In an ideal world, an early access game evolves and improves over the course of its time in what is essentially beta testing that people pay the studio to do (instead of the other way ’round like ye olden days). If one takes the list of fix-focused patches applied to the nautical survival sandbox Age of Water, that’s precisely what’s happening, as Three Whales Studio irons out the wrinkles and hammers out the dents of the multiplayer title.
The past three weeks have been all about addressing pain points of the game, including tweaking how fast enemies spawn, improving resource and medallion rewards across multiple activities, targeted fixes for specific quests, an option to disassemble items en masse, and some crew-specific updates like the ability to respec crew skills and smoothed progression towards level 20.
Taking the game’s temperature, we find concurrency numbers tailing off to a 24-hour peak of over 800 after an all-time peak of over 2,000, while user reviews place the game in the “mixed” category, with most complaints referencing long grinds, frustrating enemy spawn speeds, repetitive and boring gameplay, and an overall vibe that some deem to be too silly.
