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ONI Goes Gold
Another Klei game has graduated Early Access, showing the world how Early Access should be done.
I had stopped playing Oxygen Not Included (ONI) back in March, because I was getting a bit overwhelmed with my longest-running base, but didn’t want to start over with a fresh one because there were some pending updates. I continued holding off because the release date was going to happen soon, then it got delayed, so I waited some more. Booting up the launch version last night was satisfying, like slipping into a well-worn chair after a month-long vacation.
For the most part.
New biomes have been introduced, new machines, new elements, new critters, and a new selection of theme asteroids with random modifiers like “metal-rich” or “magma channels” or “frozen core.” There are trees now, in certain locations, and an entire engineering path in which you can burn trees for fuel, turn them into ethanol, and so on. There are also some major changes to heat deletion, specifically removing some of the cheesy methods and making it more of a hassle.
At the same time… the (optimal) early game is pretty much identical. Construct some Outhouses, dig out some 16×4 rooms, make your vertical shafts three tiles wide for airflow and future-proofing reasons, dig out a basement for your Carbon Dioxide to settle so the Dupes don’t smother in their sleep, and so on. The Research tree has been rearranged, Skills have undergone a third (final?) revision, but everything you learned about the first 50 cycles or so is pretty much the same.
The one thing that stays interesting is the placement and types of geysers that can spawn. In the beginning there were only Steam geysers and volcanoes and such, but now there are ~19 different varieties that can radically change the trajectory of your entire game. For example, having a nearby Natural Gas Vent (i.e. geyser) means you can rush an early Natural Gas Generator and otherwise skip Coal power entirely. A water geyser, in whatever form, is pretty much required for any kind of long-term survival, so it’s good to find an early one and get that concern out of the way.
In many ways, ONI reminds me of Civilization in this regard. Many of the steps you undertake are the same, although early environmental resource placement can cause you to switch strategies. By the mid-to-late game though, all roads lead to Rome and you end up doing the same sort of things, e.g. the one that work, as you coast to an inevitable conclusion.
Granted, I haven’t made it to the endgame in the released version of ONI – or in the beta for that matter – so maybe they changed things up. Hell, there are some asteroid options like Rime, wherein everything is basically frozen except for the starting biome, causing you to be very concerned about generating heat instead of having to worry about cooling everything down like normal.
In any case, Steam says I have played 80 hours of Oxygen Not Included already, so even if the release version doesn’t capture my long-term attention, it’s because I have already spent a long time enraptured in its systems. It is decidedly NOT Rimworld or Dwarf Fortress, but it is another fun game from Klei (makers of Don’t Starve). If you like failing miserably several times before becoming lord of the elements, I recommend the game.
Waiting Games
The Alpha 17 patch for 7 Days to Die has been pushed back from “late July” to August. There are some sweeping changes being done to guns and weapon mods in general, in addition to introducing new vehicles and such. It will remain to be seen if these changes are enough to make the game feel fresh, but honestly, it won’t take much to bring me back anyway.
Fallout 76’s release date is November 14th. I was hoping that “beta access” actually meant beta access, but it’s more like the now-current industry standard of pre-release. Evidence? Beta will take place in October, starting with a small group and then getting larger, and XBox users will be first.
Battlefield 5 will be released on October 19th, or slightly earlier if you’re subscribed to Origin Access. There should be an open beta sometimes in September, which I suppose matches the “beta” of Fallout 76. Hopefully the “open beta” is actually open, e.g. free.
WoW’s latest expansion will be hitting August 14th, of course.
In the meantime, I’m mostly playing the waiting game. I log into WoW, check the Emissary quest, WQs, and Order Hall mission lists to see if there are any easy reputation gains, for Allied Races purposes. I recently upgraded all of my heirlooms to level 110, and equipped them on all my alts. I have recently discovered how lucrative the Invasions can be from an XP standpoint – with 55% bonus XP, clearing the map is basically an entire level – but the quests are account-wide, so I’m kinda cycling through my characters. If there is time/interest leftover, I do some mog runs.
Honestly, I should probably be spending this time playing something else entirely. But, as always, it’s tough to play something else when you really want to be playing something in particular that you can’t. In my case, since they have not be released/updated yet.
Hearthstone is Released, Weirdly Balanced
So the blues weren’t kidding about Hearthstone being released Soon™… because it came out today. Surprise!
Speaking of surprises, the patch notes were somewhat full of them. Or rather, not full of them, which itself is surprising. The most obvious changes were to two Legendary cards I talked about last month: Nat Pagle and Tinkmaster Overspark. Pagle’s nerf was brilliantly subtle, taking the form of moving the card-draw coin-flip from the end of your turn to the beginning. It almost doesn’t feel like a nerf at all, but the reality is that Pagle isn’t likely to be haunting the upper echelons of tournaments any longer; that one extra turn of being able to deal with Pagle before the draw engine full gets started is actually pretty huge.
In contrast, the Tinkmaster nerf has all the subtlety of Jay “And double it!” Wilson game design. Which may as well have been the case, since the card was “fixed” (in the veterinarian sense) by doubling the RNG.
From hero to zero.
Where things get interesting is the peek into the Hearthstone card balance logic when the blues explained the Tink nerf:
Tinkmaster is a neutral card that silences and often shrinks big creatures. This reduces the amount of big, fun creatures in the environment. We think this change will increase the amount fun creatures in the environment, and bring him more in-line with his cost and overall power. Tinkmaster should still show up in certain types of decks, but will no longer be appearing in every high level deck.
While they did talk about cost and overall power at the end, the main concern was how Tink was “reducing the amount of big, fun creatures in the environment,” e.g. other Legendaries, presumably. Cards like Ragnaros and Ysera are win conditions in of themselves, and have pretty much gone unchanged since they were introduced; people who were holding out hope that perhaps these Legendaries would get the Pagle treatment seem out of luck. Hearthstone is not Magic: the Gathering, of course, but it appears this fact will need to be repeated a few more times before it fully sinks in.
And speak of the devil:
Secrets can now only activate on your opponent’s turn.
- Activating your own secrets feels a little strange, but mostly, the ability to do this was preventing us from creating new and powerful secrets that trigger off of events you can easily control (like a minion dying). They end up functioning just like spells, instead of trying to bait your opponent into a bad play. This change keeps secrets working like traps you lay for your opponent, instead of spells that you cast and use on your own turn.
I would characterize this Secret change as a huge Paladin nerf, but Paladins are pretty much nonexistent at high levels of play, and their Secrets are gimmicky at best. However, this change turns those gimmicks into Disenchant material. For example, Redemption is a Paladin Secret that says the next minion of yours that dies, gets brought back to life at 1 HP. Pair that with a value creature with Charge like Argent Commander, and you can suicide into a minion and come back to deal some extra damage. Or, of course, you could use Redemption with a Legendary for some serious card advantage.
Well, not anymore.
In any case, Hearthstone is out, it’s fun, and it’s F2P for US audiences… and merely Free-to-Download, In-App Purchases Optional (F2DIAPO) for those in the EU. Blizzard is offering a WoW mount for those willing to get rolled by beta veterans until three wins are grinded out, so there’s that too.
Hearthstone and other Game News
According to the Blues, Blizzard’s F2P “Free to download, optional in-game purchases” Hearthstone will be released for real in a matter of weeks:
How close to the end of the beta are we? Don’t need an exact date, because I know that would be horrendous, but is this a matter of days or weeks or months?
I can’t say exactly, but it is soon. Not months.
Although there are a number of annoying bugs still kicking around, I have largely considered the game to be ready for Prime Time since the closed beta. The level of polish when it comes to sound effects, the implied physicality of the game pieces, and everything else is pretty astounding considering the size of the development team. For a while there were rumors floating around that the game wouldn’t be released until the iPad version was up, but it seems like that might be referring to the planned single-player Adventure Mode.
Whatever the case, I am very much looking forward to the release and any potential card tweaks that might go along with it. To an extent, it’s easy to sit on the sidelines and call the release of new card sets/expansions as “greedy,” but goddamn does it get annoying after a while when you see the same dozen cards get played in game after game. The metagame is in a healthy state of flux, but the core staples of most every deck do not.
In news that I likely care about more than any possible reader, apparently there is a 4th (5th?) entry in the Deception series called Deception IV: Blood Ties and it’s being released this month. While it is obscure as hell, the Deception series was a set of rather groundbreaking PS1 games that were the precursor to games like Orcs Must Die. Essentially, you set up a number of nefarious traps in a mansion and then must lure trespassers to their doom by controlling an otherwise unarmed Gothic lady.
Here’s a video from Kagero: Deception 2, which is the sort of foundation of the series:
The graphics were pretty hideous even by the time the 3rd game was released, and the plot was Japanese nonsense, but the gameplay? Equal parts brilliant and hilarious. A large part of the game revolved around chaining trap combos, both because traps had cooldowns and because getting the bonus currency was required to unlock more traps/upgrade existing ones (and there was no farming). A fairly simple chain would go like this:
- Bear Trap at bottom of stairs.
- Giant Boulder crashes down stairs, knocks target into back wall.
- Push Wall knocks target back onto Bear Trap.
- Repeat.
Sounds quaint, right? Well, it should, considering Deception started doing it in 1996 and Kagero in 1998. Those were good years – FF7 was 1997, FFT was 1998 as was Xenogears.
…all of which happened almost 20 years ago. Sigh.
In An Age 
7 Days to More Money
Apr 24
Posted by Azuriel
In a completely unexpected turn of events, 7 Days to Die is actually coming out of Early Access. Soon!
I say “completely unexpected” because, well, it is. The game has indeed been in Early Access for 12 years already, with Alpha 22 (now “1.0”) slated to come out in a few months. However, the Early Access period has been so long due to the dev team having no project manager – each major release has radically redesigned the scope of the game, changing progression mechanics, and otherwise putzed around art assets without actually making forward progress on systems or endgame.
But now they are, so… why aren’t I happy? Take a gander at the roadmap:
I don’t think you really even need to know anything about the base game to intuit that the stuff in the 2025 columns would, in fact, be a more appropriate 1.0 experience. In particular, Bandits have been promised for literal ages, and are still nowhere to be found. Do I believe we will get a UI/Main Menu Overhaul? Yes I do. Will there also be Bandits? Not falling for it this time, Lucy.
What is really going on with this 1.0 release is the increase in base pricing.
Look, my intent is not necessarily to paint The Fun Pimps as capitalistic assholes. I bought the game 7 (!) years ago for $10, and even now you can still purchase it this week for $5.99 ahead of the $44.99 (!!) price increase. In those years, I have played for over 327 hours. And regardless of any price increases, my copy will be upgraded for free, I’ll get all the updates for free, and so on.
It’s just that this “release” is clearly a business decision first.
This is especially true in terms of the console re-release. The history is that the game was released on consoles back in 2017 but had been stuck in Alpha 15 ever since then because porting company went bankrupt. We’re in Alpha 21 on PC, for reference. The Fun Pimps reacquired the rights a few years ago, but financially it never made sense for them to hire out another porting team. Until now.
Again, good on them for trying to get console fans a discount, assuming such a thing materializes. It also makes sense that you may have to cut your losses and start fresh with a new version given all the difficulties up to this point.
I just… I dunno. It’s complicated. As I mentioned last year, each Alpha has included a seemingly pointless overhaul of the progression system, although each iteration has taken it further and further away from zombie MineCraft and more towards something generic. Once upon a time, you would come across a small town and break into houses to scavenge for supplies and hope a big wandering mob of zombies didn’t stroll in after you. Now, 100% of the Points of Interest are mini-dungeons with traps, blocked corridors, zombies popping into existence when you cross thresholds, and a loot chest at the end. Which is cute the first time you come across the PoI, but later you just stack wooden frames and hack your way through the roof to get the loot chest and skip the mini-dungeon part.
Assuming you aren’t just spam-completing quests from the Traders, since that is actually the best way to get gear; crafting shit with resources you gather is sooooo 2017. Oh, and base-building? Yawn. Despite the fact the entire game is premised on a wave of zombies attacking you every 7 days, the devs have decided that the zombies are omniscient structural engineers who know both the shortest distance to your brains and which specific wall cubes in the way have the least amount of HP. Which, of course, means “traditional” structures like bunkers or buildings with a bunch of traps surrounding it are pointless. Instead, you need to construct Ninja Warrior obstacle courses for zombies to tight-rope walk towards you single-file for anything you build to have meaning.
Or just sit on top of a roof for a couple of weeks before moving to a different building. Whichever.
In fairness, all of this nonsense was introduced in patches, and it’s entirely possible to remove it in the same way. Given the consistency in which the devs have moved backwards though, I don’t have much faith in them spontaneously understanding why their game was popular to begin with and to stop undermining it. So while the business decisions they are making with 1.0 are rational and the last-chance deals magnanimous, I still don’t like it.
About the only bright side to all this is that, perhaps, having a firmer foundational codebase will encourage more modders to fix all the bullshit. Darkness Falls is already a transformational mod that improves the game in about every way, and I know of others (Undead Legacy). That last Q4 2025 slide does says “Steam Workshop Support” so that may be the golden ticket. We’ll just have to see.
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Tags: 7 Days to Die, Early Access, It's Just Business, Release, The Fun Pimps