Update Pending...

A common complaint about buying early access games is you don't know ultimately what you're going to get.  This is certainly the case with Hardspace: Shipbreaker, a game that most people thought would eventually feature a wide variety of spacecraft to dismantle.  Counter to that expectation though, the full version of the game ended up focusing on the storytelling aspects of the game.  Don't get me wrong, it's a topical tale that is very relevant to the world we live in today.  Even so, I feel like it was (for me at least) one of the less interesting direction the developers could have gone in...well, it is a finished product for better or worse.  Some early access games have far less certain futures.  So much so, the real question isn't a matter of "what", but "when".

Developer roadmaps are nice because they let the players (current and potential) see what's coming.  The thing they don't show though is when, if ever, those updates are going to materialize.  In some cases it's understandable.  Stoneshard, for example, has some of it's dev team located in Ukraine - obviously not the easiest place to be making a game right now (with the war going on).  Satisfactory, on the other hand, seems to have lost some of it's momentum since the pandemic started in terms of frequency and substance when it comes to updates.  Still other games, such as Dwarf Fortress, have been steadily chipping away at their intended goals for what feels like more than a decade at this point.  Granted, that game will probably never truly be feature complete.  However, there has been a significant push in the last few years to get it in polished up state for it's release on Steam.  Thankfully, Dwarf Fortress is already extremely feature rich, so players have plenty to sink their teeth into while they wait.  For other games though, that's not the case.

Ultimate Admiral: Dreadnaughts is an odd game.  Ostensibly, it's all about modeling surface engagements between opposing warships.  The thing is, surface-only navel warfare ended about the same time HMS Dreadnaught came down the slipway.  Starting around the First World War, submarines and aircraft began to play increasingly important roles in naval combat.  Ultimate Admiral don't model any of that (at least not yet).  As a sandbox simulator for iron-clads and pre-dreadnaughts it works well enough, but it's really weird to have World War 2 era destroyers without any anti-aircraft guns or depth charge racks.  In other words the game has yet to update to the types of warfare it's supposed to simulate.

Lastly, I want to mention a real oddball, ΔV: Rings of Saturn.  As far as 2D space sims go it's alright.  The zero-G physics are accurate and the technology in the game feels appropriately near future in design.  Updates continue to be common and incremental in terms of improvements, but then (seemingly out of nowhere) the developer introduced paid DLC that adds anthropomorphic crew members into the game.  Now, I'm not categorically opposed to this sort of thing...but suffice to say I won't be buying this kind of content either.  It's a weird digression that I can only assume the dev made in order to make some extra money off a certain subset of his player base.  Let's hope we don't see this sort of thing in other games like Darkest Dungeon II.  That game has had enough ups and downs throughout its troubled history as is.