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The Long Dark episode 4 is out. Here's hoping they toned down the fetch quests a little, because that stuff is the worst part in their story releases.
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# ? May 25, 2024 09:27 |
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Oysters Autobio posted:I haven't tried anything modded, can you recommend any? To add to the above: it's worth mentioning Industrial Overhaul which greatly increases the complexity of, uh, everything. I have mixed opinions on its specifics, mostly due to SE's conveyor system absolutely not being meant for intermediate components. In my experience it actually makes the initial rock-punching phase faster due to the ratios on its "manual" assembler despite most mods like this doing their best to drag out that part of survival games forever (I'm looking at you, basically every large factorio mod). If you want to try this, absolutely get something like Production Quotas so you don't go insane trying to keep everything in stock. Hacking Computer is great fun with modular encounters systems. If you can get to it, you can own it. Eventually. This can range from reasonable to wildly overpowered depending on how you use it but if you wanted to play a game entirely on salvaging other ships this is a great way to do that. I once used this to steal a station that turned out to have 200k of every ore onboard and like, okay, I guess that's over now. WeaponCore itself doesn't do anything, but there's a ton of other mods that use it for great effect. Of these, Aryx Enterprises is incredibly good and is basically essential to me now. Also get Replace Vanilla Weapons if you use WeaponCore. On the other side of things, Defense Shields goes a long way to solving the "ships get exploded in five seconds" problem by either letting you tank damage or realize you're not going to win and run before you start losing parts of your ship. MES is capable of spawning hostile ships with shields too (as well as new weapons, if configured to do so) if you want to have an Exciting time. There's also "Energy Shields" but IMO Defense Shields is better; among other things Energy Shields makes it trivial to have absurdly tough shields whereas Defense Shields makes you at least think about how you're going to power the thing if you want meaningful protection. BuildInfo should just be part of the base game. I also prefer SmartRotors: Solar over the various script systems as it's easier to use and I'm pretty sure is better for performance too. And there's Nanite Control Facility which has some issues on the technical side, especially around merging/unmerging of multiple facilities into groups as ships move around, but it's a ton of fun to just throw down the starts of blocks and watch this thing weld them all for you. Ditto for watching it clean up the debris from a battle. You can also combine it with a blueprint projector of the ship it's on for fully automatic repairs (assuming the conveyor network doesn't get damaged...) It's a shame it took SE so long to get to a "not a miserable and buggy experience" because what it does it does very well, but by now it's what, eight years old? and largely forgotten.
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I really wish SE would copy the repair and blueprinting system from Empyrion. I love SE and have spent countless hours in it but combat is just awful when I have to manually repair everything (and the blueprint and self-project trick is very annoying to do).
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TeaJay posted:The Long Dark episode 4 is out. Here's hoping they toned down the fetch quests a little, because that stuff is the worst part in their story releases. It was so bad I stopped playing the game entirely (by that point I was burned out on the sandbox).
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Trivia posted:It was so bad I stopped playing the game entirely (by that point I was burned out on the sandbox). Why are they still putting money into the game? People loved sandbox mode and hated the story, so aside from maybe making some new areas, what's the point?
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BrianRx posted:Why are they still putting money into the game? People loved sandbox mode and hated the story, so aside from maybe making some new areas, what's the point? Wasn't the game at least partially funded by a grant from the Canadian government? Perhaps there's some stipulations on development that they have to keep development going. Personally I don't find the story mode too egregious. This is a game about traveling around collecting resources. It's no surprise that the story mode mostly focuses around going places and getting things, that is the primary gameplay loop.
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Less Fat Luke posted:I really wish SE would copy the repair and blueprinting system from Empyrion. I love SE and have spent countless hours in it but combat is just awful when I have to manually repair everything (and the blueprint and self-project trick is very annoying to do). They kind of can't, at least without massively changing how the game works. Empyrion pulls that off because each grid (ship/base/etc.) is its own Thing, with ownership/sharing settings, etc., but SE grids can be created or destroyed at will which is how merge blocks work or how you can saw a ship in half and get two half-ships. If you split a ship in half, which one repairs to the original? What does the other one do? Do you have two whole ships? What if it was a single armor block floating in space? It would be nice if projector alignment wasn't the worst thing ever, though. It's ridiculous that the best way to do that is still have a friend watching from a distance and telling you "no, the other left". Especially since which axis it decides is which seems basically random. I don't think I've ever had a blueprint where all three axes were "correct" despite aligning the projector the way you're supposed to.
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BrianRx posted:Why are they still putting money into the game? People loved sandbox mode and hated the story, so aside from maybe making some new areas, what's the point? I think they only have like 20 employees and the game has sold 5 million copies to date so they can basically afford to work on it forever, and I really get the vibe that story mode is the vanity project of the head guy.
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Trivia posted:It was so bad I stopped playing the game entirely (by that point I was burned out on the sandbox). Well, first half an hour has had maybe 2 minutes of gameplay and the rest listening to various people talk. And you can't even skip the dialogue (if you know how let me know). I mean, the other option is to let the player find out this exposition in a document somewhere and read it. So it's kinda bad but different kind of bad. I'm somewhat invested in the story though, and I kinda want to know where it goes, but drat the devs and the game actively make me want to stop playing with these design choices.
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BrianRx posted:Why are they still putting money into the game? People loved sandbox mode and hated the story, so aside from maybe making some new areas, what's the point? Arven posted:the vibe that story mode is the vanity project of the head guy. It's not Rimworld levels of not understanding why most people play games of your genre, but it has the same energy.
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I mean, I love, love, love the story mode for Long Dark, seriously, I recommend it to all my friends and it's one of my favorite games of whatever year I happened to realize it had a campaign. I'm going to devour that new episode once the weather turns cold here. But all that said, it's not much like other survival games, and the campaign especially has some significant idiosyncrasies in the gameplay. For me it feels more like an RPG? Jack B Nimble fucked around with this message at 22:00 on Oct 8, 2021 |
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re: Rimworld, tynan is not as bad about that as he used to be but yeah, in earlier days his head was so far up his own rear end lol the recent big expansion DLC really turned that around though, it's all about letting you tailor your experience to be the experience YOU want to have vs. Tynan's vision (it's really good)
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Flesh Forge posted:the recent big expansion DLC really turned that around though, it's all about letting you tailor your experience to be the experience YOU want to have vs. Tynan's vision (it's really good) ![]()
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Haifisch posted:It's not Rimworld levels of not understanding why most people play games of your genre, but it has the same energy.
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tynan is a dorky tech bro about certain things, if you want the minutiae you can find writeups pretty easily: https://kotaku.com/rimworlds-gay-women-controversy-explained-1788555928 more generally though, the older versions of rimworld were very much about "this is the experience tynan wants you to have" but in more modern releases he relaxed and added a whole lot of granular scenario customization options and the recent expansion adds some very heavy aesthetic and gameplay customizations based on what the player wants to do, vs what the game wants to do to the player. e: a really big thing is the game's difficulty progression, i.e. by default the difficulty of threat incidents will continue to escalate (there is a cap, but it's a very high cap) because tynan's vision was to pressure the player to leave the planet and finish the scenario. it turns out a whole lot of players aren't interested in leaving the planet and just enjoy the colony sandbox. tynan resisted trying to accommodate that for years, only recently really letting go of forcing that on every player. numerous other aspects of this e.g. he added a low tech 'tribal' start option but barely supported it for years and it wasn't practical to play except in the easiest of biomes, now finally it's pretty reasonable to play and not some contemptuous afterthought Flesh Forge fucked around with this message at 01:19 on Oct 9, 2021 |
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My two cents on Tylenol Sylvester: once it was more than just him working on the game, it seems like one of the other folks managed to get through to him that he could change the scope and focus of the project without losing some part of his identity.
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Tribal starts are always the most fun imo I just wish there was a way to cap tech at the medieval level.
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Has anyone had a chance to play Starbase? Was wondering if it’s any good.
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Trivia posted:Tribal starts are always the most fun imo There are mods that do this! https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2076106515
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Kraftwerk posted:Has anyone had a chance to play Starbase? Was wondering if it’s any good. If you like the building aspect, it has a wildly intricate ship designer and a lot of cool systems. Unfortunately, currently nearly all of the gameplay is either the tedium of mining, or flying out in a vast empty space looking for PvP. The game has promise but they're developing pretty slowly. I still wonder what witchcraft they used to have the render distances they do with a single world
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This looks neat. https://youtu.be/Kz5woHz4VyU
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Kraftwerk posted:Has anyone had a chance to play Starbase? Was wondering if it’s any good. They've put together a solid engine but it isn't really a game yet. The only thing to do is mine asteroids and then build ships to attack other people mining asteroids. Salvaging other ships is more trouble than just mining and building new ones, so there isn't really a reason to that beyond just to be a jerk. Space is huge and resources are essentially infinite, so there is nothing to fight over. There will hopefully be an update introduced before the end of the year that introduces capital ships and station sieges, however they haven't gave any inclination that they're going to address the "nothing to fight over" thing.
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tribal starts in rimworld make you pretty much objectively stronger if you can survive the first year or so and it's been that way since Royalty came out so a hot minute. the ability to stack up brain powers on your core people just by putting in meditation time is staggeringly powerful. the larger thing to note with tynan's "~vision~" is that the big thing was that he wanted the game to have an ending point and a place you could finish at. there were enough survival games where you just sort of stopped playing because you were bored out there already, and he thought that was super lame. for the longest time during development, the only exit was the space ship, and the game didn't have enough levers to pull to make the game at all interesting after a certain point, so tynan compensated by just having the enemy raids slam on the gas after you were developed to an arbitrary point, which was not a great experience. you could always turn the difficulty down to more or less opt out of that dynamic but that obviously feels really bad; it was much more likely to feel like a sneering judgement that you "can't cut it" rather than what it was, opting out of semi-broken system that doesn't scale well to big numbers. ultimately after the game hit 1.0 and there were no more patches coming after 3 months and adding something like "cold swamp biome" and other time consuming but low-impact stuff, you unsurprisingly started to see a lot of breaking out of options and narratives to become the more general story generation game that had been on the title screen for something like 4 years at that point. all that said, lots and lots of goons were very eager to take offense and hold grudges over the pre-1.0 times when tynan had made some calls to give the game a unique character in a marketplace where ultimately goalless builders were dime a dozen, and lots of them still like to pretend that the game has always been some sort of egotistical flight of whimsy by tynan and continues to be good in spite of him rather than because of him. when really the truth is that like any game designer, tynan's wrong about a lot of stuff, and right about some stuff, but unlike most designers, tynan was cool with people modding the poo poo out of his game to correct things he was wrong about even if he didn't agree with them on it. modding frequently got more functionality upgrades than the base game did, pre-1.0, which was frustrating to me because i dislike modding most games for a couple reasons; most of them are obvious enough if you read the Rimworld forums here and find half a dozen posters talking straight past one another because they don't have the same modpack installed. there's lots of stuff that i feel like he continues to get fundamentally wrong - the late game STILL does not have many interesting threats beyond just more and bigger enemy raids, and it direly needs them because the game theory gets super duper dumb at high levels like that - but the "~vision~" stuff has been drastically overblown for actual years. rimworld is far beyond tynan and has been since the beta releases.
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Coolguye posted:all that said, lots and lots of goons were very eager to take offense and hold grudges over the pre-1.0 times when tynan had made some calls to give the game a unique character in a marketplace where ultimately goalless builders were dime a dozen, and lots of them still like to pretend that the game has always been some sort of egotistical flight of whimsy by tynan and continues to be good in spite of him rather than because of him. when really the truth is that like any game designer, tynan's wrong about a lot of stuff, and right about some stuff, but unlike most designers, tynan was cool with people modding the poo poo out of his game to correct things he was wrong about even if he didn't agree with them on it. modding frequently got more functionality upgrades than the base game did, pre-1.0, which was frustrating to me because i dislike modding most games for a couple reasons; most of them are obvious enough if you read the Rimworld forums here and find half a dozen posters talking straight past one another because they don't have the same modpack installed.releases. this is one of the greatest selling points of rimworld, for a wide spectrum of reasons from the minimalist art style to the plaintext format of most of the mechanics data, it's just super friendly towards modding, there are *thousands* of mods out there now and tynan is very accommodating towards the modding community. really a sharp contrast to practically all other games in the general category.
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I don’t disagree with your overall point but I want to argue a slight technicality that I don’t think rimworld was something unique in a sea of games like it that were boring builders - it was something unique that *didn’t* have close parallels and so in those “vision” days it had annoying moments to play in what felt like an amazing unique game but for the dev having a few dumb ideas that you worked around. I agree, he figured it out and it’s way better now but it wasn’t cool and unique because of that weird “finish it” aspect - he just tied a lot of different colony builder aspects together into a game that was clearly heads and tails above anything like it at the time with a slight caveat of “and you have to work around the escalating difficulty if you want to play an endless colony sim.” I agree that it’s inaccurate to point to the “story should end” vision in 2021 as a detriment - it doesn’t really exist anymore - but I don’t think it was somehow “The thing that made the game good in a field of goalless builders.” There wasn’t a field of goalless builders that people were tired of, it was just a good game and the people playing it said “but also this was a weird choice.” Like I said end of the day my point still arrives at your conclusion so maybe it’s not even worth mentioning but I do think his vision was a relevant talking point especially for people who were playing vanilla until some of the more modern updates. (It’s also not true of everyone - I know players who explicitly only like rimworld because of the ending pressure and the drive it gives you.)
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Just finished The Long dark episode 4... I feel like there was a huge disconnect between the story stuff and the actual gameplay part. I mean, the convicts send me out there to do their dirty work, fine. Then I return with 3 rifles, pistols, knives, weapons... and could easily shoot them all. But good guy MacKenzie honorably trusts known psychopath Mathis not to screw him over, I guess. Also they don't care at all that you stash all your stuff in the guardpost and sleep there. After the last trip I forgot to stash my weapons, so I don't know if the end sequence would've been any different if you had guns. Would you be able to have a gunfight with them or would you still be forced to run? It just feels like they have this story they want to tell you but are forced to put the actual gameplay bits in there, and have tedious and long puzzle sections to keep you busy. Maybe an abridged "story mode" would've actually be best here where you could cut down all the fetch quests and busywork and basically watch the story unfold. I really felt bad for Jace at the end, I hope she survives, because otherwise that would be a really stupid death. I mean, realistically, they'd both probably die from hypothermia, but I dunno if Jace has the same kind of plot armor than MacKenzie at this point. Not to mention the Donnermacguffin. I'm still invested what happens, it just feels tedious to get through the story release. And would it kill for Astrid to actually tell MacKenzie at some point that he's carrying a super important cure for the plague or something? Although it doesn't seem to matter and he's betting his life on the drat thing anyway
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MazelTovCocktail posted:This looks neat. Sorry to quote my own post. I was wondering if anyone has tried this yet, as there is a demo out? It seems like a mix of Green Hell, Death Stranding and Snow Runner. Also I have to meet after death stranding I really kind of enjoy the mountain aspects of it; well when not having to deal with a goddamned BT. Also this is an interesting survival game I saw when looking at the Climber page. rs set above Adjust the filters above to see other reviews Loading reviews... SHARE OK Marshal Prolapse fucked around with this message at 17:36 on Oct 10, 2021 |
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Coolguye posted:all that said, lots and lots of goons were very eager to take offense and hold grudges over the pre-1.0 times when tynan had made some calls to give the game a unique character in a marketplace where ultimately goalless builders were dime a dozen, and lots of them still like to pretend that the game has always been some sort of egotistical flight of whimsy by tynan and continues to be good in spite of him rather than because of him. when really the truth is that like any game designer, tynan's wrong about a lot of stuff, and right about some stuff, but unlike most designers, tynan was cool with people modding the poo poo out of his game to correct things he was wrong about even if he didn't agree with them on it. modding frequently got more functionality upgrades than the base game did, pre-1.0, which was frustrating to me because i dislike modding most games for a couple reasons; most of them are obvious enough if you read the Rimworld forums here and find half a dozen posters talking straight past one another because they don't have the same modpack installed. There's also some extremely elaborate mods out there that pick up where the original endgame left off and have you do space adventures in the ship you made, get in a global cylon war with the mechanoids, turn your base into Factorio etc. and you know what? It is kinda boring. A lot of extremely clever design has gone into the modding scene but still nobody's worked out a better lategame challenge than the same guys you've been fighting all along, but in bullshit quantities and maybe with base-deleting rockets. The first three years or so of a settlement are the sweet spot gameplay-wise and he was right to build a default playthrough to only last a bit longer. Gamers get mad at him for telling them what to do instead of letting them decide or whatever but then the same exact people turn around and freak out that the game is bad because they turned it up to the hardest settings and now it's too hard A Wizard of Goatse fucked around with this message at 20:12 on Oct 10, 2021 |
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Void Train has a great concept and I really want to like it but... it's just not very good, is it? I keep unlocking stuff I can't use so I can unlock stuff that I wish I'd had in the beginning because it would have made things more fun. I'm 7 hours in and only just getting to the point where I can finally build a goddamn train! The whole mechanic where you always have to be tethered to something is just... weird, and honestly pretty bad? Gameplay-wise its tedious, immersion-wise its insanely dumb. Especially since the game has a tendency to put a bunch of "heavy items" at the end of long hook sections so you have to slowly go back and forth and back and forth to retrieve them. And the combat so far is terrible. Maybe if I want to play around with a "void train" I should go do sunless skies instead.
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From people I've talked to, the two big complaints seem to be 1. No passive income, in the style of Raft's nets, and 2. No way to seek out specific resources. There's a driller or extractor or something you unlock, and it seemed at first glance like something you might, for example, bring out to distant islands to get large quantities of ore in huge chunks. But instead it turns out to just be yet another processing station. If you're full up on X, Y, and Z resources, but you need more of A, in most survival games, you could go to where A is found. Dig deep for diamonds in MInecraft, chunk out to the woods in the Forest for logs, search swamps for ore in Valheim, check caves for lithium in Subnautica. But in Void Train, every resource is found in the same place. There's no way to seek out metal specifically, you just wait for it to float by the same way you do everything else, and in the same quantities. It's the first few minutes of Raft, where all you can do is pickup what floats near you, but stretched out into a dozen hours. The tedious processing sure doesn't help either. Fuel, especially at higher tiers, is very rare and valuable, but you're burning it nonstop just trying to get your items made. But even free, it's just so much cooking, smelting, and processing while meters slowly tick down.
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Also, the meters for most things need to be done away entirely (letting you finish up and get back to other stuff) or made much longer while allowing much larger batches (establish a pace of setting up, going to get more stuff while it processes, and then coming back to collect it and set up the next batch). The timers being what they are gives me a strong sense that very little actual thought is going into some of these fundamental design decisions. And who on earth decided 3 items was the optimum size for the goddamn chests? I too was excited by the idea of setting up mining equipment and getting a bunch of resources, but yeah that doesn't seem like its gonna happen. There doesn't seem to be much way to influence where you're going or what you collect at all. Also, Raft had the fun of actually spending time building out your raft, does Void Train at some point let you actually have fun building stuff? Right now it's all been pre-determined upgrades doing pre-determined things, except oh I guess you can decide where to drop your boxes. I wanted to build a motherfucking train! If that's actually gonna happen at some point I feel like there would have been some sort of indication by now, so I'm guessing it's not (7 hours in!). The worse part is I'm beginning to realize the tedium isn't going to end. It's not the slow start many survival games have that makes you appreciate the conveniences and upgrades you get later, its a situation that is actually going to get WORSE as I need to build stuff that requires ever more stuff I snag as it passes by.
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TeaJay posted:Just finished The Long dark episode 4... I'd be interested to know this too. In my case, I did stash my weapons but in the guard post as usual, and the linear escape sequence doesn't take you near that area. However, it does take you through that little garage/workshop area where you could store some stuff, or you could just drop weapons on the ground by the section of the perimeter you have to pass through during the escape, as I'm pretty sure dropped items persist between chapters. I thought this episode was pretty mediocre overall, and enjoyed the previous one with Astrid more (which itself wasn't that great). The dialogue is still pretty bad (though maybe not as a dire as in episodes 1-2) and the presentation of a lot of it is just really poorly done. There are way too many parts where there's just a load of unskippable dialogue you have to sit through (especially at the start) with very little else going on in way to actually make things engaging. And as you say there's a weird disconnect between the story and the actual survival aspects of the game. I too am invested in finding out what happens, but goddamn if they don't try their hardest to sap your will to actually get through the drat thing. I hope Episode 5 is the last one, honestly, because I have a feeling that if it goes on longer than that I'll probably just Youtube it.
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Vib Rib posted:From people I've talked to, the two big complaints seem to be 1. No passive income, in the style of Raft's nets, and 2. No way to seek out specific resources. There's a driller or extractor or something you unlock, and it seemed at first glance like something you might, for example, bring out to distant islands to get large quantities of ore in huge chunks. But instead it turns out to just be yet another processing station. If you're full up on X, Y, and Z resources, but you need more of A, in most survival games, you could go to where A is found. Dig deep for diamonds in MInecraft, chunk out to the woods in the Forest for logs, search swamps for ore in Valheim, check caves for lithium in Subnautica. But in Void Train, every resource is found in the same place. There's no way to seek out metal specifically, you just wait for it to float by the same way you do everything else, and in the same quantities. It's the first few minutes of Raft, where all you can do is pickup what floats near you, but stretched out into a dozen hours. Also, having to spend all the resources to research something and then having spend all those same resources AGAIN to build it. When you research something it should give you a free one to place, or just have a tree where you can only build things once you've built the lower level things, or have research costs be less, or something. It's just super disheartening and not much fun for to the player to go through all that resource gathering to build something and have the game go "great! now get all that again to actually make one!"
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compromise position they do a little animation where your first try falls apart comically, then you start over and make one that works
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StarkRavingMad posted:Also, having to spend all the resources to research something and then having spend all those same resources AGAIN to build it. When you research something it should give you a free one to place, or just have a tree where you can only build things once you've built the lower level things, or have research costs be less, or something. It's just super disheartening and not much fun for to the player to go through all that resource gathering to build something and have the game go "great! now get all that again to actually make one!"
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GlyphGryph posted:Also, Raft had the fun of actually spending time building out your raft, does Void Train at some point let you actually have fun building stuff? Right now it's all been pre-determined upgrades doing pre-determined things, except oh I guess you can decide where to drop your boxes. I wanted to build a motherfucking train! If that's actually gonna happen at some point I feel like there would have been some sort of indication by now, so I'm guessing it's not (7 hours in!). I haven't played or even looked at the game but maybe the truth is right in the name. Void Train, the game that is void of a train, as advertised. For our next project a baseball game called "zero machine guns" and it delivers, lol.
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Void train ultimately killed me and I was solidly of the quiet opinion "Everyone is right about it being slow and annoying with resources except they're wrong and I'll power through and enjoy it because its a take-your-base-with-you survival game and that base is a god drat cool Russian train and you fight Nazis." But then it really was just too slow and annoying and it fucks everything up. There's zero incentive to ever go faster, also? You can't get sustainable water and food? There's an actual *negative* incentive to make the train pretty because it makes it hard to access poo poo when all your resources are flying past you outside? You have to spend a bunch of resources to make resources so you can fight in an arena to make other resources and the arena is gated by your resources? I'm really hoping that one flips to good someday because for me it seems impossible for me to dislike 'a build an interdimensional Nazi fighting train' game, but I do.
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It really is a shame because the aesthetic is both novel and cool as hell, and there's so much potential for making it really good. The game itself just has a lot of really poor decisions. Not even bugs or things that need to be ironed out, but conscious design decisions that are just really terrible. I completely agree on the idea of a "take your base with you" survival game being a loving cool concept, and I'm depressed that both this and Volcanoids dropped the ball on it. Maybe someday we'll get a truly stellar one.
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I keep imagining Christopher Priest's "The Inverted World" as the ultimate bring-your-base-with-you survival/management game.
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# ? May 25, 2024 09:27 |
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Raft is on sale on Steam until the end of the weekend. I'll be picking it up.
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