What are you playing at the moment? - November 2017

[DeekyFun]

As part of my attempts to get through my backlog, I found myself playing Banished. I’ve found it fun, but a bit light. My first village ended up in an extreme old age crisis because I hadn’t built enough houses - in fairness, the game didn’t really explain how that worked, or warned you what was about to happen. I did manage to claw things back, but only after many years of a rather strict breeding program which I’d rather forget. After a few tries, I kind of found that there wasn’t enough different types of building to keep my interest for long.

[Gus_Smedstad]

Banished has been on my wishlist for ages, but I haven’t picked it up even when it dropped to $5 because I’d heard that it was terribly shallow. Basically, I’ve been waiting until it’s part of a bundle or really absurdly cheap.

[alms]

but the recipes are entirely unknown in game, so you really have to look up on the web how it works

Weird, my experience was completely different - of the survival’em ups I’ve played, I’d say only Starbound is more explicitly communicative. A wiki isn’t necessary, although it may speed up the process of learning the game: some things require the player to be observant.

However, it does have an ARPG flavor to it, also in that it will introduce new stuff you’ll likely not be prepared for and I don’t know how others just manage to survive first time.

That said, and with the caveat that I, too, haven’t played in a while, getting to Winter isn’t hard. What sort of breaks the game for me is the interplay between permadeath and repetition - after making so much progress, having to restart from scratch always left me kind of let down. You can save scum, if you want, but that didn’t feel satisfying either.

After a few tries, I kind of found that there wasn’t enough different types of building to keep my interest for long.

Try looking up the Colonial Charter mod.

[DeekyFun]

It’s okay; I’d say an enjoyable builder initially, but it just doesn’t have enough to engage over the long term. It’s a shame, because its standout feature is having to manage your constantly aging population, and keep the balance between growing new families at a pace to support future development against improvements to the village itself. But there’s so little to build that once you get into the rhythm it just gets a bit boring.

@Alms I’ll check that mod out, thanks!

[Jurple]

They can, but that turns the bush barren until you fertilize it. I’ve yet to find any manure for that.

For manure, I tend to set up camp near the ?Beefalo? herd found on some grass plains. In fact, I’ve treated finding a plain wih

1. nearby beefalo
2. rabbit warrens

as Job One. In theory, that should allow me to set up a food pipeline, when combined with transplanted berry bushes, rabbit traps, drying racks and crockpots. And whatever I did with seeds - that’s a bit hazy.

In practice, I’ve rarely made it through fall, and I have no clue how to deal with winter. So much for theory!

[Gus_Smedstad]

In practice, I’ve rarely made it through fall, and I have no clue how to deal with winter. So much for theory!

I ended up exploring a fair bit of the Wiki, and the more I read, the more I realized I didn’t want to play Don’t Starve. Way too much of the design seemed to be focused on “gotchas” to screw the player who had managed to set up something resembling a base. Things like Gobblers spawning from berry bushes to eat all your food if you’ve build a berry farm, and lightning bolts setting your entire base on fire. To a lesser extent, I’m also including the way the game spawns monsters next to you or nearby on an irregular basis, like the Treeguard and Hounds.

Of course, there were ways mentioned to deal with all of these things, such as laying lots of traps around your berry bush farm, and lightning rods, for the two examples I cite. You can probably avoid almost all of it by doing enough research beforehand, but if you play it as a discovery game, they seem designed to kill you - which sucks in a game with permadeath where a mistake means starting a new game from scratch.

I’d much rather play a game like Terraria, with steady advancement, less gotchas, and ways to recover from death. In Terraria, you mostly bring difficult challenges on yourself, by advancing into new, harder areas, rather than have them forced on you. It’s not entirely without “gotchas,” since some of the boss fights spawn when you meet a requirement, and the boss then seeks you out, but still overall I much preferred that game’s approach.

[alms]

In fact, I’ve treated finding a plain wih

nearby beefalo
rabbit warrens

as Job One

I don’t remember ever re-planting bushes but I have made it to the Winter without rabbits FWIW.

But that’s spot on, about setting up camp near to critical resources. Back when I played, some games did not start out lucky enough to have them conveniently arranged, so the first task was to survive long enough to explore and find a good spot.

I’d much rather play a game like Terraria, with steady advancement, less gotchas, and ways to recover from death

Such as perma-death being completely optional? Don’t Starve’s school of thought is definitely rogue-like: you get killed and start all over again. You make progress, then it turns out the game has a counter. In that, it’s more classic than most.

While not sure how they could have balanced it best, IMO Don’t Starve should’ve isolated perma-death, into a separate hardcore mode.

Also, survival games ought to have an audience which is somewhat like that of platformers, when it comes to difficulty: having a different perspective on what constitutes a dick move.

which sucks in a game with permadeath where a mistake means starting a new game from scratch.

The perma-death dilemma in a nutshell. That’s a problem so many games have got around by limiting the length of an average run, by providing permanent unlockables, and/or designing a progression that has the hardcore mode as a “final form” the player is led to, through practice and incremental steps.

Don’t Starve has a long enough run that death feels definitely like a set-back, which is not sufficiently obviated by a helpful kind of variety across different runs, its permanent unlockables, AFAICT, do not make the player more powerful, and its idea of a progression is shove the player into cold water and let them learn to swim. Classic, like I said.

Perma-death as a design novelty has lasted long enough, surely the tide has already turned? Like for platformers, indies will keep churning out tough-as-nails perma-death thingies for the initiated, while everybody else moves on to the next big thing.

[Baines]

Perma-death as a design novelty has lasted long enough, surely the tide has already turned? Like for platformers, indies will keep churning out tough-as-nails perma-death thingies for the initiated, while everybody else moves on to the next big thing.

Something I’ve said before, which is largely ignored in the current crop of Roguelike-inspired titles, is that it was generally easy to back up saves in classic Roguelikes if you actually wanted to. It was an active choice made outside of the game itself, but it wasn’t like it was a particularly annoying task. (The two most common solutions from my experience were either to compile a game yourself with the save deletion disabled, or to set up a simple backup-restore script which you’d run instead of starting the game directly. The complexity of the latter varied by desire, with the basic version not quite being as bulletproof safe but adding zero extra effort to the launch process, while some people would code more complex versions that were downright save game management systems.)

That is largely missing from the modern Roguelites, which have gone the route of permanent unlocks but which have simultaneously put more obstruction against backing up and restoring saves upon death. (Changes in computer systems have themselves had their own impact on this, as even for games that allow such manual save file protection, the process generally comes off as at least slightly more complex than launching the game normally.)

[alms]

That is largely missing from the modern Roguelites, which have gone the route of permanent unlocks but which have simultaneously put more obstruction against backing up and restoring saves upon death.

IIRC, in ye olde days too, it wasn’t uncommon to take measures against save scumming, which was heavily frowned upon, while at the same time allowing resurrection, at least in some instances, by tainting the save file (although the option may have been presented as part of the debug feature set)

While the games used to be strictly single-player, there was a social aspect to them in the form of conversation, so a victory that had been obtained by playing according to the rules, was not on the same level as one reached with the help of save scumming.

I’ll point out again, however, that save scumming is definitely doable (or at least it was last time I tried) in Don’t Starve (and easier than, say, in FTL, if memory serves), so anyone who feels the game is too punishing in its stock form, but doesn’t outright hate it, has a chance to take matters in their own hands, so to speak.

[MantisTobogganM.D.4]

I need to get into RB6 Siege. I bought it last Christmas and just never really played. I loved RB6 3 and black arrow on the original xbox, and vegas 1 and 2, so I think I’ll like it, I just never really started playing it for some reason.

[Winged_Nazgul]

I’d much rather play a game like Terraria, with steady advancement, less gotchas, and ways to recover from death. In Terraria, you mostly bring difficult challenges on yourself, by advancing into new, harder areas, rather than have them forced on you. It’s not entirely without “gotchas,” since some of the boss fights spawn when you meet a requirement, and the boss then seeks you out, but still overall I much preferred that game’s approach.

Have you ever tried the game, Crashlands, by any chance?

[Gus_Smedstad]

Have you ever tried the game, Crashlands, by any chance?

Crashlands is still in my backlog. Maybe I should bump it up the list a bit.

[vinraith]

Agree with the general criticisms of permadeath as a gameplay mechanic. I will note that Don’t Starve does have a single concession to those issues - there are shrines which essentially give you an extra life. It is not at all obvious that’s what they do, of course, and a single extra life doesn’t go very far toward mitigating the intrinsic frustrations of the model, but there it is.

[Det.Bullock]

Finished Soleil (AKA Crusader of Centy AKA Ragnacenty) on the Sega Mega Drive.
It was shorter than I expected but still it was a nice experience.
Also the fact that the save system isn’t as rigid as other cartridge games helped shorten the experience.
As a Zelda-like is light on the puzzles (or at least none of them gave me problems apart for the one to get the cheetah and only because I didn’t think of the obvious) but has a nice story.
Many say it’s a lot like A Link to The Past (which I have but haven’t played yet), though I’m rather skeptical, most Zelda 2D games I played are based on ALtTP and almost all of them made me go into AVGN-style rants at least a couple of times, especially towards the end which is not the case with this game.
Also there is no overworld, you only have a map to go from a place to another or revisit those you’ve already been in.
Another curious thing is that apparently there are two english versions of the game, the PAL version I played apparently is closer to the sense of the original japan script but sounds less natural while the american version (with the title Crusader of Centy) sounds more natural but turns the story into a blatant broken aesop apparently.

[PaddyDodger]

I owned it on ps4 and never got into it for a very obvious reason - I don’t really have any friends to play with lol.

Obviously a good experience for teamplay, but quite bad on your own. I enjoyed watching Twitch streams of people playing it though.

[Gus_Smedstad]

I don’t know why I was perfectly OK with the permadeath in FTL, but I was.

Possible reasons:

• It was a strategy game, rather than a crafting-survival game. When I lose a strategy game, I expect to lose.
• Games didn’t last that long. One way or another.
• Once you got past the learning curve, it was possible to get to the final sector pretty much every single time in most ships. Whether you had what it took to survive the final boss was the real question.
• The ships that had a good chance of dying in the first couple of sectors were indeed incredibly frustrating. I’m looking at you Stealth-B, with your utter lack of shields and slow-charging weapon.

[ToomuchFluffy]

I ended up exploring a fair bit of the Wiki, and the more I read, the more I realized I didn’t want to play Don’t Starve. Way too much of the design seemed to be focused on “gotchas” to screw the player who had managed to set up something resembling a base.

I only really ever enjoyed it when I was fearfully sitting at the campfire at night or when going insane to be honest. Don’t Starve’s weirdness was at its best then. But I’m not even sure why I stopped playing. Probably the same reason as you: What do its qualities really matter when it is so easy to die and even the different ways of dying soon become routine? There was a sense of wonder first and then there wasn’t.

[DeekyFun]

For me I found it was difficult to expand beyond foraging and trapping rabbits and the other basic survival needs, and that investing further into the more interesting stuff was fraught was danger which I felt less willing to face the longer I lasted. The whole game sits for me as an example of the dangers of conversative stagnation, and reminds me that I’m a big coward.

[Tritagonist]

Andromeda doesn’t seem to have a Reaper-like Great Filter, so where are all the elder races and seed AI powers and godlike superintelligences and impossibly powerful beings running timing channel attacks on the universe’s computational ultrastructure?

I see you haven’t finished the game, but I’ll note that’s not really true. You’ll have already seen the Scourge, and it’s established early on that this is an artificial construct. You’ll find out more about the who and why later.

I don’t think it’s done particularly well, but it’s there.

If we (…) aren’t seeing what a galaxy without Reapers or constant AI wars or the Citadel’s policy of clamping down on any technology that threatens to shake up the status quo might look like or even encountering strange new things that would have been inconceivable in the previous setting which owed so much to 20th century SF, then why are we even here?

In some ways that is what happens in Andromeda, but it’s too much on the background. Andromeda feels more like the introduction than a first act. I was playing the original Mass Effect on Playstation earlier this year, and was pretty shocked by how fast they introduce all these ideas that define the series. You’re swamped in turians, the alliance, the council, spectres, the geth, reapers, AI conflicts, etc. all within the first two hours.

For a game that takes about 50 hours to fully complete (about the length it took me to to play ME and ME2 combined), ME:A doesn’t do nearly enough with the story and setting.

if you hypothetically wanted a new mass effect game and were amply forewarned about it not exactly being great, and it was also Sufficiently Cheap is it worth a play

Yes it is. I’d say it’s an OK game. And pretty much all the really cringe-worthy dialogue can be avoided by not going all-in on the left side of the dialogue wheel (which is the emotional, light-hearted side).

I appreciate that they wanted a slightly more upbeat protagonist, but some of it is just high-school levels of dumb. Ryder is a pretty accomplished individual, and would be well aware of the significance of some moments. But the ME:A writers don’t know what to do with those, and often passes them off with a joke or - in one particularly bad moment - a time-skip forward (!). Some cut-scenes in which Ryder is cornered are then magically wrapped up in seconds. The lessons from the Witcher that sometimes silence and calm is more profound than witty quotes or explosions were unfortunately lost on this BioWare studio.

[MantisTobogganM.D.4]

I owned it on ps4 and never got into it for a very obvious reason - I don’t really have any friends to play with lol.

Obviously a good experience for teamplay, but quite bad on your own. I enjoyed watching Twitch streams of people playing it though.

That’s a problem I have too unfortunately.