Monthly Archives: January 2025
Impressions: Stoneshard
I’ve played almost 40 hours of Stoneshard in the last two weeks. My opinions are… mixed, but hopeful.
Stoneshard is a brutal, turn-based fantasy/mercenary game where death is always around the next corner. It’s one of those “you’re not the hero” kind of stories, although in practice that just means you can run into super high-level enemies early on if you aren’t careful. The general gameplay consists of taking contracts to do X inside dungeon Y within 3 days, and then returning for your reward. Eventually, the contracts dry up at your original location, so you have to trek to another town and start the process again, hitting harder and harder dungeons. The most recent update (0.9.1.0 – Rags to Riches) includes a caravan feature that makes moving through the world much easier.
The brutality of the game comes in two flavors: cascading failure, and time disrespect.
Let’s start with time disrespect first. The world is broken up into tiles that you move through, just the same as you would move through a dungeon. While you can click on a distant spot to have your character “hop” square to square quickly (outside of combat), the fact remains you still have to walk. If the dungeon is six tiles away, that’s six full screens you have to get through. There are a bunch of herbs, mushrooms, berry bushes and the like to occupy yourself with – you need to craft a lot of fodder to fuel your caravan – and there is always the risk of an ambush from bandits or hostile wildlife as well. So, it’s not always boring to travel long distances. Plus, sometimes it’s fun to kind of vibe with the very excellent music and ambient noises.
Here’s the thing though: you can only save the game when resting. If you travel for those six tiles, survive a few ambushes, clear an entire dungeon (including the boss), and then get bit by a hidden snake and die a tile away from town… you lose all progress since the last time you rested.
Technically, there are ways to mitigate this sort of disaster. You can buy/purchase bedrolls, which take an enormous amount of limited bag space, to create a one-time use resting spot outside of the dungeon. This will prevent you from having to re-walk to the dungeon, but of course do nothing about the dungeon itself or the walk back. Or perhaps you can bring two bedrolls, use one, stash the other outside the dungeon, and then use the second once you complete the dungeon. The latest update introduces the caravan, which you can technically park close to the dungeon and mitigate the worst of it, if you’re willing to burn a bunch of time (there’s a cooldown after parking the caravan). Of course, the existence of the caravan “workaround” calls into question why there’s no Quicksave, or a smaller Meditation Mat, or whatever.
[Note: there is a Save & Quit feature, allowing you to exit the game. This save is deleted after loading.]
It’s important to know about this sort of thing because Stoneshard has a lot of cascading failure opportunities. You have Hunger and Thirst, which necessitates bringing a waterskin and snacks. When you are hit, damage is dealt to specific limbs, which can develop wounds or even Bleeds; make sure to pack Splints for the former and Bandages for the latter. Oh, and limbs have a Condition meter that reduces your maximum HP until they are healed, which is another consumable. Even if you heal the damage away, you have an overall Pain meter that accumulates unless reduced by beer/drugs. Enemy abilities can Stun, Stagger, Daze, Confuse, Immobilize, Ignite, and/or Poison you. Fatigue, Intoxication, Morale, and Sanity are also things. And all of these typically compound on one another, like how Pain gives you a debuff at certain thresholds that constantly drains Morale.
I am not actually opposed to all these “crunchy” systems. Choosing how many healing items to bring to the dungeon is a meaningful decision, and rewards the collection of crafting components and otherwise planning ahead. What I am opposed to is how often and how quickly these interlocking systems go from irrelevant to run-ending in a way you can do nothing about. Bleeding out at the end of a fight because you didn’t bring any/ran out of bandages? Fair play. Getting Dazed (turns off all your abilities for a few turns), then Immobilized, and then chopped in half within two turns? Okay then. The slow descent into insanity works in, say, Darkest Dungeon because damage is usually spread amongst a party and you get worn down. Here, you often just get hit a few times and die.
Ironically, that scenario doesn’t play out that often because you are always, 100% of the time trying to lure enemies out one at a time. Which is super effective! And sometimes boring. I play an Electromage with a few finishing moves via Staff. Electromancy is all about low cooldown spells that can Knockback or possibly Immobilize enemies. I just cleared out a 3-skull dungeon full of bandits and only got hit once, by an enemy that had a charge+attack move. So, perhaps my experience is a bit more skewed than if I were straight melee, sword & board with heavy armor; perhaps there’s more survivable damage.
Anyway, that’s Stoneshard. It’s still in Early Access, has been for years, and the updates themselves do not come quickly. That said, this is a game that has good “bones” and I can see it meaningfully improving with some tweaks and enhancements. The latest “Rags to Riches” release apparently changed the game’s compiler, which destroyed all existing mods – if/when that gets fixed, I could see mods coming to the rescue too. I’m certainly looking forward to being able to Quicksave anywhere.
7 Days to Die – Rebirth
I’ve recently taken the plunge in playing Rebirth (v1.1 b14), a total overhaul mod for 7 Days to Die. There are a number of such overhaul mods out there, including Darkness Falls, Afterlife, Undead Legacy, and more. I’ve only played Darkness Falls before this, aside of course vanilla for a few hundred hours.
Verdict: it’s got some great concepts, but… there’s some foundational concerns.
One of the biggest draws to Rebirth is the companion system. You start out with a dog companion that both warns about and fights enemies. You can eventually expand your fighting group with more dogs (or other beasts), NPCs, and temporary help. This does a lot to make the game feel less lonely in single player, and the companions are actually very handy in a fight. And don’t worry: if the dog dies, it just respawns back at your bed.
Another of the “draws” is a return of Learn By Doing and overall reimagining (and slowing) of progression in general. While there is character XP in the game, it does nothing by itself. Instead, to progress your character – including in one of 10 classes! – you need to use specific weapons, gaining extra progress for headshots. By itself, the system is OK for what it is, and you certainly have more opportunity for progression as zombie density has skyrocketed.
The problem is that the mod’s difficulty progression is also tied to zombie kills. Once you hit certain thresholds, zombies have a chance to spawn with random buffs, including a RNG roll to revive in a stronger state. This “works” on a conceptual level, but it feels bad in practice. The name of the game is still scavenging, so while killing a huge wandering horde might give you +2.5% weapon speed or whatever your class does, it makes getting food, crafting components, and everything else actually meaningful harder.
I want to really reemphasize how badly you are punished for killing zombies here. You slowly level your primary Attributes by performing certain tasks, and there are specific Perks that you can then put points in once you hit certain thresholds. For example, you need Dexterity 1 in order to put a point into Cardio. How do you get points for Cardio? You buy them from a vendor for cash. How do you get cash? Scavenging, primarily. You can get some from Questing, but keep in mind Questing gives a lot of XP which then levels you and makes the game harder. If that is the mod author’s intention – to discourage the chain-questing that is (still) meta in vanilla – it should be more explicit, IMO.
The overall increased difficulty is another “draw” but similarly falls flat. The mod is hard, but difficulty in practically all 7 Days to Die iterations is predicated on HP sponges and/or ridiculous mob counts. Rebirth has both. Once you hit a certain level threshold, periodically a boss zombie will spawn in your immediate location along with ~30 of their best friends. For the most part, especially early, you will just die and drop all your stuff. But, hey, don’t worry, the boss and mobs will still be there waiting for you! If you somehow whittle down the horde with your non-existent bullets and take down the 6000+ HP boss, you get a loot chest that will give you maybe 15% progression towards one Attribute point. Yay! Also, get used to this shit, as to unlock certain crafting tables you have to purchase quests from a vendor that spawns these types of hordes. I’m not sure if the intention is to build a nearby cheese base or just kite them around for hours or what.
By the way, you still have to contend with the 7 day hordes on default settings.
I suppose that is worth mentioning as a positive to Rebirth: the large amount of settings you can tweak. Turning off Horde Night is one first things I did, once I realized that I was still struggling to stay hydrated on Day 6, let alone figuring out how I would ever survive the night. There may be other knobs that can be turned to address a few of the other complaints I already voiced, including turning them off. On the other hand, most people are likely to roll into Rebirth under default settings and get run over, so… yeah.
If you have squeezed all the fun out of vanilla 7 Days to Die and are looking for more, I recommend… Darkness Falls. Although I haven’t played it lately, it had a completely new look and feel with increased difficulty that, at the same time, did not feel punishing. Sure, you could encounter a few high-level zeds outside normal progression, but that is the spice of life. Combined with the extra tiers, it felt like 7D2D++ rather than a whole new game. Rebirth has some neat concepts I would like expanded on (companion system, bandits), but it feels more like a punishment simulator than anything else. As a player, I should never feel like I have to metagame killing less zombies in a zombie-killing game.
[Fake Edit] Since my primary character is already screwed, I started a second character and revamped a lot of the settings. For example, I turned Character XP down to 75% considering levels only serve to punish you. Conversely, I turned Class XP levels to 150% to improve the speed of getting abilities and such. Between those settings and a better understanding of the mod’s flow, I have had a somewhat better experience.
However. It’s still not that good, honestly. I’m going to give it a bit more time to cook to see if things improve once I progress a bit further, but it kind of feels like a slog still. And not in a “sense of pride and accomplishment” way, but more in a “nothing feels rewarding and I’m punished for playing the game.”
Steam Mod Supremacy
It has long been my opinion that Steam being the premier PC gaming storefront is not a problem for consumers. Indeed, I would argue that when Steam had a higher market share years ago, it was even better – more deals, more enhancements, and the same smooth experience. Monopolies are never ideal, but with Valve (and it being a non-public company) we seemed to have lucked into one of those Philosopher-King situations that ended up better than the alternatives.
What I am slowly discovering though, is Steam’s crushing presence in the game mod department.
Project Zomboid recently came out with a new build, and seeing a spate of Youtube clips of it has renewed my interest in the game (after 6ish years). However, a lot of those clips also talked about all of the mods that are still “required” to fix some of the rough edges to the game. Seeing as I had bought the game on GOG all those years ago, I naturally headed over to Nexusmods and… huh. Definitely not the same options available on Steam. Maybe there is just not a lot of updates yet? Went to the official forums to see if mods are listed there, but that was useless. Finally, I started Googling around to see how I could download Steam Workshop mods and use them with GOG. Short answer: don’t bother.
I’m not saying this is an impossible situation. I could probably just, you know, play the game as-is. If I dedicated more time to the endeavor, I could also probably figure out a solution to how to get Steam mods working with my GOG version of the game. For a moment, I did actually consider purchasing Project Zomboid on Steam, “subscribing” to a bunch of the mods to get them to download, copying the files when they show up in my Steam folder, and then refunding the game. Or just take the L and purchase the game on Steam and start using it from there. It’s even on sale at the moment for like $14.
Here’s the thing: it’s incredibly clear to me now that if you EVER suspect you may want to mod a game, you need to buy it on Steam. Do all games have Steam Workshops? No. Are there games in which Nexusmods is the definitive place to be? Yes. But there will never be a situation in which the Steam version of the game is penalized from a modding perspective, whereas the opposite is true.
And that sucks.
Prior to this moment, I preferred having all my games on Steam because it was convenient, and easy to track time played. However, I was not opposed to taking advantage of those Epic Game Store coupons they used to have, or when something only launched on GOG or whatever. Now? I do feel trapped within the ecosystem. Well, “trapped,” with golden handcuffs and all. But I’m starting to realize that perhaps I was only looking at first-order monopoly effects, and blind to the second-order ones.
Of course, the ideal solution here would be for Steam to make it easier to download Steam Workshop mods without having to own the game. Or at least making it more straight-forward.
In the absence of that though… well, full Steam ahead.
In An Age 
The Hopes of the Game Industry
Jan 20
Posted by Azuriel
In short: they hope GTA 6 will cost $100 so they can raise their own prices.
There is a ridiculous sort of myopia associated with seeing (and/or experiencing) high-profile commercial failures and escalating production costs, only to come to the conclusion everything would be better with higher unit prices. How about… *checks notes* … lower production costs? “But players demand AAAA-quality graphics!” Do they? I can appreciate the dilemma faced by developers, wherein the last game cost $400m and not wanting to gamble with a $350m (or lower) sequel. But if the acknowledgement is that the status quo of ever-increasing production costs is unsustainable, higher prices at best stems the bleed temporarily. At some point you need to address the root cause.
I was curious at this point as to what “the industry” actually thought about things, and if GTA 6 selling for $100 was all of it. So, the article I linked to above points to this VGC article, which then points to a 222-slide presentation by Matthew Ball, whom appears to be a “strategy advisor” to, presumably, the games industry (and others). If you have the time, I do very much encourage you to take a look yourself, as it is surprisingly straight-forward and facts-based. A summary:
The final section of the presentation includes thoughts on potential new growth engines. And it does include GTA 6, but also several others.
Again, I think it is worth looking at the presentation yourself, as each of the 11 bubbles there get multiple slides that introduce, justify, and even caution about the “solution.” Well, aside from GTA 6, which is noted would be the cheapest GTA ever (in real terms) if it comes out at $70. GTA 5 was released in 2013 at $60, which would be over $80 today, for example. Notwithstanding the billions of dollars GTA Online brought in, of course.
Overall, I did come away a bit more sympathetic to the plight of the games industry. Some of the headwinds I can personally attest to. For example, there have been multiple nights in which I found 2-3 hours of my “gaming time” consumed by Youtube Shorts scrolling. The network effect or “black hole” games are certainly a challenge as well, as anyone who has spent years playing MMOs can attest to. How do you compete against Fortnite, Minecraft, Roblox, and/or all the others?
“Raise prices,” of course!
Unfortunately, the actual solution is both pithy and hard to achieve: make fun games. Note how that solution did not include the words “spend 8 years painstakingly rendering every blade of grass.” Also note that I’m not saying that coming up with a fun game is easy either. But the industry seems stuck in this death loop of hiring more artists, programmers, marketers, and greenlighting enormously long development times… only for the game to fall flat because the fun wasn’t there. You can’t just hire more people to increase the fun quotient. And sometimes the fun that is achievable is only experienced by a narrow slice of the market, too small to be sustainable for the larger companies.
I don’t know the solution. If I did, I certainly wouldn’t be giving it out for free. But it might well be… decimation for the industry. I think a lot of publishers are just going to go bankrupt trying to spend their way out of the tailspin. AI could be a big disrupter, but disruption favors small indie shops, not the big guys. And while I do feel like longer development times is the obvious root issue for ballooning costs, I don’t see how the industry moves towards shorter development times and… then what? More releases? I mean, I wouldn’t be mad about a new Fallout every 2 years. If they keep the releases the same with a shorter development time though, that just means an implosion in the game jobs market. Not ideal.
…or maybe it is?
I dunno. I’m just a dude looking for fun games to play with my ever-decreasing amount of free time and eroding consumer surplus. When I look at my most-played games though, what I don’t see is full-priced titles with photo-realistic graphics and 8+ years in development. Well, I guess some Early Access titles were being worked on for that long, but it was like with three guys, not three hundred.
Anyway, Take Two can try and take $100 if they want and everyone raise prices as a result. Maybe it works, maybe it doesn’t. Nevertheless, my parsimony will abide.
Posted in Commentary
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Tags: Consumer Surplus, Fun, GTA 6, State of the Industry, Unsustainable