[h3]Greetings fellow scientists![/h3]
Over the past few months, we’ve given nearly 100,000 GATE scientists a chance to experience the Office Sector - a relatively small slice of the Facility - through two separate playtests and a public demo, where we collected your feedback and helped refine our research.
As a small team, we were blown away by the response to our demo. We saw huge enjoyment of the portion you played, and we want to give every sector of the game the time it needs to make sure we don’t compromise on that quality. Most importantly, we want to do things right and we want to do them with
YOU. We want you to play the best possible Abiotic Factor, not rush ourselves to meet deadlines and we want to incorporate the community as we continue to build the game.
We’ve spent a lot of time discussing the pros and cons, as well as how to shape delivery of content. We feel the best path forward - rather than delay the game to accommodate our shift towards higher quality and more features - is to
release Abiotic Factor on May 2nd, 2024 in Early Access. As you know, we love transparency of development through our monthly Status Reports and Criss’s crazy vlogs, so let’s continue that - there’s lots more to come!
We bet you have a lot of questions, so let’s dive into answering them.
[h3]Why Early Access?[/h3]
Evolving Abiotic Factor through direct collaboration with the community is core to our development plans. We intend to continue to crowdsource feedback on players’ most requested features, identify opportunities for improvement, and ultimately build a feature-rich and highly polished experience.
[h3]Approximately how long will this game be in Early Access?[/h3]
We expect Abiotic Factor to be in Early Access for 8 to 12 months while we complete the remaining sectors and portal worlds. This may change as we adapt to player feedback and development, but we plan to release new sectors every 2 to 3 months with a load of new features to accompany each of these sectors.
[h3]How is the full version planned to differ from the Early Access version?[/h3]
Every milestone towards 1.0 will see new feature-complete sectors and worlds added, including new enemies, items, equipment, story and challenges that evolve the adventure. With the launch of 1.0, the main Abiotic Factor storyline and content will be complete and serve as a strong baseline for further expansion and post-release content. We’re in this for the long haul.
[h3]What is the current state of the Early Access version?[/h3]
The Early Access release delivers a massive, multi-sector adventure through the GATE Cascade Facility and a huge range of portal worlds. Our main priority is for the experience to be stable, well polished, and playable solo or co-op with up to 6 players throughout the entirety of the playable content. We’re also prepping some dedicated server tools to allow you to customize the experience further.
We’ve created a very handy roadmap of our development plans.
[h3]Will the game be priced differently during and after Early Access?[/h3]
The game will be
24.99 USD (or region equivalent) for the duration of Early Access. We may increase the price at full release based on the new content added, but
all updates during Early Access will be provided free of charge.[h3]How are you planning on involving the Community in your development process?[/h3]
We will be collecting feedback and data from the community in a variety of ways. As in the previous pre-release playables, we’re taking direct suggestions from players on Steam, Discord, social media, and through feedback surveys. Additionally, we will be analyzing gameplay data to identify areas of the game that are opportunities to improve the player experience.
We’re incredibly excited to see what sort of scientific breakthroughs you'll make in Abiotic Factor!
See you very soon in the GATE Cascade Research Facility.
Chuck the original Half-Life and Minecraft into a reactor core with Lethal Company and the resulting, bleating, pustulant abomination might look a bit like Abiotic Factor, a one-to-six player first-person survival game from Deep Field Games and Playstack, in which a bunch of stranded boffins must find their way out of a massive underground lab.
