Author Archives: Azuriel
Microsoft (All But) Acquires Activision-Blizzard
The FTC has lost its injunction case against the Microsoft and Activision-Blizzard merger. Minutes later, the remaining regulatory holdout in the UK appears to be in back-room discussions with Microsoft. Although the FTC can still technically appeal the decision, in all likelihood things will be buttoned up by the time this post goes live.
I have not been following the court case itself too closely. The armchair legal experts on Reddit though suggest that the FTC’s arguments were weak, but don’t really go into convincing detail as what alternative arguments would have been stronger. On the face of it, everything seemed to hinge on Sony – who currently owns 45% of the entire console market – being negatively impacted by the merger. Considering Xbox is just 27.3%, one might surmise that the merger would actually increase competition in the console space. At least the UK’s argument was about cloud gaming… something that basically doesn’t exist, with even Google and Amazon unable to get it to work.
I am sympathetic to the argument that buying publishers and game companies is detrimental generally. There are no doubt millions of PS5 owners who probably wanted to play Starfield on their console of choice. Sort of like how I would have liked to play Ghosts of Tsushima on PC, which isn’t even considered a console by Sony/courts, but nevermind.
Perhaps it’s a bit myopic, but I’m obviously in Team Game Pass. I don’t care about Call of Duty and I doubt WoW will change, but potentially seeing Diablo 4 show up without having to spend $70 on it is a welcome surprise. No doubt the good times will come to an end at some point, especially considering the recent subscription price hikes, but it’s still worlds better (and cheaper) than the alternatives.
Will everyone come to regret this outcome 10 years from now? I kinda hope so. Because that means things are normal enough in 2033 that we can still give a shit about video games and not play Fallout 5 by walking outside our front doors.
Reddit Protests, pt 2
Almost a month ago, there were a series of protests on Reddit concerning a pivot to essentially ban all 3rd-party apps via charging a ridiculous amount for API calls. These 3rd-party apps were not just better from a user-perspective, they also made moderation easier (or even possible for blind users). However, these apps did not run ads, so the revenue (if any) Reddit received was minimal. There can be a debate as to whether the Reddit admins were “justified” in basically shutting them all down, but I think in the aggregate it is/was clear that a better approach of A) charging less, and B) giving the apps more time to adjust to changes would have cooled things down.
So, what is the status of Reddit two weeks after the implementation? Simmering to boil.
The subreddit blackouts clearly did not effect much change in of themselves. However, the admin overreaction to the blackouts – mainly in the form of threats and disparagement of mods – has emboldened said mods into new forms of malicious compliance. Seriously though, the Reddit CEO went on NBC and said this:
If you’re a politician or a business owner, you are accountable to your constituents. So a politician needs to be elected, and a business owner can be fired by its shareholders. And I think, on Reddit, the analogy is closer to the landed gentry: The people who get there first get to stay there and pass it down to their descendants, and that is not democratic.
“Landed gentry.” It is difficult to imagine a bigger slap in the face from someone who gets paid for what he does (spez) despite producing zero content, to all the unpaid (!!) mods who spend donate dozens/hundreds of hours of their time to ensure that subreddits aren’t just filled with trolls, hate-speech, and/or porn. According to this article, Reddit mods are (very conservatively) doing work worth $3.4 million per year. But, sure, they are all easily replaceable via “democratic processes.” Like… how?
The new front in the guerrilla protests is making subreddits NSFW. The notion is that by changing the classification to NSFW, Reddit will no longer be able to monetize that subreddit due to advertisers not wanting their product ad displayed next to something graphic. I have heard a few different arguments that this doesn’t actually work, e.g. ads are still displayed, but the reaction from the admins clearly suggests otherwise.
The first step was made by the mods of /r/interestingasfuck who basically all-but-encouraged their users to submit porn. Which they did. While I don’t believe it was a default subreddit, it does have 11.2 million subscribers, so what ended up happening was a flood of literal porn started appearing on peoples’ homepages. The Reddit admins quickly removed all the mods from the subreddit and essentially archived the whole place; there has not been a single new post there in 18 days. Presumably new mods will be installed via “democratic processes” at some point, but who knows when.
Other major subreddits are taking less explicit, but still hilarious routes. /r/Pics is default sub with over 30 million subscribers, for example, and the mods changed the subreddit rules such that “All posts must feature John Oliver.” This was done in a democratic fashion, just like the admins doubtlessly wanted. The mods also changed the overall subreddit category to NSFW with the justification that what constitutes NSFW by the admins themselves applies to the subreddit (profanity, potentially “offensive content”). Unfortunately, the admins have threatened the mods with removal for changing the subreddit category against its historical norms. While the mods are debating their next moves, they have let everyone know that all /r/Pics users can now label any post as NSFW.
True to their name, the mods on /r/madlads took it a step further and basically gave every one of their 1.7 million subscribers mod privileges. Now everyone is landed gentry! /r/politicalhumor did it too with their 1.6 million subscribers, but it’s less funny.
The admin threats do appear to be resonating in some ironic circles. For example, /r/NonCredibleDefense flipped back to SFW despite the purpose of the subreddit being military memes that frequently display graphic blood/gore. /r/DnDMemes mods also blinked, despite demanding an Intimidation check from spez. There will still be goblin smut and related porn allowed there, but apparently all is well as long as the individual posts are labeled NSFW.
The fundamental issue is that mods are not (easily) replaceable, but neither are the communities. Back in the day, there was a lot of concern that when /r/FatPeopleHate or /r/the_donald got banned, there would be “contagion” insofar as the users would migrate and infiltrate other subs. This basically didn’t happen – deplatforming works.
A 2017 study published in the journal Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, examining “the causal effects of the ban on both participating users and affected communities,” found that “the ban served a number of useful purposes for Reddit” and that “Users participating in the banned subreddits either left the site or (for those who remained) dramatically reduced their hate speech usage. Communities that inherited the displaced activity of these users did not suffer from an increase in hate speech.”[12]
When you zoom into a micro level with just your own life, it makes sense. How you act with one set of friends is typically different than how you would act with a spouse, your extended family, work friends, etc. Everyone has masks for every occasion. So, I do not begrudge the mods who blinked in the face of potential subreddit annihilation, as there are often times nowhere else to go.
As with Phase 1 of the protests, we will have to see where things end up with Phase 2. Is it another flash in the pan, to be smothered by the wet towel of admin threats? Or will things continue to boil under the surface, with mods “laying flat” and/or “quiet quitting” and/or “acting their wage”? And what of the meat of Reddit, the user-submitted content? Will people get over it and move on to the next meme, or have things been permanently overcooked?
I myself have deigned to download the official Reddit app so as to continue consuming memes and information away from my PC. Amusingly the 3rd-party Reddit is Fun app still technically works, but I cannot log in, so all I see is the myriad of default subreddits and popular posts with no customization possible. Which means it is functionally useless to me. I have been following Wilhelm’s reviews of other social media sites with interest though, to see if any might possibly be an overall Reddit replacement despite not really being advertised as such. Discord sure as shit ain’t it, after all.
But as mentioned earlier, it’s likely that no replacement is possible. Both Reddit and Twitter are apparently not profitable as-is, so who in the world is going to try (and succeed) at making a replacement? I mean, other than the half-dozen venture capitalists doing exactly that. I have the various subreddits I enjoy but I am not married to them to the same degree that mods might be. If something is better, I will go there today. Unfortunately, it’s looking more like “you get what you get, and you won’t throw (much of) a fit.”
Impressions: Elden Ring
God damn.
I do not necessarily want to rehash everything about Elden Ring, as you probably have already heard loads about it. As of May 2023, Elden Ring has sold over 20.5 million copies, which made it the second best-selling game in all of 2022 (with Call of Duty taking the top spot). This is truly a stupendous achievement considering the type of game FromSoftware makes and where the Dark Souls series has come from. Although, yeah, this isn’t a Dark Souls game per se.
The overall formula has been shaken up quite a bit. Yeah, combat is still super tough, requiring patience, precise reflexes, and usually trial-and-error. Death still results in all your souls runes dropping on the floor and you possibly losing them if you die before picking them back up. You still level up in a deeply unsatisfying way, raising stats one at a time and getting vague bonuses on even vaguer secondary stats you will probably never actually use at any point in the game.
At the same time, the game feels entirely different. Dark Souls offered freedom of a sort once you got to the first main area, but nothing like Elden Ring. After unlocking three bonfires Sites of Grace, you get a double-jumping magical horse that you can call at a whim and even engage enemies while mounted. As a spellcaster, there is essentially zero downside for me to not be mounted 100% of the time. Your foes can knock you off the horse, but the mounted shenanigans fundamentally change how I approach open-world combat. I never felt comfortable just running past everything in Dark Souls, but here? Anything you actually engage is on purpose.
Amusingly, there are even pseudo-stealth mechanics at play. Clicking the left-stick (these games demand a controller IMO) will cause your character to crouch, and there’s even a tutorial screen about hiding in tall grass. Again, you could backstab mobs sometimes in Dark Souls, but it typically only occurred during combat after they missed an attack, or with certain mob pathing. Now, you can practically Solid Snake your way through many areas, up to and including firing arrows at walls to make enemies turn around and investigate the sound.
I also appreciate that combat feels a lot… tighter? And more gamey at the same time? Dodge rolling is super important as always, but unlike in Dark Souls, I actually saw several times where my character clearly was hit by a sword or whatever but I had i-frames and thus took no damage. Enemy attacks seem to be telegraphed a bit better, or at least it feels that way.
At the same time, some of the weaknesses of the Dark Souls series are amplified in Elden Ring.
I already mentioned leveling feeling unrewarding, but exploration (thus far) feels both encouraged and kinda punished. Caves act as Skyrim-esque mini-dungeons, filled with enemies and traps, with a mini-boss at the end. If you are successful, you are accumulating runes that you will need to spend to level up or upgrade your gear, lest you lose them. But the freeform exploration means you can never really tell where anything is, or what you are building towards. Do you spend resources upgrading your starting gear, to help you in the encounters to come? What if the very next chest or body holds a vastly superior item? What are the Intelligence requirements for spells you find soon? Where the hell even is the Sorcerer trainer?
These known unknowns are part of the “mystique” of Dark Souls and certainly would sell a lot of game guides back in the 90s, but it’s all part of the sort of design bullshit I hate. I don’t need to be optimizing for the endgame from level 1, but I do need to feel confident that the devs aren’t being obtuse on purpose. Can you miss crucial game mechanics (Ashes of War) for not fully exploring one of the beginning camps? Yes. Could you technically get by without using them? Yes. Can you complete the entire game just using Glintstone Pebble? Yes.
Would this lead to a richer, more fulfilling gaming experience? No.
It’s a fine line to walk, I get it. It’s also useless to complain about degrees of hand-holding in a FromSoftware title… although they clearly do give way more hints with the “lines of grace” on the map (or having a map at all). But I bring all this up because the end result is that I hit up the Wiki or Youtube to get one minor frustration answered and end up seeing “How to become OP in the first 15 minutes without fighting a single enemy.” Which, cool, good job constructing your game in such a way that it rewards technique and mastery in learning routes. But also, WTF, mate? I’m over here playing Elden Ring like a standard videogame with progression when I clearly should have been running past every mob just yoinking all the upgrades off the ground from horseback.
I dunno, man. The problem is: when does that stop? When do you start “playing the game” and actually tackling bosses? I encountered one open-world mini-boss recently and got clobbered, even on horseback. The typical Souls solution is to Git Gud and/or farm some more levels. I did the latter, but also spent an hour riding around and getting two additional flasks plus one flask upgrade before coming back. Beat that mini-boss and was rewarded with… crap I’ll probably never use. Not quite as bad in some RPGs wherein you can out-level gear rewards entirely, but certainly not at all on par with how powerful I had become to beat the boss. That’s certainly a unique sort of freedom, but I don’t exactly want to praise the freedom to make the game experience worse for myself.
We’ll have to see where things go from here. I’m 15 hours in, zero major bosses down, still dithering in basically the first map of the game. Will things improve? Will it get worse in new ways? Who knows. If I’m casting the same two spells another 30 hours from now though, I’ll be very disappointed.
Mid-Year Game Plans
Finally, with the Summer Steam Sale, my wait is over:
Of course, the best part of seasonal Steam sales these days is that it leads to 3rd party storefronts offering even steeper discounts. For example, I won’t be purchasing Elden Ring on Steam for $41.99, I will be purchasing it from DLGamer for $36.99. Using 3rd-parties has bit me in the past, but “Steam Activation” are the magic words. Well, provided there aren’t delays in getting the keys. The only real downside is losing the ability to refund the game within the 2-hour window, but I’m thinking that won’t be relevant here. Probably.
Aside from Elden Ring, there are a number of items on my wishlist that are on sale. Unfortunately, I cannot trust any of them to not just magically show up on Game Pass by the time I get around to playing them. For example, My Time at Sandrock is currently 20% off with an estimated 1.0 release date of September. The devs have stated that once the game is out of Early Access, it will be more expensive. I really enjoyed My Time at Portia to the tune of 107 hours. But here’s the thing: My Time at Portia is already on Game Pass right now. Is Sandrock currently listed as an upcoming Game Pass title? No. Does the original game being there make it more likely that sequel will be too? I’d like to think so.
It helps/hurts that Game Pass is becoming the new hotness for survival/crafting games, including Early Access ones. Coral Island, Grounded, Little Witch in the Woods, Homestead Arcana, Farworld Pioneers (ugh), Stardew Valley, 7 Days to Die, Disney Dreamlight Valley, No Man’s Sky. Story of Seasons: Mineral Town just hit the service too. Meanwhile, my Steam wishlist has:
- My Time at Sandrock (EA)
- Stoneshard (EA)
- Scrap Mechanic (EA)
- Travellers Rest (EA)
- Roots of Pacha
- Sons of the Forest (EA)
- One Lonely Outpost (EA)
- Forever Skies (EA)
- Survival: Fountain of Youth (EA)
- Voidtrain (EA)
- Life Not Supported (EA)
Which of those will land on Game Pass? Or in a Humble Bundle, for that matter? Who knows.
What I do know is that it will be difficult to find time to play all of the things anyhow. Just look at this:
- Hearthstone: Titans (Expansion) – August 1st
- Baldur’s Gate 3 – August 3rd
- Guild Wars 2: Secrets of the Obscure (expansion) – August 22nd
- ARK: Survival Ascended (Remaster) – August 2023
- Starfield – September 6th
- Lies of P – September 19th
- My Time at Sandrock – September 26th
- Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty (DLC) – September 26th
Needless to say, August and September are a little stacked. It was even more stacked on the September side until the devs for Baldur’s Gate 3 decided to release it a month early to avoid competition with Starfield. Of course, I do not necessarily plan to purchase all of these games… huh. Actually, both Starfield and Lies of P will be on Game Pass, and I’m eagerly anticipating the Cyberpunk DLC. And Hearthstone is Hearthstone. And GW2 is GW2.
So, uh, yeah. Maybe I will just wait on any more deal purchases until the Winter Sale.
Cyberpunk Expansion
Cyberpunk 2077 is receiving an expansion called Phantom Liberty in September 2023. And even though I never finished the base game a single time… I’m excited. In fact, it’s hard for me to remember how excited I have ever been for any DLC for a game.
Why? Because the designers are actually addressing my deepest disappointments in the main game: the Skill/Perk tree and cybermods more generally.
The devil, as always, will be in the details. But we have some clues that they realize that hundreds of nodes of +3% Headshot damage is goddamn stupid. This screenshot shows how the current “Skill bush” will resemble a proper Skill Tree, with more consolidated abilities.
Then there is this hands-on Kotaku post:
CD Projekt Red has completely overhauled growth progression in a way that feels in-line with what the game always promised. If there was an alternate version of Cyberpunk 2077 where you can actually craft playstyles that don’t inevitably end with a shootout, this is it. The expansion brings new character builds and revamps old ones, and is geared toward build-defining abilities and augmentations, rather than the base game’s tedious numbers-go-up grind of incremental but meaningless stat boosts.
[…] For the hour I spent in Phantom Liberty, I played a build centered around agility, doing things I couldn’t have pulled off in the main game. I was able to dash on the ground and in the air, deflect bullets with my sword, and execute devastating finishers when I got in close. I was practically Genji from Overwatch, slashing my way through the militant forces of Dogtown. This was only one of the builds the demo offered, but a cursory glance at Phantom Liberty’s updated skill trees was enough to send my mind racing to the new possibilities.
Thank. Christ.
I’m a systems kind of guy. I enjoy thinking about possibilities, synergies, optimizations. And while it is very easy to reduce things too far and otherwise be overly prescriptive… the true danger is building your system to be boring. And Cyberpunk’s current system is extremely boring. It is full of “perks” like “Reduce draw time for pistols by 50%” and “Reduce time to aim down sights with Rifles and Sub-machine guns by 10%.” Even if the design argument is that there needs to be speed-bump perks to soak up excess points, would it kill them to make it more interesting? Why not make those perks affect all guns? Or have pistols get a 5% chance to cause bleeding, and then allow that to synergize with a different perk in another tree that increases critical strike chance by 10% on bleeding targets, and combine with a third perk that increases bleeding duration?
I wasn’t a fan of The Secret World generally – having to tab out to a Wiki to get through “basic” quests was not much fun – but its synergies between talents and such were top-shelf.
Now, is “Genji from Overwatch” potentially a bit too far? Maybe. That said, right around when I abandoned my playthrough I stopped using sniper rifles because I could already instantly kill people from similar ranges with Quickhacks without having to worry about bullet drop. So perhaps having a little Genji up in here is precisely what Cyberpunk needs more of.
In any case, the new system sure as shit can’t possibly be worse than what Cyberpunk already has. And yeah, I dare the Monkey Paw to try and jinx that one.
AI Presidential Debate
Oh boy, the future is now:
Welcome to TrumpOrBiden2024, the ultimate AI generated debate arena where AI Donald Trump and AI Joe Biden battle it out 24/7 over topics YOU suggest in the Twitch chat!
https://www.twitch.tv/trumporbiden2024
It’s best to just view a few minutes of it yourself, but this rank absurdity is an AI-driven “deep-fake” endless debate between Trump and Biden, full of NSFW profanity, and somehow splices in topics from Twitch chat. As the Kotaku article mentions:
The things the AI will actually argue about seem to have a dream logic to them. I heard Biden exclaim that Trump didn’t know anything about Pokémon, so viewers shouldn’t trust him. Trump later informed Biden that he couldn’t possibly handle genetically modified catgirls, unlike him. “Believe me, nobody knows more about hentai than me,” Trump declared. Both men are programmed to loosely follow the conversation threads the other sets, and will do all the mannerisms you’ve come to expect out of these debates, like seeing Biden react to a jab with a small chuckle. At one point during my watch, I saw the AI stop going at each other only to start tearing into people in the chat for having bad usernames and for not asking real questions.
It’s interesting how far we have come as a society and culture. At one point, deep-fakes were a major concern. Now, between ChatGPT, Midjourney/Stable Diffusion, and basic Instagram filters, there is a sort of democratization of AI taking place. Granted, most of these tools were given out for free to demonstrate the value of the groups who wish to eventually be bought up by multinationals, but the things developed in such a short time is nevertheless amazing.
Of course, this all may well be the calm before the storm. Elon Musk’s lawyers tried to argue that video of him claiming that Teslas could drive autonomously “right now” (in 2016) were in fact deep-fakes. The judge was not amused and said Elon should then testify under oath that it wasn’t him in the video. The deep-fake claim was walked back quickly. But it is just a matter of time before someone gets arrested or sentenced based on AI-fabricated evidence and when it comes out as such, things will get wild.
Or maybe it won’t. Impersonators have been around for thousands of years, people get thrown into jail on regularly-fabricated evidence all the time, and the threat of perjury is one of those in-your-face crimes that tend to keep people honest (or quiet) on the stand.
I suppose in the meantime, it’s memetime. Until the internet dies.
Reddit Blackout
In case you were unaware, there is a sort of Reddit protest currently underway. Essentially, ahead of an expected IPO, the Reddit admin team pulled a Twitter and changed their 3rd-party API policy from “free” to “a gazillion dollars.” It’s a gazillion because the price was intentionally set so high as to make it practically impossible for 3rd-party apps to function, even if they started charging a subscription fee. This suits the admins just fine, as either A) the apps die off and more people get funneled into the official (ad-supported) Reddit app, or B) they get paid lots of money.
The planned protest was on 6/12 and 6/13. On those days, the moderators of 7000-9000 subreddits turned those subreddits Private, essentially shutting them down. At first, it was difficult for me to tell something was amiss, as all the new threads in subreddits that didn’t protest continued to pile up in my feed. But when I went to look up commentary on the latest Hearthstone balance patch, I realized nothing was showing up. So I left it and went about my day.
The latest news though is that the protest is continuing for many, many subreddits. Perhaps indefinitely. The Reddit CEO did an Ask Me Anything session ahead of the protests and essentially told everyone to eat cake, which certainly did not help. It is anyone’s guess how this will end though, because while the Reddit admins are fully capable of booting the mods and unlocking the subreddits at will, somebody will still need to mod those spaces. For free, in their spare time, likely fighting a slew of ex-mod power users with a sudden influx of free time. Sort of highlighting the fact that Reddit itself doesn’t actually produce any content.
Do I have skin in the game? Sorta. I have used the Reddit is Fun app since before there was even an official Reddit app in the first place. But RiF is getting shut down on July 1st because of the API changes. And it is undeniable that the official app is a big step down in functionality (plus ads everywhere). The browser version will still work though, and I haven’t heard about Reddit Enhancement Suite getting shut down, so the experience won’t be too different at my desk.
The biggest loss though are some of the subreddits I have subscribed to. For example:
- /r/Hearthstone
- /r/CompetitiveHS
- /r/GuildWars2
There might be more, but I only noticed those because I had shortcuts for them – private subreddits no longer appear in my subscription list otherwise, so it’s hard to tell what else is missing. In any case, all three of those subreddits are going dark indefinitely until the API changes are rolled back.
To be honest, I have no idea how to “replace” those communities. Like if I wanted to read some commentary on Hearthstone, I would be stuck with Hearthpwn, the sorta weekly Vicious Syndicate reports, and… what? Official Blizzard forums? Discord? I looked forward to the VS reports being posted in /r/CompetitiveHS and then reading through hundreds of comments about other peoples’ experiences running those decks, changes they made for their pocket metas, and other minutia. Similarly, the GW2 official forums are in no way a possible analog of the content produced in the /r/GuildWars2 subreddit. It was precisely the variety and sort of auto-sorting (by upvotes/downvotes) of quality content that is the reason I have been using Reddit for the last 10 years.
Times change, but this is hitting me rather hard, even if Hearthstone/GW2 aren’t exactly my #1 interests currently.
Having said that, broadly speaking, I support the protest and blackout. Enshittification is apparently inevitable, but that does not mean we should go quiet into that good night. The prospects for success are low, but they aren’t zero, and doing nothing gets you nothing. Let’s just see what happens.
Back to Frackin’
I have returned from vacation. Pro-tip: don’t go to the beach in early June and expect to get in the ocean or pool. It’s cold. Was seriously considering booking 1 night at a resort just for the indoor pool.
My disappointment with Farworld Pioneers left a Starbound-shaped hole in my heart that I prompted filled with Starbound. Again. More specifically with the Frackin’ Universe (FU) mod reinstalled.
I was pleased to see that the expansive mod had embiggened itself over the last three years, pretty much to the point where everything felt new. Yeah, many of the craftable items are the same as is the general sense of gear progression that comes from mining new ores on new planets to build things that help you mine newer ores on newer planets. But there was a clever implementation of a new Research system that ties it together in a (slightly) coherent package.
All technologies in FU are unlocked by spending Research points to purchase nodes in various categories. The primary way to accumulate Research is… playing the game. Which is a fancy way of saying “passively in real-time,” at the rate of +1/second. A system like this would typically feel stifling, but the innovation here are the modifiers. Play a long session? Bonus +1/second every 60 minutes. Land on a higher-tier world with more dangerous enemies? Bonus +1/second based on the tier. You can also get +1/second by hiring an NPC Researcher to follow you around, by wearing a special armor set, and by hoarding an endgame resource. Plus, there are some consumable rewards that will give you a dollop here and there.
For the most part, Research doesn’t get in your way too much, as certain nodes also require you to craft (or at least own) milestone materials in addition to the purchase price. Indeed, pretty much the only thing the system really changes is the encouragement of building a planet-bound base as your ship always counts as a “tier 1 planet.” And planet-bound bases were really already encouraged by the simple mechanics of buildings needing power that more easily came from solar/wind sources.
Well, I suppose Research also serves as a sanity check on players trying to leapfrog progression by getting lucky on high-tier planets. Before, if you could dodge getting one-shot by hostile fauna, it was sometimes worth landing somewhere long enough to get lucky with chest drops or some endgame ore close to the surface. With the Research system in place, you won’t be able to even smelt any ore you find without spending an appropriate amount. High-tier weapon drops could still make suicide runs worth it though.
Anyway, I’m back to being obsessed with Frackin Universe. For now.
Impressions: Farworld Pioneers
Steam indicates that I first added Farworld Pioneers to my wishlist back in August 2022. It was described as Terraria/Starbound meets RimWorld/Oxygen Not Included, and since I very much enjoyed all those games, it seemed like this one would be up my alley. Well, it had a surprise (to me) release a few days ago and was on Game Pass to boot, so I was super excited to start playing.
Unfortunately, the game is pretty much trash right now.
First off, the game is labeled “v1.0” but it is very much in the “minimum viable product” category. Like, barely Early Access. There are periods of inexplicable slowdown; all electricity generators delete their fuel whenever you Save & Quit; Colony AI is abysmal to the point where colonists will readily starve/freeze to death while getting stuck on the very resources they were collecting; several research products literally say “Coming Soon!”; the ultimate goal for exploring the rest of the game, the Dropship, simply… doesn’t work. That last one was the final kick in the balls for me, as I ended up exiting the game several times to try and get unstuck from the inside of the cabin, only to finally teleport out back to the original planet… sans Dropship. And its contents. According to others, I was lucky: they didn’t have a teleporter so they were truly trapped and had to abandon 10-hour saves.
As bugs and sloppy code, those things can hopefully be fixed. What is a bit more concerning is the overall design of the game.
Terraria and Starbound both have NPCs that you can “recruit” to basically progress the game. They are not active members, but more like glorified workbenches or vendors. In colony sims like RimWorld and Oxygen Not Included, giving detailed orders and blueprinting out a base is important because you can’t control people directly. In exchange, you can see most of the map for planning purposes. Farworld Pioneers is a bastardization of the two – main character and colonists – and it just doesn’t work.
You can certainly give orders like “cut down these trees in particular” or “build a concrete room that looks like this.” And if you happen to have the resources in your stockpiles to accommodate the request (and the AI doesn’t wig out), they will even build it for you! The problem is that your colonists will not move the Iron Ore into the Smelter to make Steel Ingots and then move those to make the Steel door. Colonists will use existing resources, and they will work “bills” at crafting stations, but you have to set those up manually yourself. In which case, you may as well do it yourself.
Now, perhaps that is a deficiency of the existing AI. Certainly possible. But even if that piece is fixed, the fundamental problem is that you can only manage things that your character can see – no setting things up remotely while you are mining or exploring underground caves – which kind of renders the entire exercise moot. About the only functional things colonists can do while you are gone is perform Research and farm food.
I also have grave concerns about the scope of the game. Obviously building a Dropship and heading to another planet to get more advanced resources is one of the top goals. But what comes after that? Are they truly going the Starbound route wherein you then head to new star systems and discover even more exotic minerals and so on? Based on the current tech tree, it seems unlikely. And based on the gameplay on the starter planet, where you might get notified raiders are attacking your base while you are deep underground, I have my suspicions that this is a more “defend your colony” and/or “play on multiplayer and PvP strangers” endgame.
Overall, the game is a hot mess and should not have been released in this state. As someone starved of exactly the genre Farworld Pioneers professed to belong to, this has been extremely disappointing.
In An Age 
7 Days to Die, Again
Jul 21
Posted by Azuriel
7 Days to Die (7DTD) received a new patch a few weeks ago. So I had to boot it up.
If you haven’t heard of it, or read any of my posts, 7DTD is a zombie survival-crafting game that has been in an alpha state for almost 10 years. It has survived this long because A) it’s a fun, more realistic zombie Minecraft, and B) it continues to receive updates, albeit on a more yearly cadence. I came in around Alpha 15 or so, and this most recent release is Alpha 21. Supposedly the game will go gold with Alpha 23, but the dev team never had anyone with project management skills, and it kind of shows.
Case in point: the devs have spent a majority of A21 overhauling the leveling system and mucking with the early game. Again. For the 3rd/4th Alpha in a row. When I started playing, the skill system was a “learn by doing” sort of Oblivion system, wherein you crafted hundreds of stone axes to increase the potency of future stone axes. Then they moved towards a Skill Point system, so you needed to focus on leveling up and assigning points into Skills that improved your crafting ability. With A21, you now need to find and consume skill magazines in order to level each of dozens and dozens of skills. The Skill Points are still there, but are more focused on 10% (etc) bonuses, although you will find more corresponding skill magazines by spending points in specific areas, e.g. Spears, Shotguns, etc.
Are these changes bad? Yes and no.
In principle, I am fine with devs trying to figure out their preferred method of player progression. This is what Alpha states are supposed to be about, after all. The problem with the Fun
PolicePimps (their actual studio name) is that they are almost actively hostile to the way most people play their game. Over the years, the Minecraft elements have been nerfed into oblivion because they didn’t like players just basically digging into the ground and smelting iron and crafting all corresponding items (guns, etc). So, they nerfed the XP gains from digging and tied blueprints to either levels or loot (Skill books). When players still Minecrafted their way to castles, the devs started adding things like “gun parts” as uncraftable items you had to loot. Which, fine, whatever, but that also leads to ridiculous situations like how you need “baseball bat parts” to make a wooden bat, but can engineer a working gyrocopter out of scrap metal just fine.Meanwhile, over the years the devs started adding “dungeon” Points of Interest (PoIs) into the game. Whereas existing homes and shops were set up in a logical manner, these new PoIs were designed around players going along set pathways and encountering zombies in scripted ways, with extra loot at the end. These are cool… the first time you encounter them. Unfortunately, the devs has since turned every PoI into a dungeon, making looting a bit of a slog. Until/unless you have memorized where the main loot in located and can just break through doors/walls/ceilings to bypass everything.
Meanwhile meanwhile, the devs have also been tweaking zombie AI over the years to counteract players. The eponymous 7 Days horde is a bunch of zombies who attack at a sprint, always knowing your exact location. When I started playing, they couldn’t dig straight down, so if you found or built a bunker, you were basically immune. Clearly, that was a bit too easy. Zombies were then allowed to dig, making underground bases problematic. Players then started just driving around all horde night on motorcycles, so devs made zombie vultures move at 300% speed when you’re in a vehicle. People then started making zombie mazes. Devs wildly overcorrected and gave all zombies perfect omniscience as to the block HP of everything between you and them, so that they make a direct beeline towards the weakest part of your base. Not only was this nonsensical – how does a zombie know this concrete block has 495 HP instead of that one? – but it invalided all “real-world” defense strategies like installing spiked walls everywhere. Players then made zombie obstacle courses that end in impossible-for-AI jumps, so the devs reduced zombie fall damage and made them “rage” a bit, attacking any nearby blocks (e.g. support pillars).
Oh, and new to A21: glass jars and tin cups have been removed from the game. The stated goal was to make water a more important concern in the early game, as otherwise you could craft/find tons of containers, fill them up at a nearby lake, and boil your way to eliminate thirst. I mean… sigh. Maybe being able to craft glass jars in a Forge with just sand is a bit much. But that just makes bodies of water useless, throwing out another element of rational post-apocalypsing in favor of abstract game design. Instead, we must imagine you drinking bottles of water and throwing the container away, while you desperately collect enough coins to purchase a Water Filter from vendors, which you use to craft Dew Collectors, which generously grant you 3 Water (containers!) per day… from the aether.
Games change over the course of Alphas, especially when they have gone on for ten years. But at a certain point, you have to question whether the devs even want to finishing make the game they started. One of the leads once admitted on the forums that if they could go back in time, they would not have allowed players to dig into the ground. Which… is kind of a big deal for a voxel-based game.
All of the changes mentioned above though make digging immaterial to begin with. There used to be a tension between looting buildings and still saving enough time to build your own base to survive horde night. Now the optimal, dev-directed course is to spam quests from vendors – oh yeah, quests were introduced a few Alphas ago – to get PoI loot + quest loot, and just camp on the roof of a bank or whatever for the hordes. The zombies will eventually tear down the building after a few weeks of hordes, but by that time you will have enough high-level loot to kill them with ease, especially after creating a little obstacle course.
The good news is that 7 Days to Die has already attracted some quality mod authors over the years that have put out some transformative overhauls. So even if the Fun Pimps continue to go all-in on making the game just a series of scripted zombie encounters, there is still hope for an experience more akin to the game it used to be. Which is more than can be said for many titles out there.
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Tags: #ForeverAlpha, 7 Days to Die, Crafting, Survival, Zombie Apocalypse