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Just going to Chime in and say that as someone who played most of Subnautica and all of Below Zero, I actually liked below zero quite a bit more.
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May 16, 2022 09:02
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I did like Below Zero but not as much as the first game. There's a bunch of obviously incomplete story leads, for example I completely ignored the frozen leviathan vaccine thing and never touched the penguin robots. The overland bits also loving suck.
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May 16, 2022 09:38
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e:Crap, thought this was the other thread, probably better there. Ignore.
OgNar fucked around with this message at 10:01 on May 16, 2022 |
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May 16, 2022 09:58
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Subnautica is one of those games I wish I could experience the same kind of magic for the first time again. The exploration and the outworldly feel of the underwater is just so magical. The first time you dive into the big entrance of Lost river ... and being a dumbass on my first playthrough navigating the Cyclops all the way down to Lava zone past the big tree. Yes, it was really annoying.
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May 16, 2022 10:06
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Spanish Matlock posted:Just going to Chime in and say that as someone who played most of Subnautica and all of Below Zero, I actually liked below zero quite a bit more. I thought I liked them equally but having decided to grab OG on the switch I realise that yeah. I like a lot of Below Zero a lot more, not having the stupid rocks to hit to get resources, the tech progression, the rectangular rooms. Not saying that I don't like OG a whole bunch, they're both perfect video games (lol) but I definitely prefer BZ having played them both recently.
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May 16, 2022 10:11
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Below Zero just has weird design choices in a lot of places. The snow scooter is useless, there's no utility to it at all whatsoever. But it could have been good if they'd covered the entire surface in a sheet of ice with holes to the sea here and there, making the snow scooter the fastest way to get around the map. Instead the surface is tiny islands of ice spread over the surface of the water, most of them with nothing on them. All the points of interest are near the ocean edges and are actual land instead of glaciers.
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May 16, 2022 10:12
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Remember that a large chunk of BZ was wrapped up in work from home covid times. Much of the later audio was recording during this too when they changed voice actors. I think they just kinda wanted to finish it and shove it out the door.
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May 16, 2022 10:18
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Demiurge4 posted:Below Zero just has weird design choices in a lot of places. The snow scooter is useless, there's no utility to it at all whatsoever. But it could have been good if they'd covered the entire surface in a sheet of ice with holes to the sea here and there, making the snow scooter the fastest way to get around the map. To be fair I do forget about the above ground stuff. Most of my fondness for the game is probably based around building cool bases all over the place. Building one into the wall of the big pit under the island was great fun.
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May 16, 2022 10:20
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I love The Long Dark but it's really not that hard to reach a level where you can survive forever and the game just becomes a job. I assume it'd be way too hard at this point to add base building elements but some sort of end goal would be enough. As it is there's nothing to stop me finding a good spot on a friendly map and harvesting sticks and rabbits until I get bored and walk into a wolf's mouth.
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May 16, 2022 10:30
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Below Zero didn't have a super well-developed land section, to be fair. It was probably in some way COVID-related and kind of feels like an afterthought. I really liked several of the underwater biomes, though, and I thought at least a few of the new leviathans were very charming.
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May 16, 2022 10:36
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Flesh Forge posted:I'm trying to play it anyway and even though it starts you out in the baby pool it makes legitimately very uncomfortable, in a way that space sims flying around in 6 degrees surrounded by vacuum don't. I'm having a really hard time enjoying this game because it does the deep water poo poo so well 
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May 16, 2022 20:33
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NO gently caress YOU DAD posted:I love The Long Dark but it's really not that hard to reach a level where you can survive forever and the game just becomes a job. I assume it'd be way too hard at this point to add base building elements but some sort of end goal would be enough. As it is there's nothing to stop me finding a good spot on a friendly map and harvesting sticks and rabbits until I get bored and walk into a wolf's mouth. They recently posted about their DLC plans being solely focused on the survival mode, and about splitting survival and story so one doesn't influence the other anymore. I'm cautiously optimistic because I love like 90% of TLD it just needs more to do and a bunch of win conditions. Seriously, let me end the game!!! lordfrikk fucked around with this message at 10:41 on May 17, 2022 |
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May 16, 2022 20:37
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Apologies if it's already been brought up, but Tin Can is pretty great. Basically you have to MacGyver together failing systems on an old escape pod after you have to get off your ship while doing maintenance and cleaning. https://store.steampowered.com/app/1315980/Tin_Can/
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May 16, 2022 20:45
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Flesh Forge posted:I'm having a really hard time enjoying this game because it does the deep water poo poo so well Deliberately getting myself killed by scary things in the deep a few times helped me a lot with this, I think overcoming the panic impulse is part of the game.
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May 16, 2022 21:13
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Big Monster is pretty unsettling but it's not any better when No Big Monster either 
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May 16, 2022 21:18
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Have you gotten the little handheld sea scooter thing yet? Being able to perform something approximating running the gently caress away was pretty helpful as well, similar to how a "climb the ladder 5% faster" button helps with ladder-based terror.
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May 16, 2022 21:25
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Running away from things isn't really the problem, it's the overpowering reluctance to leave the kiddie pool area I only managed to make the sea scooter once the Sunbeam approach countdown started, and I still haven't managed to collect enough bits to make the habitat construction tool. Maybe it won't be so bad once I get some buildings made. It isn't the fear of running out of air, because Planet Crafter didn't do this to me at all, it's really just the swimming/deep water and the sound design, especially the reefback leviathan groaning
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May 16, 2022 21:42
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Spanish Matlock posted:Below Zero didn't have a super well-developed land section, to be fair. It was probably in some way COVID-related and kind of feels like an afterthought. I really liked several of the underwater biomes, though, and I thought at least a few of the new leviathans were very charming. BZ suffers directly from having high staff turnover during development and clashing visions for what the game should be, culminating in the lead writer getting fired/quitting and the entire narrative being scrapped and rewritten shortly before release. Not really spoilers but there were three different storylines at one point iirc: Storyline 1: You wake up in a field camp and are told that your colleague Jeff found a large architect portal and disappeared into it hours ago and a rescue is being mounted. When you go through you see the alien planet in the end scene of BZ-1.0, but get an ominous warning by a voice that you need to leave and you aren't welcome. Jeff is nowhere to be found. When you get back most of the base is being destroyed by a meteor storm and the orbital station is hit by a larger asteroid, obliterating your escape chances. You have to flee into the water and find an empty life pod from the station, beginning the story similarly to SN1. Allegedly this story line was going to focus on finding your lost team members and figure out what the hell was going on, with destroying the last of the Kharaa bacterium being a bargaining chip. This storyline got replaced sometime in development and was replaced by.... Storyline 2: You played as a member of the missing Alterra Team. Said meteor storm causes the Alterra team(that is the vanished team in the released version) to have to emergency evacuate to the orbital habitat but the evac shuttle gets obliterated shortly after take off, hence why in the released version you bizarrely choose to land in a meteor storm with no supplies despite not being particularly rushed to launch the shuttle. Al-An has a much more malicious role and is kind of like The Thing. He takes over another survivor Jeff, who wandered into the ruins after the crash seeking shelter. He is used by Al-An blow up the main Alterra station orbiting the planet in an attempt to sever Planet 4546B from contact with the known world. Marguerite was also encountered as a survivor who knew how to survive on the planet without an orbital station. Only the supply shuttle Vesper is left in orbit and your sister Sam guides you and occasionally sends capsules through the meteor storm to try and repair the long range communication array to get word to someone out there that 4546B is in big trouble. You send small rockets back with rare materials (this was why there are so many little rocket launch pads on the map) and progress some story objectives that way, at one point including a forcefield surrounding the planet to prevent the last unfrozen Kharaa bacterium from escaping. Unfortunately the lead writer left/was canned before this was fleshed out and an ending written. Released Storyline: Something else entirely, but with all the scenes from the above two storylines trying to be recycled despite not really fitting and not having conclusions.
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May 16, 2022 21:55
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feeling a lot better about BZ now because I hadn't heard those before and they sound absolutely terrible
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May 16, 2022 21:58
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Yeah they were all bad, the second one that got pretty far before getting canned was distilled B grade schlock.
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May 16, 2022 22:01
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Flesh Forge posted:Running away from things isn't really the problem, it's the overpowering reluctance to leave the kiddie pool area Getting the seamoth mini-sub will help. From a practical perspective once you have a seamoth with a zap module you're generally safe. From a generally feeling of dread perspective, you'll be in a nice lit metal enclosure and will no longer be surrounded by oppressive blackness. You can make it with only some minimal foreys outside the kiddie pool areas.
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May 16, 2022 22:05
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I mean, I wouldn’t be that angry to have gotten Subnautica x Penumbra
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May 16, 2022 22:06
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I don't have a problem with thalassophobia normally, but diving through ice caves broke me. "What if cave diving, but the walls are nondescript and partly transparent" is the worst thing and I ran out of air twice.  It's much worse than getting lost in one of the wreck sections in Subnautica.
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May 16, 2022 22:10
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lordfrikk posted:They recently posted about their DLC plans being solely focused on the survival mode, and about splitting survival and story so one doesn't influence each other anymore. I'm cautiously optimistic because I love like 90% of TLD it just needs more to do and a bunch of win conditions. Seriously, let me end the game!!! That sounds cool. I always felt like Story Mode only existed because the devs didn't trust themselves with environmental storytelling back in the day. I always thought it'd be cool to have various characters with different objectives based on how they got caught up in the disaster. A guy wakes up at the crash site in Pleasant Valley with an objective to get to the coast and collect enough coal to sail a boat out, a guy wakes up in a crashed car in Crumbling Highway and has to make it to Mountain Town to find out what happened to his family, that sort of thing.
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May 16, 2022 22:25
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Omnicarus posted:BZ suffers directly from having high staff turnover during development and clashing visions for what the game should be, culminating in the lead writer getting fired/quitting and the entire narrative being scrapped and rewritten shortly before release. Thanks for sharing, I had never heard about those. Honestly those both sound like pretty solid storylines to me. Would have taken either of those over what we ended up with.
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May 16, 2022 22:26
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Warbird posted:What’s the going take on Vintage Story? I loved Feed The Beast and parts of Better Than Wolves (dingus of a creator aside) and this looks to be a dedicated stab at that sort of systems based voxel game mod. The features reel from a couple of years back seems interesting but certain aspects seemed a tad much. Are they implemented well? General consensus: combat bad, everything else good to very good. Like many games of its type, a lot of the challenge is lost once you jump the early hurdle of fighting off starvation and surviving the winter, but the various mechanisms you need to build for advanced crafting (windmills, forges, stills, pottery, etc) add more stuff to keep you on your toes. And that's if you're not the type of player who's simply satisfied building and/or chiseling pretty-looking stuff, in which case the game has you set for ages.
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May 16, 2022 22:37
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Kind of related, but if Subnautica were an album, it would be Pelagial (Instrumental) by The Ocean. Safe Shallows: https://theocean.bandcamp.com/track/epipelagic-instrumental-version Lost River: https://theocean.bandcamp.com/track/abyssopelagic-ii-signals-of-anxiety-instrumental-version Lava Lakes: https://theocean.bandcamp.com/track/benthic-the-origin-of-our-wishes-instrumental-version
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May 16, 2022 22:46
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Suzera posted:Empyrion v1.8 and new HWS+ is coming June 7. HWS is a large community Empyrion server with maybe a few hundred players that cycle in? Not entirely sure of the exact amount, but the official HWS discord gets a lot of traffic. At least several people on the Sandcastle Kicker discord are going to give it a shot starting launch day if anyone here wants to join in and have fun building or maybe be a menace for a while. Discord link: https://discord.gg/Y5JPZ2qKAw Didn't know there were other HWS goons out there. My wife and I play Empyrion occasionally...a lot. I'll make a note to check out your discord, we recently started up on HWS again and should be able to stockpile some stuff for the wipe (you can keep a certain amount of stuff across seasons if you load up the web-based part of the server with everything). It's nice to log in on a fresh build and pretty much have everything you need out the gate. I've played on HWS for several years off and on to check out new patches and such (still waiting on walking around on ships in motion, come on man). The additions they have are thoughtful and pretty good. The ability to start with a CV does nuke the early part of the game, but if you've played before it's a perfect way to get yourself to proper mining territory/all the way to the Homeworld system which is like the hub for their custom server content (separate from stock + RE). The endgame PvE content is absolutely bonkers and borderline impossible to solo, even with maxed quantum CPUs and endgame equipment. Figuring out your ships to be able to tackle drone swarms and other endgame content is fun and engaging, where you need special ways to survive 500+ degree molten planets and stuff (albeit briefly). A couple seasons back we played to get loaded up for PVP and it was pretty fun way to spend a fuckload of resources. We had enough resources stocked for like 4-5 giant mega-Pvp-CVs and played the pvp game for a while, quickly realizing the name of the game is circlestrafing your target to outrun their turrets. It's not quite that simple but it does seem to play a large factor and when you are not doing circles you are getting owned at 4-5x the rate of the enemy doing it. I think I only won 1 or 2 pvp battles ever but it was still pretty fun/intense compared to regular PvE content.
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May 16, 2022 22:50
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Spudalicious posted:Didn't know there were other HWS goons out there. Also while I'm posting here since there doesn't seem to be a solo thread for it yet, some of us are also going to be doing V Rising tomorrow for EA release which I can best analogize as vampire Valheim but with a lot more PvE stuff and moba style attacks and you burn in daylight. There's also pvp servers which I would guess most of us will be on but there might be some PvE only people as well. Official trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9aaaHhajv0 Some youtube guy talking about his closed beta time and a bunch of the different stuff in the game and how it plays: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LV6NXc-VWoA Suzera fucked around with this message at 23:14 on May 16, 2022 |
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May 16, 2022 23:08
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SexyBlindfold posted:General consensus: combat bad, everything else good to very good. Like many games of its type, a lot of the challenge is lost once you jump the early hurdle of fighting off starvation and surviving the winter, but the various mechanisms you need to build for advanced crafting (windmills, forges, stills, pottery, etc) add more stuff to keep you on your toes. And that's if you're not the type of player who's simply satisfied building and/or chiseling pretty-looking stuff, in which case the game has you set for ages. I’m not usually but I can be if there are incentives to do that. I loved messing around in Valhiem and redecorating my buildings since you could get comfort bonuses and so forth. That and the building system being pretty engaging.
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May 16, 2022 23:44
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speaking of Valheim I'm really bummed it had such a strong initial EA release and then just ..........................................
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May 16, 2022 23:46
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Warbird posted:I’m not usually but I can be if there are incentives to do that. I loved messing around in Valhiem and redecorating my buildings since you could get comfort bonuses and so forth. That and the building system being pretty engaging. decorations don't confer any bonuses in VS, though there are mechanical bonuses to things like maintaining a varied diet, having a nice bed, building an actual proper fully-enclosed house instead of some little lump of dirt blocks, etc.
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May 16, 2022 23:59
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Flesh Forge posted:Running away from things isn't really the problem, it's the overpowering reluctance to leave the kiddie pool area Yeah this was me at first. I tried to play Subnautica when it first came out and 100% could not do it, the panic is too loving real. Getting out of the initial baby area and building a base was huge, I felt so powerful. It absolutely fuckin ruled to go from being literally too scared to play the game to docking my mini sub in the moon pool and unloading my fat haul of loot that I ripped from the abyssal dark.
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May 17, 2022 01:02
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Suzera posted:Also while I'm posting here since there doesn't seem to be a solo thread for it yet, some of us are also going to be doing V Rising tomorrow for EA release which I can best analogize as vampire Valheim but with a lot more PvE stuff and moba style attacks and you burn in daylight. There's also pvp servers which I would guess most of us will be on but there might be some PvE only people as well. I've been interested in this but it feels like there is no hype or exposure around it. That guy on youtube is the most substantial information about the game out. Everything else is sparse and straight out of the press kit. I'd like to convince some friends to play but I don't have a lot of clue what I'd be convincing them to play other than overhead thirdperson survival game.
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May 17, 2022 01:40
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Lawlicaust posted:I've been interested in this but it feels like there is no hype or exposure around it. That guy on youtube is the most substantial information about the game out. Everything else is sparse and straight out of the press kit. I'd like to convince some friends to play but I don't have a lot of clue what I'd be convincing them to play other than overhead thirdperson survival game.
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May 17, 2022 02:02
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SexyBlindfold posted:General consensus: combat bad, everything else good to very good. Like many games of its type, a lot of the challenge is lost once you jump the early hurdle of fighting off starvation and surviving the winter, but the various mechanisms you need to build for advanced crafting (windmills, forges, stills, pottery, etc) add more stuff to keep you on your toes. And that's if you're not the type of player who's simply satisfied building and/or chiseling pretty-looking stuff, in which case the game has you set for ages.
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May 17, 2022 07:55
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Vib Rib posted:Honestly my biggest problem with Vintage Story is prospecting. You need the optional, off-by-default method to even have a reasonable chance, but even with it on, at default ore spawn rates you're going to be wandering vast overland areas just digging little short boreholes in the ground here and there just to try and find a trace of whatever one material is bottlenecking you. It's so tedious and it's the same problem Terrafirma Craft had, just unreasonable amounts of wandering because all the biomes and ore deposits are so spaced out. Finding ore sucks and it's not enjoyable and next time I play I'll probably just turn on an xray cheat or something because I don't feel a single thing is gained, gameplay-wise, by prospecting. I've posted this before in this thread, but I'll requote it in case it helps you or anyone else with ore: StarkRavingMad posted:It took me FOREVER to figure out how to effectively use the prospecting pick, and finding tin can be a real pain. Some things to realize: Finding out that you could trace ore deposits back to a local peak rather than them just being randomly strewn across the map helped me a lot.
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May 17, 2022 08:39
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Flesh Forge posted:speaking of Valheim I'm really bummed it had such a strong initial EA release and then just .......................................... My impression is that the Valheim devs fell prey to the usual EA success fallacy. They made a ton of money and started hiring a ton of people, then had to spend a year training those people and doing various admin related stuff which has culminated in not much at all being released. I'd say it's 50/50 if they release a huge content pack or fold up, but they've spent a ton of money and probably have already sold most of the copies they ever will.
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May 17, 2022 08:56
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StarkRavingMad posted:I've posted this before in this thread, but I'll requote it in case it helps you or anyone else with ore:
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May 17, 2022 09:17
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Demiurge4 posted:My impression is that the Valheim devs fell prey to the usual EA success fallacy. They made a ton of money and started hiring a ton of people, then had to spend a year training those people and doing various admin related stuff which has culminated in not much at all being released. I'd say it's 50/50 if they release a huge content pack or fold up, but they've spent a ton of money and probably have already sold most of the copies they ever will. I think I would still give them the benefit of the doubt, holding out for a major patch (Mistlands?) at this point. I personally played a LOT of Valheim with friends when it released so I wouldn't be returning for lots of little content patches anyway. It's the same situation I kinda have with SCUM. We played it a hell of a lot the first+ year or so when it came out of EA but the basic gameplay loop still haven't changed at all, and they're seemingly content of adding graphical updates than gameplay updates. Modular building seems to be on the menu and that _might_ be a big enough thing to interest us. Cars are first and structures sometime after. While I'm on the subject of SCUM, it's kinda amusing that latest news is a Danny Trejo playable character DLC, which I admit sounds rather awesome... already imagining three Dannys taking a dump, fighting zombies and shouting his catchphrases. But still, the basic gameplay will be the same, no matter how many airplanes they add to the game and it SORELY needs improvements.
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May 17, 2022 09:24
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