Почему ранний доступ?

“We want to make it clear to players that AirMech Strike is in active development mode and we are still experimenting with the game to make it the best it can be. As a Free to Play game, it is important to us to make the game fun and fair for anyone interested in a true Action RTS. We remember the days when demos were free, so to us Early Access as a F2P game is great since it lets anyone try the game 100% free, and give input that helps shape the game ahead of our official release and leaving beta.

Carbon has never made a Free to Play game before, with the dev team having worked on mostly retail or console paid games in the past. As such, we don't know what we are doing when it comes to making a F2P game loop, especially for a game that doesn't quite fit into any existing genres perfectly. Since one of our core values is to not make a game "pay to win", this has us testing a lot of different approaches to find the best fit for AirMech Strike.

Our definition of success is to have the game operating where we can justify continued development post-release, meaning it generates enough income for a small dev team. We have recently crossed the 2 million player mark for the PC version, but have found it very difficult to offer players things they want to purchase--but we see people do like to play solo and coop a lot! We've decided to move a lot of the free content to a new paid game, while refocusing AirMech Strike on the core PvP experience.

All players who are marked as Silver VIP (our internal flag for a player having spent any money at any point) will be receiving a new game, AirMech Wastelands, for free very soon. It will serve as a companion game to AirMech Strike, with greatly expanded Coop missions, RPG loot, and all the restrictions removed that previously limited free accounts. The goal is no second class citizens in either game--in AirMech Strike, it is a level playing field for everyone, payer or not. And in AirMech Wastelands, everyone "owns" the game, putting us back in our older comfort mode of designing games.”

Сколько примерно эта игра будет в раннем доступе?

“AirMech Strike will be in Early Access unitil August 2017. With the AirMech Strike update, our months of effort to rebuild the game are finally revealed, and we are focusing on finishing up the restructure and fixing bugs.

We will continue to update the game after leaving Early Access, we just don't feel the Early Access label is appropriate any longer. We've always had a very stable client, and we don't require to be paid before you can try the game, so it isn't representative of what some of the complaints players have about other games in Early Access. It's been fun, but we want to move up to full release now.”

Чем планируемая полная версия будет отличаться от версии в раннем доступе?

“We are patching AirMech Strike every few days. The full release will not be radically different than the current version (if you have seen the Strike update) but mostly will focus on bug fixes, tutorials, social feature hookups, and making sure AirMech Strike hooks in nicely to AirMech Wastelands, which uses a shared account. (players can move between the two versions if they want to do PvP, or the PvE/RPG game)”

Каково текущее состояние версии в раннем доступе?

“We have just posted a massive update to AirMech in the form of AirMech Strike. Players from a few years back will recognize this as the pure PvP action game they loved, which over time we crowded with bits and pieces from other F2P games in an effort to expand the appeal. We admit that was probably a wrong direction, as we annoyed the players who loved PvP by making it just another mode, and didn't seem to offer anything that the new players wanted to pay for.

The current version you see, AirMech Strike, is very close to our vision of what we want the Free to Play PvP game to be. We have disallowed many of the modifiers to combat which made PvP confusing and/or unfair, instead moving them over to AirMech Wastelands--and making them even better.

Since AirMech Strike is free, we suggest giving it a try to see if you like it. To us this is the best thing about being a Free to Play game--we don't have to promise the world, we can just let you try for yourself!”

Будет ли разница в цене до и после раннего доступа?

“AirMech Strike will remain free. AirMech Prime, a package that includes currency, Boosts, and some exclusive cosmetics (among other perks) will increase 50% from the Early Access price. We have stated this for years now, and ingame we clearly mark this.

Other prices will remain the same.

Also, any player who has paid real money in the past (shown as Silver VIP ingame) will be entitled to receive the companion game AirMech Wastelands before it is sold to the public. After it is released, this offer will not apply, and AirMech Wastelands will likely be priced the same as AirMech Prime during Early Access. (sorry for not just listing prices, the local currency options make that tricky!)”

Как вы планируете вовлекать сообщество в развитие игры?

“Even before AirMech was on Steam, Carbon has maintained their own forums for interacting with the players. Carbon devs are often in Global Chat, monitoring the health of the game and the servers. We have an AirMech Council of dedicated players that advise the devs on game balance issues (and they are so happy to see AirMech return to its PvP roots), as well as community moderators who are players that have shown themselves to be helpful leaders.

On our forums we have been very open with the community about our development plans, who we are, why we wanted to make AirMech, and how we are continually trying to find that right combination to make the game profitable while not doing "bad" F2P things. We've been opportunistic to find other ways to help build AirMech, from doing console versions with Ubisoft to doing VR versions with AirMech Command.

It has been difficult to not find the right mix for so long, and the previous (pre-Strike) update was a bit of a disaster. We annoyed our loyal players by adding more solo content, and found the new players played a lot but didn't play with others, and didn't pay for anything.

We proposed different paths forward to our community, both publicly on our forums, and privately to paid supporters. We considered un-F2Ping AirMech, or even moving to a new game. Collectively the decision to split the game in two became exciting, as nobody misses out on anything. Over the past 6 months, we answered questions, laid out plans, and felt really good about the next steps.

After finishing AirMech Command earlier this spring, we set to work on "the split". AirMech Wastelands started as the older version of the game, first by removing F2P mechanics, then greatly adding to the missions and overworld design of the game. Without worry about F2P, true progression came in the form of tons and tons of parts to earn as drops, buy from vendors, and we see a really cool RPG rising up.

At the same time, we trimmed AirMech Strike back to its roots. How to get players to play PvP? Just literally put them in a lobby. A 3D lobby. Make it easy to invite friends, use matchmaking, create custom games, browse for custom games--everything the hardcore PvP crowd had been asking for.

The community has been incredibly supportive during this process. As a tiny self-funded dev team (which means we are community funded) this is the only way we could have made it this far. A huge thanks to everyone from the Carbon team!”