Following Early Access games, especially smaller indie games, is both fascinating and very frustrating. On the one hand, you get to see a game shape up in almost real-time, as well as see how they are learning and adapting their game. On the other hand, since the games progress is at the mercy of a small group, if not one person, that sometimes leads to large gaps in progress, uneven development velocity, and sometimes a game going in a very different direction than you initially expected.
I’ve mentioned Rimworld here before, and when I was playing it earlier in the summer, updates were pretty frequent. However the last update/news was back on 6/3/2017. That’s… not great. Is Rimworld dead? Is a huge update coming? Did the guy making it just take a little break? The joys of small-time early access…
I posted about Castle Story, another EA title, a few days ago. Having now played it, I can safely say its about 30 minutes to maybe an hour of fun before you see the whole game. How the hell do you spend 5+ years working on something that simple and small? Just makes no sense, especially because the foundation (or in this case, the whole game) is pretty solid. Building stuff is fun, the resource gathering isn’t terrible, and the animations/graphics are cute. But if you have beaten back one wave of enemies, you have beat back all of them. Very strange, and kinda disappointing.
On the other hand you have a game like PUBG, which is also in EA, but at the same time is one of the most popular games out. Such an odd dynamic. And who knows how long PUBG will be popular. Will it be like LoL or CS:GO, where it becomes a staple of gaming? Or will it be a game like DayZ, massively popular while in development, and then dies before it even makes it out for official release?
Humor corner: Just watched a PUBG eSport event, where in the final game, the eventual winner of a best-of-three series won despite just looting meds, sitting in a rock, and eventually dying to the circle. Guess Gevlon was right all along!
Oh wait, he also outright won the second game and had a K/D above 0.1. Nevermind.
Hardcore Casual 
I believe most Rimworld news you’ll hear (when there isn’t actual news aka patch notes) is from the guy’s Twitter. I’m subbed to /r/rimworld so I occasionally see something like “Tynan herpaderpa derps some stuff about some shit”, I feel like I’ve seen one of those recently so I wouldn’t worry too much.
As for Evermore in the rocks strat I’m pretty sure he got stuck there on accident (I believe there is a clip from his stream during the event) and did what he had to do to live as long as he could. But yeah, Gevlon is dumb. Though I also think the hardcore deathmatch players are dumb too. Occasionally I’ll land at school or military to have a little fun and see how long I can last but some people only do that. Just yesterday I heard a guy die in the first 5 seconds there and on the mic he screams “I FUCKING HATE THIS FUCKING GAME” and hey maybe he was just trolling but he sounded pretty madbro. Of course this same type of person would probably say not landing at school or military makes the game fucking stupid and for pussies. Meh, internet gonna internet.
Yea they didn’t show him getting stuck, only showed him in the rock live, so it was a bit confusing. I did see the clip later of him trying to get out, and then eventually accepting his fate.
I think one of the major appeals to PUBG is you can play it different ways. Some people love the initial slugfest at popular spots, others focus more on winning overall, and a Gevlon can play looting online and never fire a shot or have a chance to win a game. It gets a little hazy when you throw eSports into it, but hopefully they remember that 99.9% of their playerbase isn’t all that interested in the eSport-style of playing.
What was your opinion of PUBG as an esport having watched the event?
I don’t think the game really works as a competitive “who is the actual best” game ala LoL championship for example. It works amazingly well as entertainment though, with great highlights and just all-around funny and skillful plays.
That event itself of course suffered from some atrocious camera work and just generally iffy pacing, but those are things they will improve on in the future.