What is the Longest Game in Early Access Game still being worked on?

[Gapaw]

We Know 7 Days to die has 10 years..Not sure about the others that are Early excess and still being worked on..Anyone else know?

[Roland]

Project Zomboid only beats 7 Days for longest by a few months. I don't know any others but there are a couple others I'm aware of who technically left early access but still play like they are unfinished games but I won't mention them since they did what some here are wanting this game to do...simply shed its EA tag and say it's done so that...tada....they aren't early access any longer....wink wink

[GinsengSamurai]

DEVELOPMENTAL TIMES AS REFERENCE POINTS

- Don't Starve: about 3 years
- Astroneer: ~3 years in Early Access
- Star Wars Squadrons: about 3 years
- Mass Effect 1: ~4 years
- Sims 2: about 4 years
- Rimworld: 5 years in Early Access
- Minecraft Dungeons: about 5 years
- Fallout 3: about 4 years with Bethesda, +2 years with Interplay
- Alan Wake: 6 years
- Valheim: ~6 years so far (Alpha 2017 to 2021, Early Access February 2021)
- L.A. Noire: 7 years
- Spore: 8 years
- Too Human: 9 years
- Team Fortress 2: ~9 years
- Owlboy: ~10 years
- 7 Days To Die: 10+ years (still in Alpha) <===
- Prey: 11 years
- Diablo 3: 11 years
- Camelot Unchained: 11+ years (still in Beta) <===
- Kenshi: 12 years total, 5 years in Early Access
- Star Citizen: 13+ years (still in Alpha) <===
- Duke Nukem Forever: 14 years
- Metroid Dread: 15 years
- Unreal World: 20+ years

* <=== Denotes games still in development. This list is of course, not complete. It was originally created to show people that Valheim being in Early Access for 2 years is pretty standard. People complained that it 'took too long for too little updates' when in fact, the game had a ton of updates. So to give people perspective, I was trying to show them that fast development isn't about having more people, but rather, how much resources and access developers have. Resources and access are not exclusive to just funding, but a combination of that plus experience, licensing, connection, design, and tools for creation, plus other nuisances of life.

[Foxu]

I think that a game called beamNG has been in early access since 2015 so like 9 years

[Mardoin69]

Also, 'Rising World' has been in EA for somewhere close to 10 yrs (I think?). But, mainly because when they were getting near finished, they opted to rebuild it in a different game engine. So, basically they had to start all over again (dam near.) It's getting close to caught up where it was in the original game engine now. Great game... similar to 7d except without zombies and no SI rules for building. Except the building aspect is much less limited since you can resize blocks.

[MoistGamer]

Unreal world... 20+ years huh? 7 Days... 10 + years?

Yeah. Now define "in development" for us. You cant probably, its rhetorical far as these forums are concerned. IRL you can define it sure, but not here.

So - I refuse to believe zomboid, 7 days, and whatever the heck unreal world is, were "in development" for 52 weeks of the year, 5 days a week, during 8 hours of business hours, enjoying only weekends with their families.

Nah. Whats actually happened while these were "in development" is probably... launch an alpha, make some money, go "oh F look at this FING MONEY WE HAVE", slack off, take vacations, buy a house in a suburb outside of Dallas, have a crew of 6 work 4 hours a week for 6 years straight, then realize "oh crap this is gonna take forever", finally hire some people with the millions$, publicly say TFP is "60 employees now", when in reality its actually 15 with 45 other people who come in once a year to record voice lines. Nothing wrong with that. IMO you, we, have no right to feel any negative emotion about that aside from Envy. I sure feel that anyway! But thats probably what happened.

The reasons companies like Bethesda, Blizzard, others take forever to develop probably include that theres so many rules, bureaucracy, 7 levels of managers for a single approval, thousands of hours of testing... whatever. It takes a while. Budgets, boards of directors, human resources shoving performance reviews down your throat, you name it.

The reason development here and with other... "Indie?" (outdated word I feel) developers is a swing in the complete opposite direction. No rules, no approvals, just some dude and his brother going "k now undo this and do this". Nate the steamer dude (hes cool) showing it off, and FaTal actually doing something. There's not thousands of hours of testing in each alpha iteration. Its not required and its pretty obvious as the consumer. (Had they played anywhere beyond 21 days in this A21 release they'd realize how horrid the crafting vs magazine balance is). "but people were clamoring for an update". Not an excuse, so stuff it.

FaTal is the only one who I've thus far discerned actually does anything with this game. There are others surely, NO - knowing them is not some moral and ethical right we have the choice to invoke. None of our business.

If it matters I'll take the "no board no approvals no HR" route any day. But if anyone thinks this game has been under 10 years of consistent, persistent, linear development... you're crazy. Total nonsensical guess on my part, going off nothing but optics, but the chances that a single TFP employee has spent 40 or 40+ hours M-F , working on this game, even ONCE in the last 5 years, is very unlikely to me.

Perhaps around the time Richard ran his mouth with release dates, perhaps around the A17 crunch and deliverables... and definitely right around the launch itself. I'm sure these are cases where there was a pulse beating at TFP and it was probably beating fast.

Beyond that... cmon man. What do the optics tell you. You think at 9:15AM Monday morning CST they're all on some call hashing out whats gonna happen for the day? Lol....

If you condensed TFP into an actual corpo work scheduld M-F 40 hours a week at least, 2080 hours a year, I'd venture to say this game took 2 business years worth of development. Total.

I'm just spit ballin and stool-posting here. Offtopic afterall. Id love to know what others think about this.

[Mardoin69]

@MoistGamer... I'm 100% convinced that's exactly how it works... You know dang well they aren't working a 'normal' business week on games. The exception 'might' be with big companies that employ a lot of people. But, even then ya have to wonder. Doesn't seem like even them big companies (like Bethesda for example) come out with enough titles that would suggest they work 'normal' business weeks. It's almost like it's a part time job or something... a few days a week and then they go work a different side job or something. At any rate, the smaller dev teams certainly don't work 'constantly' or 'consistently' or they'd surely finish these game much sooner imo.

[♥ Bluky ♥]

You all forget about giant STEAM game.... Yes, DOTA 2 still in beta since 2016 (I guess*). hahaaa

[꧁༺๓คɭ༻꧂]

Not sure how long M&B2 Bannerlord has been at it, feel like ages too.

[TK421]

Rust released in 2013 (Early Access) but they are bringing new content updates once a month. This last month they released the motorcycles and bicycles update. And they only have 2 DLC since 2013. Both of which do not effect whether you win or lose a battle. So I would say they are very much still in development. Released or not.