I thought that Feb 3rd was going to be this games "official" release date but after visiting it's steam page it says it's still in early access. How finished are we talking here. Does it feel finished? Does it have some sort of progression or end game or is it just kind of an endless dungeon crawl? More importantly does it feel like it's worth it yet?

From what they showed on last fridays UPF it looks like it is missing a couple classes and the last 2 dungeons are locked

Aside from the last two dungeons being locked, it feels fairly finished. It takes awhile to get your characters leveled up and you're just as likely to lose them anyway or get stuck enough to have to restart, so there's no lack of content. I put in about 5 hours on release day and am only just getting close to fighting the first boss of the starting area. There are apparently some bugs and issues although i haven't run into any. They just released some list of fixes that they put out on steam just a little bit ago. You have a check list of bosses to beat, so I'd assume that doing so results in the end game as soon as those dungeons are available? If you feel like you're going to play this for only an hour or two and expend everything the game has to offer, don't worry. There's lots to enjoy provided you like the gameplay and difficulty.

From the early access page:

“The current Early Access build is playable with 3 complete dungeon environments (Ruins, Weald, and Warrens), 10 character classes, 9 town building types, 5+ quest types, 30+ monsters, 130+ items, and more than 30 interactive dungeon objects. There is currently no end to the Campaign Mode in Early Access, so players can keep raising heroes and embarking on quests indefinitely. The full version of the game will have an end to the story.”

They also said that they intend to release in the 2nd half of 2015, 6 months down the line. That said, its very polished for an early access title. It just seems to be missing some content.

Gameplay systems and mechanics are all in place and functional, but as mentioned in the other thread, the game is badly affected by "random numbers". It's full of exploits, work-arounds and useless stuff due to poor balance. It currently also has game crashes and corrupt save file bugs, and the UI could use several improvements (very curious on how they're gonna manage to put this on consoles). And as others have said, it's missing the second half of the "campaign".

Having that said, I've had a good amount of fun with it. I would've personally waited a bit to buy it if I knew beforehand, but that's mostly due to the fact that once I lay it down and wait for fixes if I know myself well enough I won't come back to it.

@ares42: Discouraging, but useful, information to know. Thanks.

@htr10: What part about that is discouraging? It's an Early Access game that is admittedly still a work in progress, and it's missing some classes, some late-game content, and needs some balance work. The bugs are relatively uncommon.

The game mostly needs balancing badly. Your heroes at level 1 are no stronger than normal mobs and doing one quest might require 3-5 regular encounters... more if you are unlucky. The cost of sanity treatment is also wayyyyy too high at the start of game. It is like you are meant to just lose tons of dudes to make a bank roll then finally get somewhere on adventurer set 15.

@karkarov: Oh man, you should see the enemies in the medium tier of quests (where your guys need to be lvl 3). I'm still not clear on how many weapon and armour upgrades I should have before tackling lvl 3 quests, but wow, those enemies have some HP on them and do considerably more damage.

Anyway, you're right, the enemies in the game are pretty much equally as strong as you. They tried to balance around that by giving you the "Death's Door" mechanic where you don't necessarily die at 0 HP. The closest thing to a Sectoid in the game is those Grub and Spider enemies, and even then I've had an unlucky encounter where one of them marked me with webs, and the other three literally took a character from full health to dead (I believe their attacks took him from full health to zero, then he had Blight from one of the spiders, and I had no chance to heal him so as soon as the guy started his turn the Blight killed him because I got unlucky and Death's Door didn't save him).

Your success on missions is basically a function of enemy crits. The more crits, the more likely it is that your stress maxes out sooner and the more likely that your guys will be completely out of health sooner or be afflicted and sabotage the likelihood of you succeeding.

@bisonhero: Game crashes and save game bugs are discouraging, whether the game is early access or not. He didn't say the bugs were uncommon, you are saying they are uncommon. Krater was a great early access game, but I would have discouraged other people from buying it when it was first available because of the frequency with which a bunch of us early players lost our save games.

@htr10: Well, it's probably mostly compatability issues, so it's gonna depend on your computer. I've had the game hard lock my computer a handful of times and lost my save 3 times in only 19 hours of game-time according to steam. Learned my lesson and started backing up my saves at this point =) If you check different forums there are plenty of other people reporting crash bugs as well. Fortunately from what I've read it seems like they're getting on top of the corrupt save issue.

Still, it's not like losing your save is a huge deal at this point (you probably wanted to start over anyways). While it certainly sucked losing my 30+ week run, my new run is in a way better condition now since I've been able to use what I've learned from the start.

@ares42: Oh yikes, didn't know the game has been that rough for some people. I've played 21 hours so far, and it's never locked up nor have I lost a save file. I'd heard some people talk about crash bugs (kinda not a big deal when the game autosaves every 5 seconds), didn't know there was more than that.