A Game You Plan on Playing

Monomi Park is a game development studio that created a game called Slime Rancher that has proven to be a modern classic in the making. In years to come, generations will look back on it with the fondness and nostalgia that I hold for the games of my youth, but a lot has changed since I was a kid. For one, the approach to game development is much more varied, I grew up in a time when games took between 3 and 5 years to develop and save for some minor publicity you didn't get much in the way of a preview of what was to come. Slime Rancher 2 is an example of how far we've come and how players today are much more involved in guiding the creative process.

Today it's not unusual for a game developer to release a beta version of their game, or even an alpha version that is playable but nowhere near complete. The first Slime Rancher game was first released for early access as version 0.2 in December 2015, and would receive many updates and revisions before its eventual full release in August 2017 almost 2 years later. During that time I saw various YouTube channels cover the game and I liked what I saw but I was aware of the pitfalls of early access and held back on playing it and I'm glad that I did.

The reason I don't generally play early access games is because you can never change your first impression of a game. The first time you play it and the experience you have is a fixed point in time. Your opinion after the fact can change but you can never play it again for the very first time and see it with the same innocence, ignorance, and sense of intrigue.

The original Slime Rancher changed markedly throughout its development and even after release the game received substantial updates that added mountains of content, in some cases literally. It wasn't until 2024 that I finally played the original game, and I am happy that I waited because the version I played is the most complete - everything that has been added to the game to date was included by that point. This also meant that I got to avoid the glitches, bugs, exploits, and peculiarities that come with playing a game that is essentially unfinished.

Monomi Park first released Slime Rancher 2 for early access in September of 2022 and the game is still in development. You can buy it and you can play it now if you want, but it hasn't technically been officially released as it's still going through revisions and expansions. The 0.6.1 update dropped in December of 2024 and added an entire new area to the game and several new mechanics, I know this because just like the first game some of the YouTubers I am subscribed to have covered the game, I still haven't played it.

I want to wait until the game is officially released. I understand why developers release early access versions of their games, there are a lot of advantages to doing so. I have played a few in my time, most notably Deltarune as I couldn't wait for development to complete, partially because I loved Toby Fox's first game Undertale so much and partly because I understand Toby Fox has personal health complications we don't need to get into right now but it's enough to know they've been very public as to why development would be slow and the community that surrounds Undertale and Deltarune are accepting of the difficulty.

The main drawback of early access is that it can spoil the element of experience that players get when they play the final game for the first time. If you've been involved in the development process or just played the game during early access you'll know how things have changed over time within the game - or even worse you will have played a specific version and taken it as the direction of the final product and then never came back to it, so even if the game changes drastically as the art style and mechanics of the first Slime Rancher did, you won't know that.

I don't know when Slime Rancher 2 will officially release, it has now been in early access for two and a half years which is longer than the first game spent in development before its official release, but I am still adamant I want the final product to be my first impression in terms of gameplay, I'm fine seeing videos of others playing it as seeing a playthrough and playing a game are two very different things, for one it's very rare that I find a YouTuber that has a similar play style to me in any game I look up.