The Silliest Reason for Avoiding Early Access Games

There are plenty of perfectly good reasons to avoid Early Access games. You might be worried that you’ll buy the game and then it’ll never be finished. I’ve certainly bought into a couple of those. *cough* Once I even did it for two games to the same developer. Suffice to say, I won’t be knowingly buying a third from them. Or heck, you might just consider it in the same light as pre-ordering and be reluctant to part with the money until a complete game is ready for review before you.

But nope — my reason isn’t anything sensible like that.

My reason? Achievements. Or more to the point — the fact they’re often not implemented yet during Early Access.

This silliness has layers to it, too.

I don’t even particularly like achievements…

OK, that might be a bit extreme. I do like achievements.

So I suppose it would be more accurate to just say that I’m by no means an achievement completionist. I practically never even attempt to 100% or ‘platinum’ a game. Nor do I very often go hunting for a particular achievement. (Sometimes though!)

Mostly I enjoy the odd shot of joy delivered by seeing the little, ‘Hey- you did a thing!’ screen pop up. But it’s very transient in nature. I don’t overly ‘care’ about them in the longer run.

And if a game is never going to have achievements?

That’s fine.

Not a deal breaker at all.

The problem is when the achievements are added later

You know. After many hours have been spent. Many things have been done. Many things which should have resulted in an achievement!

And didn’t! They didn’t.

And there’s no way I’m going to spend that time in the game all over again. Or reach the same levels, doing the same things, hitting the same highs as I did in the first run through.

Something about this really sticks in my craw.

It might be some vestigial remnant of back in the days when I was more of a completionist. There was a time I would chase down achievements a little more aggressively after all. Or maybe it’s more that I don’t like having it ‘on record’ as it were that I haven’t done a thing, that actually I have!

Whatever the reason — it’s a pretty silly (and shallow) one for avoiding a game I would probably otherwise quite enjoy already. It also means avoiding seeing a game develop throughout its time in Early Access first hand. Which is also something I used to quite enjoy!

Buuuut… I’m also relatively sure that this isn’t something I’m going to change any time soon. It seems a pretty engrained behaviour and feeling at this point.

Silly or not!