With Lost Rift formally announced and set to launch later this year, it's a good topic to start with: what Early Access means for Lost Rift.
While Early Access is becoming increasingly common in games, the definition of what Early Access is intended to look like varies significantly across different games, platforms, and genres.
We plan to be fully transparent about what we intend to deliver with your purchase of Lost Rift on Day 1, as well as what will be added later in Early Access development.
Why Early Access?
To answer this question as simply as possible, we believe that now is the ideal time to gather community feedback on what we should focus on next. The core gameplay loop has come together well, and there is sufficient content to showcase our vision for the game.
We believe we’re creating a great game, and we think it can only be improved with your feedback. So, without further delay, below you’ll find exactly what we intend to bring to Early Access, as well as what will be coming in the future.
What Comes with Early Access?
The base game and access to all future non-DLC updates, initially up to 5 characters, and 5 PvE island instances saved on our dedicated servers, with no limit on how many of your friends’ islands you join.
We plan to deliver both a PvE island (also known as Pioneers’ Landing) where you can spend hours exploring and building your survival space, along with a high-risk, high-reward PvPvE extraction experience where rare and exotic loot can be obtained that will help you progress your quests when you return.
What We Plan to Bring Early Access on Day 1
The Lost Rift team is striving to bring you three key things on Early Access launch day:
1. A Strong Core Gameplay Loop & Body of Content
We’re applying People Can Fly’s expertise in gunplay and fusing PvE survival and PvPvE extraction into a unique, replayable, ever-evolving experience. We want to generate an experience that incites wonder and curiosity as you begin to explore Pioneers' Landing, our PvE-only island. You can explore, build, hunt, cook, and craft alongside with up to four friends, or as a solo adventurer. You can uncover new areas at your own pace, stock up on supplies, complete quests, and recruit NPC Survivors to help protect your base camp.
In juxtaposition to the relative safety of the PvE survival island, we also plan to have the first fully explorable Expedition island, a time-pressured and intense PvPvE experience filled with stronger PvE threats and, more importantly, rare loot that you can’t craft back at Pioneers' Landing. You may run into other matchmade players, where you will have to decide whether to engage or stick to the shadows and loot the scraps of bigger teams.
You’ll find a variety of enemies on Expeditions, including Outcasts (our name for the humanoid enemies), predators both big and small, prey, other real players, and more as you try to locate the wires, screwdrivers, and other special loot required to progress the initial story. If you die on an Expedition, you’ll lose everything you had with you and return to Pioneers' Landing. If you successfully extract, you’ll retain everything you found and be one step closer to accessing new areas or quests.
We want to demonstrate how we can seamlessly blend these two experiences, all while incorporating satisfying gunplay that delivers strong, moment-to-moment gameplay.
2. Stable Experience
We want to ensure that you have a stable and friction-free experience. Our team has collaborated for months to do everything possible to quickly mitigate any issues with connecting to servers and provide a stable experience, allowing you to focus on giving us gameplay feedback instead of troubleshooting.
While we can’t promise everything will be perfect, this is early access for a reason, after all. We’re becoming increasingly confident, having conducted internal company-wide tests, and will be rolling it out to a much larger scale with Steam Playtest on May 15th.
3. Transparency & Open Communication
We announced in mid-March and launched our Discord server, with most of our development team as active participants, who can be identified by their handles, which start with 'PCF_'. We aim to be transparent about our goals and what we intend to deliver during Early Access, allowing you to see more of the work in progress through quick screengrabs, GIFs, and playtest blooper videos.
Once players get their hands on the game, we will listen to your feedback. Whether you think something is too powerful, too weak, too long, or too short, we genuinely want to know about it, and we believe our team can deliver an even better game with your collaboration and contributions.
What we won’t have on Day 1 of Early Access
With transparency in mind, all of the below are goals we’ll be working towards over the course of Early Access, but won’t be fully realized on launch day.
We won’t have the final art & assets
Our small team of artists has been hard at work delivering a wealth of outfits, jungle biomes, weapons, building pieces, and more. That said, the game will be far from ‘art complete’ on Day 1 of Early Access.
This means that you will encounter missing textures, placeholder assets, and greybox in our game. Gameplay is king, and incomplete art should not prevent us from sharing our plans or delaying our playtests, allowing you to play and provide your feedback.
Here is one easy example of art in our game and what “Placeholder” or “Greybox” means.
The above screenshot is a great example. From a distance, you can tell what the Antenna is, and it has a rough shape. However, it lacks textures and artistic refinement to make it look like an actual building. It’s there, it’s functional for gameplay, but it's far from the quality we’re striving for in our 1.0 game launch. Many of our assets are currently in this state, and we have a priority list of improvements for 2025.
We won’t have a bug-free experience
You can have the biggest and best QA team in the world, and players will find more weird and wonderful issues on day one than the QA team finds in a year.
As a result, we’ve been working diligently to organize ourselves to streamline our reporting and bug-fixing process. We’re ready to listen, diagnose, and patch starting from day one. When you experience an issue, hit us up on Discord or the Lost Rift Steam Forums, and we’ll be sure to pick up the torch (no pun intended) and address it as soon as possible.
Wrapping Up
We’re incredibly excited to put this game in front of you, starting with our first open Playtest beginning 10 AM Eastern on May 15th, 2025. To be the first to learn how to sign up, join our Discord.
We’re looking forward to you testing our servers and providing feedback to help us build the game alongside you, rather than just behind the scenes. Thank you for reading.
- PCF_Harmonious
Lost Rift Product Owner