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Looking forward to try it but I'm a bit worried about content with this one. In the demo, only the first building you were in had any sort of interesting things to check out but then after you're just landing on these barren flat topped platforms. Though the airship is very cool (hope it gets larger though). Hoping in the EA that there's enough variety to keep it interesting when exploring.
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Jun 19, 2023 12:00
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Played a couple hours of Space Engineers, in 'survival' mode. There really isn't a lot of 'survival' other than making sure you're near your first-aid station to top off once every hour or so. Building up from nothing on a planet, to cruising around in rovers to mine something other than stone, and then blasting off into space to finally get access to higher tier ores is a fun experience if a little grindy, but depending on how you build stuff, its a fun 'survival'/progression/engineering experience, but then it really falls off into 'make your own fun' territory and progression is done. There's probably mods out there that add more ores/progression/reason to do stuff, but for vanilla survival, once you get to mid-tier engines and stuff it's definitely just a more fiddly creative mode. You *can* build better looking, sleek spaceships, big hangers and bases to store them in, in-depth automated bases, etc., but there isn't a huge point of doing it other than your own satisfaction. Fun build up to get a handle on vehicles/physics and ridding yourself from the shackles of gravity, but once there, it really fell off for me in terms of goals and progression.
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Jun 19, 2023 17:52
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Yeah, you really need to mod space engineers to poo poo to get it just halfway there. Look for MES (More Encounters System) mods for things to fight, there's some flavors of needs mods floating around too, I'm partial to Eat Sleep Drink Repeat and Plant & Cook for that. Also recommend AwwScrap, but only if you enjoy tedium (I do), makes it so that deconstructing crap doesn't give you pristeen components back, you gotta melt down the scrap and remake them, great for scavenging challenges when paired with that one mod that lets you dissect and weld stuff together dynamically. But yeah, my workshop subscriptions is sitting at 24 pages worth, and about 2/3 of that will be active on any given world, and even then, it's only halfway there to a survival game, as I said.
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Jun 19, 2023 18:27
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MES and packs for MES help since you can have actual planet encounters and bosses and things. It's probably the best mod overall. Scares Resources or AQD Vanilla Ore Distribution spreads some of the ores around so there's a reason to hit other planets. Both of those helped more then anything else in giving me goals to work toward. There are some user made scenarios, but I dunno how good any of them are aside from Escape from Mars. That one is pretty good and is being updated by someone (get the "EscapeFromMars Wico" version that doesn't say "mod"). Agreed that the game still is mostly about making your own fun and goals though.
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Jun 19, 2023 18:47
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REDjackeT posted:Agreed that the game still is mostly about making your own fun and goals though. My latest has been scavenging challenges: you can't build complex blocks (I just use self-restriction and am not allowed to build non-atmo thrusters, 'advanced' weapons, gravity generators, reactors and jump-drives), have to cut them out of wrecks and reattach them to your junk. You need to surgically remove stuff and build cranes and transport trucks and frankenstein poo poo together, it's great. It all relies on the Advanced Welding mod, and optionally Improvised Engineering (with tweaked settings to make sure it's not OP) https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2960768984 is a scenario specifically designed around this playstyle, tho I've not checked it out yet, it's been sitting on my backlog for a bit.
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Jun 19, 2023 19:32
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Definitely try out Splitsie's new Scrapyard Engineering mod, it feels a lot more survivalish. Basically it removes the ability to mine for ore, and all your material and things come from procedurally generated scrap sites and you just start with a buggy and no jetpack. You also can't build much so very often you're slapping parts together to make things work. It's really fun when to build things you also need to plan out your scaffolding and lifting, so you typically need to build some sort of crane to maneuver items. I found a wind turbine that I had to load onto a trailer I made, then at the base maneuver it into position with a crane. Definitely get the crane script he uses that lets you control it with keyboard because I've been too lazy to set that up and it's very tedious to constantly be clicking to extend etc. Also the UI mod that opens a radial menu in first person is super useful too. Getting to space would certainly be an endgame goal in this because everything dies take longer, so the game is definitely not for everyone (if you enjoy making cranes, lifts, pullies and enjoy the process more than the goal then you'd enjoy it). Only criticism isn't from the mod but from the game's really lovely handling if physics for wheeled vehicles. There's a ton of driving in this and god it just highlights how poo poo the game is for simulating that. Every bump sends you flying and bouncing and it's so easy to flip yourself and have to save scum (unless you do what I did with one rover and basically dig underneath it till I could flip it over. This wasn't easy). This is on earth too so it's not like gravity should be an issue but it feels like driving on the moon. I know there's some magic combo of strength, friction and distance settings for your wheels that improves this but I really don't understand how to set it, and even when I have it still doesn't do all that much. Is it do much to ask for a game that fully simulates space flight and other engineering to also basically model Snowrunner's driving and dynamic mud mechanic???! Huh?? Is that REALLY so much to ask for? (just kidding, though if games with driving mechanics could pull off what Snowrunner has it would be just absolutely amazing but I'm assuming impossible given all the modeling and computing that needs to be dedicated to mud and friction mechanics. Which is a shame cause the game feels more like a physics demo since you don't really do much except haul things around. It just spoils you with cool features that ruin driving in other games lol) Oysters Autobio fucked around with this message at 12:16 on Jun 20, 2023 |
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Jun 20, 2023 12:03
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Is Void Train really that bad? I want a game (I'm sure I've posted this dozens of times at this point) about building a moving based and travelling around making my base move better/further/etc Space Engineers with some mods as discussed above would be pretty much it but unfortunately, big caveat coming up, I'm mostly restricted to steam deck these days. I feel like I've tried loads of these sorts of game and just found them lacking in some way. Raft, Empyrion (I do not understand how to play this game or how anyone worked out how to play this game it is completely arcane and beyond my comprehension), Subnautica sort of fits this bill but I've played it to death at this point, what a game. I'm basically looking for Subnautica again. That Forever Skies game looks like it might scratch the itch but we'll see. I find these sorts of things miss far more often than they hit, right? Honestly something like The Long Drive but with a campervan or like some teetering wooden construction in the bed of a pickup would be great. Someone needs to steal the ToTK building system, slap some survival mechanics in and that'll be golden. I keep thinking about trying to make something like this myself but I've barely touched gamedev since becoming a real adult and I know I would get anywhere but it would basically be raft but with a balloon instead of a raft so you can pootle around on your big flying platform and lower it down to gather etc. There was something like that a while back that I remember?
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Jun 20, 2023 15:13
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I absolutely love Space Engineers but it's very much a build your own fun game. I've got like 90 or so mods between blocks, scripts, and actual mods like MES and similar. I make different scenarios for myself where it'll be like "disable the jetpack and 3x oxygen use, start on mars, become a pirate lord" and just ironman it. Whatever happens, happens.
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Jun 20, 2023 16:21
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LeFishy posted:Is Void Train really that bad? i think many hoped void train would be a good iteration on this concept, but based on the earlier demo they did not figure out good from the bad for the gameloop from raft LeFishy posted:I keep thinking about trying to make something like this myself but I've barely touched gamedev since becoming a real adult and I know I would get anywhere but it would basically be raft but with a balloon instead of a raft so you can pootle around on your big flying platform and lower it down to gather etc. There was something like that a while back that I remember? posted above, forever skies is this and is (hopefully) more fleshed out since the demo also left a weak impression
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Jun 20, 2023 19:01
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Voxx posted:i think many hoped void train would be a good iteration on this concept, but based on the earlier demo they did not figure out good from the bad for the gameloop from raft
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Jun 20, 2023 20:25
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Allegedly Craftopia is going to be dropping its big “Seamless World Update” this month. I hope it is good when it does end up arriving! I think I got... maybe 5ish hours in when I tried it a year or two ago. They wanted me to make batteries with treadmills and I didn't like how that meant either spending loads of time running myself, or killing a bunch of animals. The building/scavenging was kinda fun, and I liked the feel of some of the combat options, but islands 2-3 felt kinda weird and aimless, so I lost interest. A big world with more intentional design seems like it could make for a much more fun experience. I'm probably more interested in Enshrouded and Ars Notoria overall, but I don't think either of those has a release date yet. Let's see, any other notables... Frozen Flame I hear pretty negative things about. Probably not worth picking up unless it gets loads more iteration and improvement. V Rising and Conan: Exiles were fun for a bit, but felt stilted being run as single-player games. Clearly designed for a multiplayer experience first. Sons of the Forest looked really cool for a base building survival game, but it also seemed a little bit too gruesome for me. Farworld Pioneers looks extremely fun, but it is also wrestling with a ton of jank right now, probably needs another half year of work before I try it. Valheim and Core Keeper have both had semi-recent updates that look cool. Not sure if Terraria counts as a survival game, but if it does I just started trying out some of the more recent mods and there's loads of quite impressive stuff.
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Jun 21, 2023 02:40
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Fairly big update for Empyrion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDfgv5dvcB8 e: sounds like they're paying attention to what's doing well for 7 Days and investing a lot of effort in new premade POIs, which is great imo - I haven't played this but that kind of news makes me want to give it a try Flesh Forge fucked around with this message at 05:00 on Jun 21, 2023 |
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Jun 21, 2023 04:57
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After about 7 hours with Forever Skies EA: Good: - Fun concept, feels very much like a Subnautica sequel. Apocalyse Skynautica if you will. - Building a mobile base and exploring is super fun. Feels really fun to fly your airship over to a ruined tower, scout it out from the air, find a landing zone and slowly bring it down so you can go explore and loot stuff. Bad: - Maybe my computer is just lovely or something but the performance seems really really bad. Lots of stutters and halts, or the frame rate will just slowly drop over time. - Inventory and storage boxes are way too small with no way to expand it. Makes for some very grindy inventory management, especially when climbing the tech tree. Lots of required components are very feast or famine. - POIs feel very sparse and samey after a bit of playing. Overall I'd say it's pretty fun, especially if you liked Subnautica. However it still feels very EA right now, which is fair I guess, but if the not quite fully baked vibe bothers you I'd wait a bit.
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Jun 23, 2023 18:25
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The performance was really terrible with the demo as well, way worse FPS than what my PC should handle and a lot of people reported the same. Seems like they really haven't managed to fix that yet. In other reviews people are saying it's really light on content so far. So I'm guessing it'll be worth to wait for a while.
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Jun 23, 2023 18:48
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Vib Rib posted:Yeah, maybe they've changed it but when I played the main limiting factor was inventory space Your tier 3 storage has a whopping eight slots.
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Jun 23, 2023 21:50
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ugh, dicking with dozens of separate containers is the most aggravating bullshit substitute for gameplay, really wish developers would stop doing things this way.
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Jun 23, 2023 22:24
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Oh yeah, the youtubers audible disappointment - this was phase twenty-six of research. Even with all the grinding happening off-screen and the guy enjoying himself, watching all that effort ground down at my soul. Even the research system seemed fiddly enough. It's not just dicking about with dozens of containers for -building- things, but for the research as well. And many of those research components had to be processed at a variety of workstations first. And then knowing that the player would run out of material components and go right back to scavenging without any seeming gameplay variety (he didn't like the arena), I just died inside - watching it.
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Jun 23, 2023 22:41
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LordSloth posted:Oh yeah, the youtubers audible disappointment - this was phase twenty-six of research. Even with all the grinding happening off-screen and the guy enjoying himself, watching all that effort ground down at my soul. Even the research system seemed fiddly enough. It's not just dicking about with dozens of containers for -building- things, but for the research as well. And many of those research components had to be processed at a variety of workstations first. And then knowing that the player would run out of material components and go right back to scavenging without any seeming gameplay variety (he didn't like the arena), I just died inside - watching it.
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Jun 24, 2023 00:09
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mrmcd posted:After about 7 hours with Forever Skies EA: I got a bunch of emails telling me this game was out and I was so disappointed to find out it isn’t actually out, it’s just EA and a very early EA at that. Still, I’m glad to hear it’s showing promise. The scope of the game seems wild.
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Jun 24, 2023 00:22
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Vib Rib posted:I had forgotten research was a linear path and not a branching tech tree you choose your path through. Just a completely straight line. Seems bad. You could almost say it’s on rails.
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Jun 24, 2023 00:37
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Vib Rib posted:I had forgotten research was a linear path and not a branching tech tree you choose your path through. Just a completely straight line. Seems bad. Void Train had a really near concept and a tiny bit of fun worldbuilding and the devs decided to cover it in a healthy layer of the grindiest, most unsatisfying gameplay I’ve experienced in a good while.
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Jun 24, 2023 01:22
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Bussamove posted:Void Train had a really near concept and a tiny bit of fun worldbuilding and the devs decided to cover it in a healthy layer of the grindiest, most unsatisfying gameplay I’ve experienced in a good while. Probably the most succinct review of it, yeah. Doing a weird Russian ether world train fighting Nazis and poo poo is cool, but it’s just not good because of the grind.
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Jun 24, 2023 05:55
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It's so bizarre because the problems are almost entirely at a design level, while normally I feel like it's good ideas not done well, this is competent execution but the core decisions are just bad. "Inventory should be small", "tech tree is a straight line with no branches", "no passive resource income, let's force the player to constantly have to pick up more items manually". A few small changes could be transformative. Maybe even just put the occasional junction so you can choose which way to go, select your fate a little better than just the poorly explained fate stations.
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Jun 24, 2023 07:02
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I've been trying out Core Keeper lately and so far it satisfies my busywork craving. It's very Terraria/Stardew/Valheim (yes, even with pixel graphics) but I have no idea how much content there is yet at version 0.6. A friend said that it released a year or so ago and the devs have been putting out content steadily and there's a larger content patch lined up for this autumn. I think I read somewhere that so far it has content for early-mid game but even so it's quite fun. There's also multiplayer and others can spawn in your world, but I don't know if they all start at the same spot, probably, since the "core" where you start is kinda important for lore reasons (think Metroid and the statues here...) And yes, you can go fishing, and it has cooking, so it's already a success in my books.  Plus a function that should be in EVERY game like this. 
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Jun 24, 2023 11:16
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Everyone spawns around the Core, yeah. It’s a fun little game to play with friends and one of the random landmarks that can generate is a go-kart track complete with working cars so it might be the greatest game ever made.
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Jun 24, 2023 12:15
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Bussamove posted:Everyone spawns around the Core, yeah. It’s a fun little game to play with friends and one of the random landmarks that can generate is a go-kart track complete with working cars so it might be the greatest game ever made. ArmA 3 has a go-kart DLC after an April 1st fakepost got a response of "okay, but when is this actually coming out?" https://store.steampowered.com/app/288520/Arma_3_Karts/ lol, I just noticed that it's under the Racing Games category.
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Jun 24, 2023 14:10
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Core Keeper is a weird game. A friend and I bought it and played it during a sale, and it was fun enough, but traveling got EXTREMELY tedious as we got further in the progression and had to go further and further from the base, leading to us having to mine ten trillion billion copper to make infinite minecart tracks just to not have to waste 10 minutes walking back every time we had to return to base, which felt like an enormous design oversight. It also really isn't fun looking for new bosses because of the aforementioned poo poo travel speed. We spent hours looking for the evil mage guy before giving up and me loading the map into a map analyzer to find out where the gently caress he was.
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Jun 24, 2023 14:33
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Alright I'm calling it quits with Green Hell's DLC. At first I was really enjoying how it was a less linear, more building-focused version of the base game but progressing in it by finding all the legends and grinding out tribal rep was bad enough before I found out you have to do it for four (?) different maps.
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Jun 25, 2023 04:40
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StarkRavingMad posted:Yeah that's the thing for me. If it was entirely just some dumb meme game, I wouldn't give it a second look. The person making this is putting some real effort into it, like more than a lot of other janky early access survival games I've played. And that makes it interesting and also unnerving in its own way. All things considered, your pitch for the worst-sounding-game ever was actually convincing! A game where you, yourself, are the biggest threat to the environment is intriguing.
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Jul 1, 2023 06:22
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Man that makes it even worse because yeah those mechanics do in fact look good. But I'm sorry, this game could literally be the best survival simulation ever designed, with everything modelled perfectly and immersively but I just honestly don't think I could play it. The pissing fog mechanic is just so on its face stupid that the thought of playing the game is making me cringe, and I just don't think I would ever be able to "get into it" by that fact alone.
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Jul 1, 2023 13:02
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I tried it on a friend's machine once some months back and while it's obviously had improvements since then, I really wasn't engaged by any of the mechanics and the UI was unintuitive at best and hostile at worst. A lot of walking over long, empty spaces doing nothing and everything struck me as kinda janky. It felt a bit like playing a very strange Postal 2 mod.
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Jul 1, 2023 13:07
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Vib Rib posted:I tried it on a friend's machine once some months back and while it's obviously had improvements since then, I really wasn't engaged by any of the mechanics and the UI was unintuitive at best and hostile at worst. A lot of walking over long, empty spaces doing nothing and everything struck me as kinda janky. It felt a bit like playing a very strange Postal 2 mod. Yeah but that's Sons of the Forest, what about the piss game? 
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Jul 1, 2023 14:13
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Evil Kit posted:Yeah but that's Sons of the Forest, what about the piss game?
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Jul 1, 2023 15:16
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Vib Rib posted:I tried it on a friend's machine once some months back and while it's obviously had improvements since then, I really wasn't engaged by any of the mechanics and the UI was unintuitive at best and hostile at worst. A lot of walking over long, empty spaces doing nothing and everything struck me as kinda janky. It felt a bit like playing a very strange Postal 2 mod. It does tend to have a slow start because you haven't ruined the environment yet, it's fairly easy to contain your piss at the start when you can find empty bottles or unclogged toilets, and no piss geysers have gone off yet. So enemies aside from basic bugs are pretty rare and it can be a bit of just wandering around scavenging. And you don't have the vehicles at the start, or any way to purify piss enough to safely fuel them. It picks up later when either the atmosphere gets worse or you have to get more creative about purifying and collecting yellow fog from the air. You're definitely not wrong about the UI being rough and there being plenty of early access jank. I'm definitely not expecting it would be everyone's cup of tea. Or cup of piss. I'm just glad I could bring awareness of this weird thing to more people. And get the word "piss" said so many times in this thread that it starts to lose all meaning.
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Jul 1, 2023 17:24
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Sons of the Forest didn't "grab" me the way Regular Forest did but I'll give it time to cook. Not a fan of your little torch being purple I can't see poo poo with it.
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Jul 1, 2023 21:41
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Speedball posted:Sons of the Forest didn't "grab" me the way Regular Forest did but I'll give it time to cook. Not a fan of your little torch being purple I can't see poo poo with it. Is it actually worth crafting stuff? In the original forest you just wanted to scavenge poo poo from caves and crafting was useless.
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Jul 1, 2023 22:38
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Jarvisi posted:Is it actually worth crafting stuff? In the original forest you just wanted to scavenge poo poo from caves and crafting was useless. TBH I never got as far in Sons of the Forest myself because when I last tried it out it was all still pretty new. It seems to me that one of the things you need to make, not find, is 3d-printed stuff like a canteen or 3d-printed armor.
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Jul 1, 2023 23:51
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Belatedly: regarding VoidTrain, at some point they loving changed the story, such as it is, to get rid of a lot of the more cringe-worthy jokes in the beginning (the nazis talking incessantly and you "locking them out" by drawing a lock on the door come to mind) Still love when the music swells whenever you get to a new station. And thank god you don't need food to not die, it's just regeneration like Minecraft. Still not a fan of how they gate progression behind you making items...and using those up to then make the next tier. That's baffling. Speedball fucked around with this message at 08:11 on Jul 2, 2023 |
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Jul 2, 2023 08:08
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Speedball posted:Belatedly: regarding VoidTrain, at some point they loving changed the story, such as it is, to get rid of a lot of the more cringe-worthy jokes in the beginning (the nazis talking incessantly and you "locking them out" by drawing a lock on the door come to mind) It didn't pan out at all and I was completely wrong, but it was a fun first impression.
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Jul 2, 2023 09:58
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Speedball posted:TBH I never got as far in Sons of the Forest myself because when I last tried it out it was all still pretty new. It seems to me that one of the things you need to make, not find, is 3d-printed stuff like a canteen or 3d-printed armor. Yeah SOTF is an odd one. I had been waiting on it for years, and then once it came out I really only played it a few hours. Absolutely love all the build mechanics and immersive systems (definitely sets the standard) but for some reason the game didn't hook me. I think one thing is that it's almost like a 1:1 copy of the first. Same mechanics, same map type, same game flow. It didn't really introduce enough new things to do that I found was enough to keep me grinding to build up my base. Gonna need to wait for a big update, tho I don't really know what is on its roadmap and if it's any good.
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Jul 2, 2023 22:28
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