Yea, when I see "Early Access" I experience an automatic ocular translation of "Do Not Buy Yet" I mean, if they went on 75%-off or steeper I might, but that'd be really odd for a pre-release promotion.
I'm also interested in King Arthur's Gold, though as usual there's my standing question of multiplayer-team-games: does it have a bots option? Are they at least functional (if not particularly challenging)?
I gotta say, so far, this one's completely worth it for the price they're asking. Frankly, I'd have happily paid more, but that's just me.
I had been waiting for this one for.... hmmmm..... about a billion years, give or take. Havent been disappointed. This has been most of what I've been doing for the past couple of days (and also Hearthstone) and it isnt getting old.
There's a few similarities to Terraria, but for the most part I find this one pretty drastically different. In all honesty, this one is what I'd been hoping that Terraria would be. Not that Terraria was bad, far from it, but.... this is better. The gameplay and particularly the combat is a bit slower and more methodical, which I prefer over Terraria's "dash in and just keep randomly flailing till everything is dead" combat. If you try that in this, you're probably going to get splattered.
Alot of items to be found, too. Very.... very.... very.... many. On top of that, the procedural generation is more prevalent here. In terraria, it was just the world gen. Here though, even the monsters themselves are generated that way. For each new planet, you have to approach them carefully, to figure out which ones are passive, which are hostile, which can launch boulders at you, which ones have blood breath (!) and so on. And some will be common, others you may only rarely see on that planet, and so on. Even the look of each planet is procedural, with different colorschemes and terrain types and such. Weapons and armor that you can find are that way as well.
And the digging is better this time. Terraria had one thing I just haaaaaaaaaaaaated, which was that it only let you really dig at one block per time..... in a world of really tiny blocks. This one gives you a larger area that your mining tools will hit at once, which dramatically speeds up digging time. So THAT is a plus. Alot of other similar mechanics, such as block/item placement or interaction as well as the lighting engine are also much better. Though the other thing I didn't like about Terraria was that you had ONE world, which wasnt infinite.... didn't take long before there wasnt really anywhere to go. Not an issue here. There's alot of jumping between planets/stars/sectors to do here.
The only problem I've encountered as gameplay goes so far is a particular type of humanoid enemy (as there's usually at least a few on most planets somewhere), which is one that's carrying something like a sniper rifle. Anytime this gun shows up, it's nothing but trouble. A single super-fast bolt seems to always just wreck you. Makes dungeons and similar things a pain, as those are usually filled with colonists/soldiers/whatever from one of the 6 races, who of course typically want to kill you because you've committed the grand crime of existing. There is the occaisional vendor who DOESNT want to beat you over the head with your own face, but they're not easy to find.
The one other thing is that the tutorial bit for the game is not finished. Most mechanics seem fleshed out quite nicely, but the game simply wont explain a few of them, which are naturally the few that are the most cryptic. For the most part though, it's easy to learn things as you go along. I'm finding zero bugs, though some players report crashes; it seems to be specific to players though. Anyone that doesnt have crashes seems to then continue to never have them. They seem rare though in any case.
So, yeah, that's my thoughts on that. Finding it to be absolutely fantastic. Fortunately if you wanna check the game out further a bit, there's a gazillion billion videos and streams of it right now, so that makes it very very easy. But yeah, in my view, absolutely worth it and lives up to it's hype.
If anyone here does try it though, I'll give you one major hint: At the start, once you've finished the tutorial quest, it'll then give you the Beacon quest. Right at the start of the game. Which is very deceptive. DONT do this quest that early. Take alot of time to explore the starting planet, and some others, and gather the best gear and such you can find for that sector before building the Beacon. And dont do it near any structures that you dont want wrecked. I wont spoil what happens, but.... suffice it to say, finding out the hard way can be very, very frustrating. EDIT: Oh, and one more tip, make pickaxes immediately. Get a copper one as soon as you can. It gives you a thing like a futuristic digging tool right at the start, which you'll carry for the whole game, but it's actually NOT meant to be the prime digging tool, and the game will not point this out. It took me a few hours of quite slow digging with the blasted thing before I noticed the picks were in there and found out that they were meant to be the main digging tools.