Why Early Access?

“We chose to make Tactical Operations Early Access as we are not a big studio. We are a small group of enthusiastic gamers who like those old, easy-to-learn-hard-to-master online shooter games. Let's call them "Arcade Shooters" for old times' sakes.
We decided to build the foundations of the game we wanted before we released on Steam via Early Access, this means that we are releasing a stable version of the game, but it's not complete by all means. It still requires a lot of work mainly visual content and balancing.

Early Access will enable us to build up a player base and a dedicated community around the game, as a byproduct of this we can potentially find more talented individuals to get involved in the development of the game.
The key points we would like to communicate are: We want to make this game with the active player base and community's involvement, we will be developing the game while we play. This is how we have been doing it in the closed alpha stage and we intend to keep to that during the Steam Early Access stage.”

Approximately how long will this game be in Early Access?

“Early Access to a game is not a punishment. TO4 is a fully playable fun game. With features and elements that make the game stand out from the rest. It just needs more content and polish. Early Access lets the community play the game and give feedback, it also gives the development team a good advertorial to get new talented developers who can contribute to the project.

Our Early Access is the follow up to our Closed Alpha phase. We are expecting to be in Early Access for quite some time and most likely will be until the game includes fewer placeholders, more unique content, extra game modes, and various quality of life improvements.
Since we are only a free time dev team we can't guarantee dates. Our progress depends mostly on our free time and our current individual motivation.”

How is the full version planned to differ from the Early Access version?

“When talking about leaving Early Access, it's best to talk about additions, features, and the overall vision for the game. The full version of the game will contain much more content. More maps, extra characters, more weapons, etc. But, the most important difference will be that we are currently working (while in Early Access) with placeholders for animations, sounds, environment models, etc. We plan on replacing those with unique content and further polishing the game before we leave Early Access.
So the full version (not the final!) will be more about quality and quantity as the foundations are already in place. After the release of the full version, we intend to keep working on the game and bring more content to it.”

What is the current state of the Early Access version?

“Currently, the game has most of its basic gameplay functionality and is fully playable.

The Early Access version contains:

• More than six competitive maps with various themes and objectives.
  
• 17 buyable guns and 3 grenade types divided between the two teams.
  
• Basic UI including a game settings menu, in-game server browser, chat functionality, in-game voice-chat and hit stats during gameplay.

The classic Game mode scenarios for Early Access:

• Hostages rescue
  
• Bombplanting and Defusing
  
• Terrorist escape scenario
  
• Espionage terminal hacking or similar objective
  
• Team elimination

The things you need to know about this Early Access version:

• The game is multiplayer-focused. There will be no single-player experience in the Early Access version.
  
• Some menus and overviews are still rough. They work, but they might lack that intuitive feeling and attractive look that you might expect.
  
• Some features are implemented but might need tweaking (weapon balancing, economy balancing, map layouts, etc.). Feel free to give us feedback on that. We are happy about all feedback which helps to improve the game!
  
• The maps are currently built with content that is not unique to the game, we did try our best to make unique environments for every map. We hope to enhance that unique feeling more in the future once we have more developers.
  
• As devs, we also play the game, feel free to say hi if you see the TO4 tag in-game.

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Will the game be priced differently during and after Early Access?

“This game is Free and will remain that way. We won't have any premium currency, EXP, or any other shady free to play monetization scheme.”

How are you planning on involving the Community in your development process?

“It's easy for you to give us your feedback about the game, we are open to suggestions, criticism, bug reporting and your support via our Discord community group. In our Discord group, we will keep you up to date with development news and discuss the road ahead of us as well as building a healthy community around the game.”