moon to drop some gaming video with text all over it to remind you once again that he's still alive before disappearing once again to drink honeyed whiskey and procrastinate so here i am on the channel presenting something different holy [ __ ] um okay some context before time was time no a few years back around about the time that i finished the last horror video i think it was monstrum i told my patrons that i was looking to try my hand at doing a different format to see what people think something alongside the bullshitters to compliment them and i like many people i'm a really big fan of video essays particularly video essays that teach me something i know little about like film structure or screen plays or stage productions and i was hoping to take a crack at doing one myself that became something of a running joke amongst my patrons in twitch subs because it did not go swimmingly actually at all i quickly discovered that editing video essays good ones anyway is really hard and i would steal two weeks here three weeks there usually between the bullshittery compilations to try and make something something i hoped you'd end up enjoying i'd show my first draft to the patrons get some feedback adjust re-edit rewrite etc and it's one of the reasons that i seem to disappear for so long sometimes it's not that a single bullshittery took 10 weeks it's that there's probably another video in there that never went public be it a video essay or a cartoon or something because it wasn't ready or i didn't think it was any good and it became a sort of running joke because well the patrons kind of doubted i'd ever finish any of it and honestly who could blame them my track record isn't great so this is what this is this is a side project that has miraculously made it to the channel so yay video essays the format is well represented now a video that is structured much like a written essay advancing an argument or analyzing a point so what is my discussion point what is it i would like to talk about well if it isn't obvious from the title day z i want to talk about day z day z is a mod an extremely fascinating mod that i am for reasons that i hope to sell you on completely enamored by it's a zombie survival mod one that was released in 2012 for the military simulation game armor 2 and it turned that game into a creepy open world sort of 28 days later with players connecting to a wide open map overrun by zombies attracted to noise called zeds this channel kind of started with the dayz mod and i would go so far as to say i'm its number one fan hashtag fight me and even if you're not into gaming it presents a really interesting success story i think it's a mod that catapulted the three year old game that it runs on right back to the top of the steam sales for like months and it launched a tidal wave of similar products on revealing a huge market of customers who continue to be an influence on more recent development trends the rise of the survival sandbox not necessarily invented by the daisy mod but certainly popularized by it it's perhaps analogous to say if tomorrow hollywood discovered noir something brand new an entirely new creative language to draw from to be expanded upon and tweaked by thousands of different creators to figure out what works and what doesn't an entirely new form of creative expression expression that emphasized in open world survival at least an absence of structure an absence of rules of objectives of a code of conduct a correct and expected way to play survival games particularly multiplayer ones and especially dayz thrive in the ambiguity of the gameplay the absence of a clear path it's not simply about managing in-game survival health bars like food and water but how the existence of those bars and the scarcity of the things you need to satisfy them often ends up with you making uncomfortable unscripted choices for the sake of your own survival it puts you in tense situations that are emergent that is to say without the developer having planned them and personal to you this atmosphere can be intensely immersive creating memories of gameplay that will stay with you many days afterwards and it can be a genre of incredible heroics and staggering cruelty where the concepts of good and bad so easily quantified and numerically represented in so many other games can seem so antiquated and juvenile and also that lack of structure means that well nobody's holding your hand in an industry that's all too eager to coddle players and claim that any toxicity is bad and that everyone must play with each other and get along in the matchmaking circle or have the player a passive observer in a fairground ride pulled from one carefully crafted cutscene to the next survival games more often than not treat people like adults giving them all the control within a very community driven setting it's a refreshing feeling especially with the gaming industry right now and the genre also does a fantastic job of capturing that sense of melancholy that is often so hard to get right when depicting post-apocalyptic fiction so often undercut in other games by smothering the player in structured quests with levels and and waypoints god [ __ ] waypoints comparatively in survival sandboxes nothing is guaranteed your survival is not guaranteed your fun is not guaranteed you don't know what's beyond the next hill over could be nothing but empty wilderness or four players waiting to ambush you and there's something i want to talk about more specifically rather than just going into a multi-hour long tongue-bathing session about how awesome the daisy mod was because something more interesting happened afterwards something that has itself spawned numerous video essays and critiques over the years a course that these videos will no doubt join and that is the daisy standalone was developed the daisy standalone was is an attempt by the company that created arma 2 called bohemia interactive to make a standalone fully working version of the dayz mod bringing aboard the mods original creator and the talent behind arma 2 plus some decent funding to turn an often broken mod into an official game and the interesting thing is that process was far from smooth sailing if you clicked on this in your related videos feed you're probably well aware of the daisy standalone and the frustrations surrounding it how the development time seemed extreme and the features in it wildly deviated from what many expected and how overall reception was mixed to negative there have already been many what went wrong with what happened why the standalone failed type videos and i'm certain that i will retread much of that ground but i've always felt that the existing video essays on the daisy standalone rarely touched upon some of the core aspects of it i would find myself consuming many of these over the years and it surprised me how surface level some of them were so many focused on the superficial and the easily fixable problems whilst ignoring the things that are worth talking about things that should be immediately obvious to insert no true scotsman fallacy true fans of dayz which is when i realized since many of them outright say so a lot of the people critiquing it had never actually played the daisy mod and further many of them were talking about aspects of software development with no experience in it that kind of irked me the narrative on youtube was often but not always being created by people who just didn't know what on earth they were talking about and as the self-proclaimed number one daisy mod fan hashtag fight me and as someone who has spent 10 years in software qa and who was looking for a topic to edit into a video essay i think i found a good place to start so um here we are amazingly late to the party long after everyone has moved on and forgotten about it let's talk about the daisy standalone strap the [ __ ] in title screen transition what oh early access for those who are not familiar concerns the release or limited release of a piece of software to customers earlier than it would be otherwise typically as part of an open or closed beta with the customers able to provide feedback for the development team highlight bugs check in-game balance and that sort of thing and from about 2010 onwards it would become a pretty standard practice the new norm in many cases hell there are so many examples that take forever to list game titles that have been released in a very basic state with the developers either successfully or not patching the thing to completion minecraft made an impression for one man with a good idea was able to build up a team and monetize and build it bigger before iteratively and successfully developing it up and up and up into the monolith that is today selling at least 176 million copies and i'm mentioning early access here because well a lot of the problems with modern gaming survival games specifically and the daisy standalone explicitly concern the improper use of early access development methodologies differ but one very common one is iterative development that is a development team moving in cycles of design build test design build test internally outlining new features that they're going to implement in any given month and then working on them testing them and then adding them to the next patch for a game that may be in early access or maybe not but without jumping down the rabbit hole of how all of this works not yet anyway here's what i want to underline you need to go through lots of these a hell of a lot of these before you even entertain the notion of going into early access your product needs to be quite some way through development and b a complete system full of entertaining things before you roll it out i know that might seem obvious to the layperson but to many a developer that idea is near heresy because they're used to working with processes that count on a virtuous cycle of customer feedback as you develop your game from the very foundation i'll talk about those processes later but what i'm asserting is that 90 of gamers just don't give a [ __ ] about this something like minecraft was the exception because even a barely built teaser version on launch is okay when the concept is unique on the market and rarely ever is that the case anymore steam is just saturated with clones of the same game concept made easier with licensed engines and store-bought assets and due to things like humble bundles and steam sales people will own most if not all of them when your average pc gamer opens up something on steam especially if they paid money for it they're not looking to assist your development process they just want their fun there and then they just want a game with enough features to keep them entertained even if it's a bit rough around the edges early access is your release therefore you need to make sure that your development is sufficiently far enough to warrant opening the floodgates to let customers in your game will be on steam with a store page and a buy button subreddits will start being made by fans wikis will start being created tutorial videos and reviewers will start giving their impressions on your game all for a few more minutes of suckling on the advertising nipple no amount of its early access will stop the hype train if your game is not ready for scrutiny okay these messages on the main menu they kind of piss me off actually as a qa analyst this idea that customers should withhold judgment until early access is complete the onus is never on the customer to be more cuddly but for the developer to impress them to showcase a well-built and evolving body of work with a high level of technical competence and if you're not ready for that then you're not ready for early access and if you're a developer who is typing in the comments all of the reasons why no it is totally fine if you go live with your second or third version with an engine that's only just barely working and with only one mob to grind and no real gameplay and we'll just build up the rest in the following months and the agile methodology says it's okay then if we were working for the same company in the same building on the same project as part of the same team and i'm your qa guy expect me to take you to one side to say exactly what i've said to so many project managers over the years you never get a second first impression you just don't if you release some buggy boring unstable piece of [ __ ] then be prepared to have customers mentally file your product away towards the bottom of a pile of competing products and if you still want to go ahead negative reviews be damned well then let me introduce you to the second problem further down the line there's a term in marketing evangelists referring to customers who believe strongly in your product enough to sing its praises to other people on the fence and by the nature of these things these people typically are your first adopters the ones who buy your product first the ones with the most play time the ones who stick around after each patch who are making and administrating those subreddits and those wiki pages and the ones who so often write the ever amusing i have several hundred or thousand hours of entertainment from this 20 that i spent on this early access title but now i'm giving it a negative review after this one patch broke something i care about which is tied on to my next point if you go into early access too early you run the risk of what i'm going to call evangelist alienation meaning the process of turning those specific customers against you by accidentally moving further and further away from the features that attracted them to your products in the first place software is by its very nature soft meaning that for relatively little expense large amounts of it can be adapted and changed based on changing requirements and as mentioned there are indeed iterative development fundamentals that i and many have been trained in that talk about the virtues of doing so but here's my point it is possible demonstrably possible to go too far to change too much to move away from the fundamentals of your piece of software and while that can happen naturally as those initial user stories seem oh so high up and far away in your development database several years down the line it is noticed even more by users who joined very very early but what does that matter one might argue software often has to change and evolve as markets evolve and new customers often come in and buy the product anyway well it matters because of the nature of the evangelists this type of fan has the energy and the time to devote towards setting up subreddits and wikis and editing youtube videos like it or not their voices are the loudest and so if you play your cards poorly and you end up in a situation where the loudest voices are praising the older version of your game then you end up in a situation where the people with the most energy are slamming your existing product and praising one that no longer exists an example of this the culling by xavient released in 2016. it's worth remembering because of the impressive heights it reached followed by its spectacular nosedive how it was in early access beta in name but despite that immediately started making very major changes to the fundamentals of their game design specifically how the combat works the main thing for which developments really should be done the result was that the audience turned on it even if it was better it didn't matter it was different which started a death spiral and had a situation where the loudest voices of support turned on the developer so my point is this by the time your product reaches early access whatever you have is going to form the anchor of your core audience's expectations for your product if you keep on [ __ ] around with the anchor then you're going to alienate people with the energy and passion to loudly bash your product driving new customers away making your customer reviews a total [ __ ] show and broadly speaking everything i've said here happened to the daisy standalone they did go into early access far far too early before their engine technology was even ready and they've done interviews saying as much how early is early not too early have a base game loop functioning it's really important you shouldn't have a broken game available to a customer ever and they encountered the problem of evangelist alienation in a bit more of a roundabout way in the sense that the daisy mod users had an anchor in their minds an idea of what daisy should be and so when what was being developed was drastically different from what they expected they basically turned on it but there's more to it than that i'll explain that soon but for this chapter i just wanted to talk about early access generally because these are persistent problems in the industry so if you're a developer or an aspiring developer i want you to remember early access is fine but there is such thing as too early take the time to get it right and only open the floodgates when you think your product is ready for it

Channel: SovietWomble

Views: 1,818,586

Rating: 4.9535112 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: _LhmHO6qXf4

Length: 16min 28sec (988 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 12 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Practical-Parsley]

I really wish I'd gotten into DayZ when it first exploded on the scene. Looked really cool and I enjoy that slow paced lots-of-quiet-time type of gameplay. It goes on my list of gaming regrets

[u/Wafflecopter77]

Here's Part 2 and Part 3

[u/Wolfe244]

Great video. Would love to see more of this from womble, he's so right that so many complaints about software dev on YouTube have LITERALLY no clue what they're talking about

[u/[deleted]]

I'm glad I'm not the only one that thinks this whole "it's early access bro" line of thinking is mostly just used to deflect criticism

[u/stanleys85]

I strongly recommend anyone watching this video who has a sense of urge to revist the game to try it out again. There are so many well done modded servers around now theres almost surely something you'd like. Whether u want to try super hardcore survival servers with crazed small armies of zombies chasing you, or servers with traders u can buy guns from if u make enough money selling drugs etc. Theres even flyable helicopters now and base building. Still some bugs left though like vehicles spinning to space every once in a while if u crash in 100 player servers.

[u/-Lithium-]

Wtf is a womble? I love his stuff but this has been driving me nuts.

Edit: After watching the video I think he opened a can of worms here. I expect to see a lot of comments discussing evangelist alienation.

Overall it was pretty solid if not a little short.

[u/BushElito]

Holy shit, the part with the "the biggest fans become the biggest creators" (paraphrased) actually applied on me with Heroes and Generals, I especially enjoyed the version that came out with early access on steam, but overtime it got really stupid updates that just made me a rude asshole (on the forums).

I regret being this active. Sometimes I would write really stupid things and I am disappointed in myself in what I wrote. All because I was waaay too obsessed with the game and hoping it would become better.

[u/Mecxs]

Fuck I love DayZ.

I know that it's produced monumental levels of hatred amongst those that didn't like it, and that's fair. But fuck me, I love DayZ.

I've loved it since I first played the mod, just as it was starting to get popular. I loved the standalone throughout its development process. From bug-riddled mess, to arcade-y shooter, to the current 'live-off-the-land' flavour the devs are pushing. I love the bones of this game, the fundamental essence of what it is.

I love the 'walking simulator' parts - spending hours running through forests, coming to the outskirts of towns and deciding whether to run in for resupply, or go around the edges to avoid the risk of a firefight.

I love the survival aspects. Deciding whether to risk signalling your location with a campfire on a cold, wet night, or whether to try and fight through the cold and hope that you don't get sick. Hearing deer nearby when you're hungry and trying to sneak close enough to them to take a shot and get some dinner.

I love the inventory system. Trying to weigh up (so to speak) the benefits of carrying an extra mag for your gun against the ability to sprint a little longer or carry some extra food or bandages instead. Do I go for a big, bulky backpack that makes me standout but lets me carry loads of loot, or a camouflaged ghillie that lets me blend into the grass and trees?

I love the combat. The sheer unexpectedness of it - suddenly hearing bullets whip and crack through the air around you. No other game so consistently is able to send adrenaline surging through my body. I can feel every heart beat in my chest, my hands are trembling - the immersion is spectacular.

I know it's a giant piece of shit and the devs are awful and cheats are everywhere and the creator abandoned it and cars are bugged so they kill you and everyone kills on sight and everything else that's wrong with the game. But none of that has been enough to make me stop playing it.

I just fucking love this game.

[u/FOTBWN]

I played the mod when it first came out then got popular, then the mass cheaters showed up. I remember the endless promises from Rocket about where things were going and how it was going to be super awesome.

...then there was nothing but languishing in early access for years.

There were things that bothered me that I don't think were ever fixed or resolved. The debug plains were just straight up silly for one.