We should probably correct something we all do, ourselves included. Somewhere
in the last decade “early access” curdled into a dirty phrase, a synonym for
unfinished cash-grab, and every time a game launched into it we braced for
disappointment. Endless Legend 2 just hit 1.0, and it is a quiet, pointed
reminder that we got a bit too cynical about the whole idea.
Because here is what actually happened, and it is worth slowing down for.
Amplitude’s 4X strategy game spent a full year in early access, and in the
words doing the rounds this week, “15 years ago, people understood it was an
unfinished game.” That single line is the whole correction, because it points
at something we quietly forgot: early access was never supposed to be a
finished product you review in a temper the day it lands, it was supposed to
be exactly this, a year of players and developers building a big complicated
thing together out in the open, arguing about factions and balance in the
forums, watching systems get torn out and rebuilt, then arriving at a real 1.0
that is better for all of it. Somewhere along the way a wave of genuinely
cynical cash-grabs taught us to expect the worst, and that lesson was fair,
but we let it harden into treating the entire model as a scam, which it never
was.
It was a bargain. We just stopped keeping our end.
And the 1.0 is a proper 1.0, not a shrug. It brings a whole new playable
faction, the Sandshapers, the oldest civilisation on this drowning world, who
believe it is their sacred duty to terraform the oceans back into the desert
they remember. It adds two rogue factions and a minor one on top. This is a
studio using its early-access year the way the label was always supposed to
work, then landing the release with real new content rather than a bug-fix
note and a price rise.
We will be honest about the wrinkle, because we always are: the reception is
genuinely split. A “Very Positive” year on Steam sits next to a middling 3-ish
out of 5 on the PlayStation and Xbox stores, and that gap is worth watching,
probably down to how a dense, systems-heavy 4X feels on a controller versus a
mouse. If you are a console strategist, temper the excitement a touch and read
the platform reviews before you buy.
This one really is a mouse-and-keyboard game.
But the headline correction stands. Endless Legend 2 is what early access
looks like when a studio takes the deal seriously, and if the genre is your
thing, and its shifting Tidefall world sounds like the kind of strategy
wrinkle you lose weekends to, this is one of the good ones. We were too quick
to write the whole model off. This is the game reminding us why it existed in
the first place.
