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Review: Planet Crafter
Planet Crafter really surprised me by keeping my attention all the way to… just before the very end.
The premise of the game is that you are dumped onto a barren, hostile world and tasked to terraform it into something more hospitable to life. The “twist” is that there is no combat. At all. The planet is barren, after all, so what would even attack you? But what intrigued me was precisely how intrigued I stayed for the 35 hours I played. And that’s quite the trick considering I am not much of an Explorer type nor someone typically into Factorio-style automation games.
The secret sauce is probably the sense of progression.
When you first start out, you have an extremely tiny oxygen meter and will be doing some desperate loops around your starting capsule to gather raw materials. Eventually, you will start building a rudimentary base and start stockpiling supplies. However, almost all crafting recipes and upgrades are gated around one’s Terraforming Index (Ti) score. Improving this score is only possible by creating machines to generate Heat, Pressure, Oxygen, etc, to first form an atmosphere, and so on. Certain resources to build these machines are not located on the ground like most everything else, so you will need to go explore deeper afield – including inside the wrecks of spaceships – to gather what you need.
And so a cadence is formed: build up machines to improve Ti, go exploring for new material, come back and build new machines that got unlocked while you were exploring. Each loop will increase your ability to travel further as you expand oxygen capabilities, movement speed, and inventory space, and start fostering a sense of curiosity about what’s over the next ridge or inside that cave.
It’s also worth mentioning the more visual sense of progression as you improve Ti: watching the planet bloom. Glaciers recede, opening new travel and resource opportunities. Liquid water starts to form. Weather occurs. You start building Flower Spreaders, grass starts generating, then you upgrade to Tree Spreaders. By the time endgame rolls around, you are flying around searching for the last remnants of secrets left behind, occasionally stopping to gaze at the previously lifeless stone arch now covered in an explosion of color and growth. It’s a real treat.
The only shame then is the final stumble. I have unlocked every technology except the final one to end the game. I have explored procedurally-generated wrecks, I have optimized my automation, I have uncovered every mystery on the planet, consumed every bit of novelty. My score is sitting at 1.43 TTi and 5 TTi is the end. After timing it, I would need to leave the game running for 5.5 real-world hours to get to that number.
Could I speed it up? I mean, hopefully. I’ve already built 6+ T5 generators of various types (Pressure, etc), overlapping Optimizers fitted with boosters, dozens of satellites that further juice the numbers by 1000% a pop. Each added machine makes the overall number increase by what feels like an insignificant amount. I spent the entire game waiting for the “Spam End Turn in Civilization” inevitability to kick in, and was surprised every time Planet Crafter bobbed and weaved out of the way. But, alas, it did come after all.
Nevertheless, Planet Crafter did deliver an extremely solid 20-30 hours of entertainment without once leaning into combat or contrivances. If you’re looking for Subnautica minus the thalassophobia, or the first half of Breathedge minus the chatty sidekick, then Planet Crafter is your game.
The Waiting Place: December 2023
A non-exhaustive list of things I am waiting on for one reason or another.
Waiting on Sales
- My Time at Sandrock
- Dave the Diver
- Zero Sievert
- Vintage Story
- Dead Island 2
- Dying Light 2
I’ve really been kicking myself over passing on Sandrock during the Thanksgiving sales. I was busy playing other games at the time, but I got the itch really bad after playing Coral Island and now anything else I play feels like, well, that I’m trying to distract myself from itching. Aside from that, Dead Island 2 was almost good enough of a deal during Thanksgiving, but there was some kind of fuckery going on with the base game versus game + DLCs or something that made me pause.
Waiting on Updates/1.0 Releases
- Stardew Valley – v1.6 with major changes
- Kynseed – Out now, but needs updates/fixes
- Sons of the Forest – February 2024
- Smalland: Survive the Wilds – Q1 2024
- Once Human – Q3 2024
- The Planet Crafter – sometime 2024?
- Core Keeper – Summer 2024
- Valheim – sometime 2025?
I thought about booting up Stardew Valley again with some of the expanded mods to give that a whirl, but the looming 1.6 release gave me pause. Updates that big will probably impact the mods too, so that will take some time to sort out. I’ve had an eye on Kynseed for a while, and there is some developer drama I’m not keen on, but the lack of sales (and needed updates) make that easier to wait for. Just looked at the roadmap for Valheim and they are expecting 2 more years in Early Access so… yeah. Already been 2 years, what’s 2 more? There will be plenty of other games releasing into Early Access (and possibly out of) in the meantime.
Early Access Launches
- Enshrouded – January 2024
- Palworld – January 2024
- Nightingale – February 2024
- Light No Fire – TBD
- Rooted – TBD
- Under a Rock – TBD
I’m pretty excited about all of these, honestly. The release date trailer for Enshrouded was pretty great, and I’ve watched enough of the “demo” streams to feel pretty confident it will have an enjoyable Early Access experience. Palworld is Palworld. Nightingale is one where I’m worried about how the idea of it might end up better than the finished project. We shall see.
Light Some Fires
There were some interesting reveals coming out of the recent Games Awards, but Light No Fire was one that immediately piqued my interest. Here is the release trailer:
In case it was not obvious by the trailer style or esoteric title or the logo with a mysterious red thing in the middle, this is Hello Games studio’s upcoming follow-up release to No Man’s Sky. Sean Murray was back onstage to give a sort of intro to the reveal, and history sort of repeated itself with some amazing claims. “[We’ve been working on] something very different, something maybe more ambitious.” Something more ambitious… than a goddamn procedurally-generated galaxy? Even the host chimed in with a “Ha, here we go.”
Indeed, the jokes started coming in from all corners afterwards:
Now, you can certainly take some umbrage with how both the Cyberpunk and Hello Games devs are making light of releasing broken games that took multiple years (or longer) to fix. You are well within your rights to be screaming from the rooftops about Sean Murray in general, and warn about the dangers of hype. Hell, we don’t even have a release timeframe or hints that it will come out this decade.
But. But!
…I’m excited for Light No Fire. For two reasons.
First, it’s a survival-crafting sandbox. You might think there are dozens of these sort of games on the market already, and you would be correct. And I played them. Pretty much most of them, actually. So, I’m excited that another one is coming out from a team that I trust*.
That leads me to the second reason: trust. Do I trust that Hello Games will deliver everything Sean Murray said at the Game Awards? No. Do I trust all the things written on the Steam page? No. But what I do trust is the No Man’s Sky that exists already. And when I saw that Light No Fire trailer, what I saw was mostly stuff that you can already do in No Man’s Sky.
Climb mountains? Check. Go underwater? Check. Build stuff? Check. Fly around? Check. Ride creatures? Check. Survival elements, collect rare resources, care about environmental dangers, build persistent buildings, explore things with friends, fight big monsters? Check ^ 6. About the only thing you can see in this trailer that you don’t already see in NMS are trees swaying in the breeze and a world with more than one biome. We can imagine them stitching together a bunch of planets onto one larger planet, and that is solved straight away.
The “danger” is getting hyped on what a game could be. Will there be dungeons, will there be raid bosses, will there be a “reason” to go to the tallest mountain, will there be PvP? I suppose there is also danger in assuming that when they say “one world” that it will actually be one, non-instanced world. I actually hope there isn’t one world because, if ARK has taught us nothing, it’s that prime gameplay for many people includes obstructing all available real-estate with pillars and/or phalluses. I don’t care if the world is larger than our own 197 million square miles – if you build it, people will come take a shit on it, if possible. If there are no building limitations, I give it six months, max.
Anyway, that’s Light No Fire. I will be closely following this one.
Asset Flip
One of the games I was looking forward to during the previous Steam sale was one called Grand Emprise: Time Travel Survival. The trailer was amazing, the premise novel, the gameplay was survival-crafting, it had it all! So, imagine my dismay when I read this review:
You can read the full review yourself, but the gist is that the one-person “dev” downloaded a bunch of Unreal marketplace assets and just dumped them as-is into his game. These environmental assets have demo areas already built, along with tools to customize that area or create new ones, but apparently the dev just used the demo areas. Other reviews point out that the dev has a very cynical marketing mindset wherein he publishes a lot of similar asset flips in Steam trying to determine how to generate traffic (and revenue) using as little effort as possible.
This is further supported by the fact that “Karagon (Survival Robot Riding FPS)” – yes, that’s the actual name – was another indie title this dev released three months ago. I had been looking forward to Karagon too, as a sort of ARK substitute to hold me over until the remaster/sequel got released. The reviews further reinforce the notion that the dev swoops in, dumps a game with recycled assets, and swoops away with whatever cash wasn’t refunded.
The concern about asset flips is not limited to this one specific dude, of course. In my last post, I was talking about Craftopia and all the cool things (and a lot of jank) going on there. What I had not realized was that the devs of Craftopia are the same ones as the upcoming Palworld. If you haven’t seen the amazing trailer for Palworld, take a quick peek now, because it’s worth it. Big publishers can have multiple teams working on different products, but something tells me that that isn’t exactly the case here. In PocketPair’s defense, Palworld is slated for an Early Access release January 2024 and Craftopia has a roadmap that ends in September of this year.
In PocketPair’s non-defense though, their latest trailer showed this area for a split-second:
Is it exact? No. I suppose there are only so many different ways you can construct a stone bridge. And, you know, if you need to put out a trailer for an alpha game to generate buzz, you may as well use whatever you have laying around in any case. That said, the shenanigans with Grand Emprise have made me a bit sensitive to this situation. Was Craftopia’s “Seamless Update” really intended to enhance the game? Or did they want to beta-test their Palworld alpha?
There is potentially a conversation to be had as to whether asset flips are bad at all. Things like microtransactions and DLC put the monetary side of the industry front and center, but it is easy to forget that these things that bring us joy are a product being sold. Therefore it is a bit presumptuous of me to characterize someone as being lazy and cynical when that can technically describe all capitalistic aspects of product development. I’d very much prefer devs to have a passion for the game they are making, but as long as it’s fun, who cares? There are apparently many people who played Grand Emprise and had fun with it.
…yeah, no, can’t do it.
I try to have at least one paragraph where I take the opposite side of the argument just to see if there is something I’m missing, but I don’t think so in this case. Asset flips are shitty and it’s especially frustrating to be a fan of the survival genre when it’s apparently ground zero for this chicanery. We are indeed deep in this bizarro world in which even “completed” games feel like abandonware, but Grand Emprise is a whole other level of nihilism.
I suppose we as gamers are not “owed” the same level of passion as ConcernedApe (Stardew Valley) or the people behind Terraria, but it’s still just sad. We become invested in these gaming experiences in a way that we don’t for other products. So, to me, exploiting that investment oftentimes diminishes my very capacity to be invested in things in the future. That is… just restating the definition of being jaded, but the actual diminishment feels much more personal somehow.
Oh well. Caveat emptor and all that.
Impressions: Craftopia
A lot of developers, even in the indie space, like to play things safe. Even if the genre is something out of left field, a lot of the basic game design still feels like +10% skill bonus here, clearly defined tutorial there. Early Access is treated as a soft launch – which it definitely is – of the final product instead of an opportunity to just go nuts.
Meanwhile, Craftopia is the nuts. I don’t remember the last time I played something where you could just feel the devs sitting around a whiteboard saying “That sounds cool, let’s try it out.” And since the team is from Japan, they are already coming at design from sometimes extra weird angles.
On the face of it, Craftopia is… well, let me just post this from the Steam store page:
Craftopia is the brand new multiplayer open-world survival action game.
We have imagined what would happen when we combine our favorite video games altogether.
Chop trees and mine stones as in Sandbox,
Explore the world as in Open-world,
Fight the hunger as in Survival,
Cultivate and harvest as in Farming,
Collect loots in dungeons as in Hack-and-slash,
Automate activities as in Factory management,
Hunt monsters and creatures as in Hunting action,
Cast magical spells as in Fantasy RPG.Now we have a utopia for all of us. That is Craftopia.
After destroying the world in the opening credits, your character emerges from a tutorial cave and you can basically do whatever you want. The game looks like Breath of the Wild and/or Genshin Impact, including the ability to gecko-climb up every surface from the get-go (and build a glider soon after). Following the breadcrumb quests will take you to some NPCs and a small town where you can get acquainted to the crafting. The thing to know is that you can basically build anywhere, which will be important later.
Before the big Seamless World update in late June, the game was basically a series of instanced islands and you needed to unlock things to open portals to other places. Now, you can basically go anywhere you want right off the bat, although you will of course encounter higher-level enemies the farther afield you explore. One of the principle progression mechanics is unlocking special pillars across the landscape using crafted goods. Once you supply the necessary ingredients and then press the button at the top of the resulting pillar, you progress the “Age” and unlock new crafting possibilities.
Let me talk about the pillar for a second though, because it was amazing to me. I supplied the ingredients and then it shot up into the sky. I started climbing the pillar, which is something you can just do, but I started getting nervous halfway up because the ledges were very tiny and, admittedly, the game has a lot of jank. So I threw down a wood platform so I wouldn’t fall off. And then I slapped my forehead with the realization that I could have just built a spiral staircase to reach the top. Which I then did. There’s a floating island you need to reach to get some upgrades, and I presumably would have learned that lesson had I done that earlier, but whatever.
Aside from the crafting aspect, there is a lot of experimentation in the Skill trees as well. You can choose to use Magic of various flavors, enhance your normal weapon attacks, unlock basic movement skills like double-jump, and more. When I played, a large portion was simply unselectable placeholders, but what exists is plenty inventive and makes me feel excited for the possibilities. One Skill lets you throw a knife and then teleport to that location. I was a tad disappointed that its range is limited, but it reminded me how much fun I had with Rogues in WoW with Grappling Hook and Shadowstep.
Also, apparently there is an entire Pokemon element in the game wherein you can capture and breed anything in the game, including NPCs (!!), and ride them into battle (!?!). Actually, I haven’t tried to see if you can ride the NPCs, but I have ridden a cow and what looked like a Shy Guy from Mario 2, so I wouldn’t be surprised.
Also also, there are dungeons with traps and boss fights. Building is more limited inside, but there was a sequence where you had to come up with something to avoid fireball turrets and infinitely falling giant iron balls that roll down the main ramp. I hesitate to call the boss combat Soulslike, but you do need to dodge and counter-attack at precise moments to avoid damage. Or summon a bunch of pets/NPCs and spam attacks? Didn’t try that, personally, but maybe it would work.
What I will say though, is that currently Craftopia has a lot of jank. Like, a lot a alot. When I played, damn near half of the NPC dialog was in untranslated Japanese, and what was in English was very clearly machine-translated. According to one patch note the untranslated dialog was due to a bug, but let’s just say that this isn’t exactly an AA game experience at the moment. It certainly is A game experience, and definitely a BBB game if I ever saw one.
And that’s fine. What I love about Craftopia already is that it can improve in so many different ways and directions from here. That sounds like a backhanded compliment, perhaps, but my point is that these guys threw the entire box of spaghetti at the wall, instead of just a normal amount. With what they got going on so far, I am not worried about them necessarily cutting features and/or nerfing certain builds into the ground. Which means we could just have fun for once in completely unique ways. How many times does that happen?
The one negative I’ll say is that it’s difficult to justify playing exactly right now. For one thing, there is apparently some kind of critical Save Game bug, which is about the worst thing that can happen with a survival-crafting game. But more than that, I worry about playing through things, getting my fill with the novelty, and then them releasing a whole bunch of new elements that I don’t get to experience because I’ve moved on. That’s a Me problem, 100%, but it’s there. The roadmap suggests that an official release may come in or after September, which isn’t too far away, and may be just as well considering that’s when Starfield comes out.
But overall, if you want to experience a game where it feels like almost anything can happen, Craftopia is where it’s at.
7 Days to Die, Again
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 Police Pimps (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.
The Waiting Space
I have been playing a number of games since completing Dark Souls, but none of them are the games I really want to play. Because those games aren’t done yet. And it’s driving me mad.
Coral Island
This is a farming/life-sim game set in a more tropical area. It is currently in Early Access and available via Game Pass. According to the Roadmap it looks like there are updates planned all the way out until Winter of 2023 and then some additional big updates prior to the 1.0 release. One of those updates? The traditional marriage and/or kids additions. I don’t require life-sims to have these features, but if it’s already planned to be available, I also don’t want to miss out and/or have to replay for that content.
My Time at Sandrock
Quasi-sequel to My Time at Portia, which I played for 108 hours and enjoyed quite a bit. A lot of content already out there, but according to the Roadmap, it will be late March/early April before they add the marriage system in. Then late May/early June before they add three additional NPCs into the romance pool. I don’t know any of these NPCs or if I would care about them at all, but… what if I did?
Valheim
The Mistlands biome has finally came out, but apparently there are more on the way. I have waited almost exactly two years already, so I may as well continue to wait until this one gets done.
Sun Haven
Farming/Life-sim game that is a more fantasy-based Stardew Valley. And it even got a v1.0 release! After checking the patch notes though, I noticed the “Coming Soon!” section which includes, among other things:
- – More Pets
- – More Race Specific Dialogue
- – Having children with your spouse
- – Farm Buildings (Sheds / Greenhouses)
- – Proximity Animations
- – Minor DLCs
- – Main Story Epilogue
Sigh.
The Planet Crafter | Craftopia | Len’s Island | Sons of the Forest | Traveler’s Rest
All Early Access and none of them discounted. Pass for now.
[Edit] Just kidding, Steam Spring Sale is going on.
Green Hell
Technically on sale and… technically released? Doesn’t have the Early Access tag any more, but most info points to this being in a more Beta state. Green Hell is one that has been on my radar for a while from a survival standpoint. What I have heard is that it is a bit more grindy insofar as you have to take care of your macronutrients rather than just regular Hunger, and you are much more likely to die of random snake or spider bites than other games. Those sort of things are whatever. The biggest damnation though has been talk about how base-building is not really encouraged based on the narrative of the game, which requires you to venture out all across the map. That sort of thing really hampers things, if true.
V Rising | Kynseed
Released but no sale, so… no sale.
[Edit] Just kidding, Steam Spring Sale is going on.
Voidtrain | One Lonely Outpost | Palworld | I Am Future | Under A Rock | Lightyear Frontier | Rooted
None of these are available, even in Early Access. :(
All of this is mostly pointless belly-aching because of course I have a million and a half other games bought and paid for to play. But I want to play these games at the moment. #1stWorldProblems.
Rimworlder
As feared, I succumbed to Rimworld yet again.
The experience of playing Rimworld 1.4 with all the paid DLC has been interesting. And yet, simultaneously, an outrageous slog. Principally, my problem with Rimworld is the opening act. The “game” doesn’t really start until you have a working refrigerator and a relatively stable colony of 5-6 people. Before that point, you do not have the resources or manpower to engage much with the Research tree, rituals, caravans to other settlements, or any of the fun war crime shenanigans that just sort of happen on the way down the slippery slope.
To back up a bit, let me talk about my first scenario this time around: Rich Explorer. Instead of crash landing with three pawns, you land with just one but with a pile of money and a tech tree unlocked enough to built turrets right away. For some reason, this particular scenario has been speaking to me for months now – possibly because it speaks to the sort of survival games I enjoy. What I discovered was… pain, and not just because I run the Randy storyteller with the 2nd highest difficulty. Basically you have to have Construction 5 skill on your pawn in order to craft turrets, so I was defending solo for the first year. Not that it would matter much, because turrets require power, which was difficult to set up when you are also trying to sow crops to survive the winter. And that’s another deviation from my historical Rimworld attempts, e.g. not selecting a temperate zone that has year-round crops.
I persisted with that playthrough all the way to the next summer, until the moment that the four pawn colony I had scraped together all managed to get food poisoning at the same time. I wasn’t under attack or anything, I was just frustrated beyond reason that all four of my pawns were vomiting constantly, weak with fatigue, and I was zoomed in, watching pixels to see if they managed to actually finish eating the meal or would get interrupted and then collapse on the floor from starvation or not. It’s very possible that the colony would be fine, but I didn’t want to waste my time even on the highest game speed to see if they would.
Honestly, I don’t remember much about the 2nd attempt. I just abandoned it for similar reasons.
The third and current attempt is somewhat of a “cheese” run. Using the Biotech DLC, I decided to create my own xenotype that includes the Iron Stomach trait that makes them immune to Food Poisoning. I also used the Ideology DLC to create a belief that organ harvesting is OK, seeing corpses don’t provide a negative debuff, and research speed is increased. My pawns are genetically addicted to Psychite though and the area I settled in only has two growing seasons. Plus, any recruits beyond those initial three won’t have the xenotypes or Ideology bonuses without extra work.
That said… it’s still a slog. I’m currently surviving (thus far) the winter and barely have had time to research any new techs, let alone anything that utilizes the rest of the DLC material. Which is not necessarily the “point” of the game, but come on. All the fun stuff (to me) occurs when you have a somewhat stable base and can start meaningfully interacting with the rest of the game world. I’m still very far from being able to do anything with gene editing, Psycasts, or anything other than try and survive the winter without multiple psychological breaks.
Welcome to the rim, I guess.
Impressions: Grounded, pt 2
While the first Impressions post for Grounded was a week ago, the reality is that I have been mainlining the game daily for the past three weeks. That first post was written based on my first dozen hours or so, but I ended up playing so much that I never got around to actually posting it. So here are my impressions about the game after some 50+ hours.
Grounded is good. Sometimes annoying. Definitely still Soulslike.
The game world continues to be a huge star of the show. Survival games sometimes have to make huge contortions to accommodate varied biomes – lava must coexist with snow and deep oceans and deserts all in the same map – but the way Grounded interweaves its own biomes is a masterclass in design. The backyard is a believable backyard. And yet going from the Grasslands to the canopy of the Hedge is a big transition. Or to the pond. Or in the sandbox, with it’s deadly Sizzle effect when you traverse the dunes without shade. These are different places, with different resources, and different challenges to overcome. And it all feels… coherent. Believable. Or at least, as believable as teenagers crafting crossbows out of grass vines and crow feathers can be.
Some aspects of the game have begun to provide friction. As you become stronger and explore further afield (ayard?), you… well, have further to go each time. Ziplines become a means of faster-ish travel, but they require a LOT of setup – constructing a vertical tower in the yard, carrying supplies to build destination anchors, and slaughtering dozens and dozens of spiders to turn their webs into silk to craft the zipline itself. Meanwhile, the only way to repair your Antlion Armor is to kill Antlions in the Sandbox, the best healing component must be farmed in the Pond, and you feel in your weary bones how much more time will get wasted with each unblocked attack you take while exploring the Upper Yard for the first time. It gets pretty exhausting, especially when you have to leave an area, inventory laden with loot, and know how much busywork is ahead of you before you can go back again.
Perhaps the better recourse would be to build multiple bases instead of one major hub. Problem with that is some of the more advanced crafting stations can’t really be moved easily. Plus, it’s arguable as to how much time you would really be saving building several bases.
In any case, I am decidedly approaching the endgame. Having achieved upgraded Tier 3 Armor and Weapons, I can say that most fights with bugs are less Soulslike than they were in the beginning. As in, I don’t have to Perfect Block every single attack in order to not die. The tradeoff, as explained earlier, is that you end up needing to farm up considerably more healing potions and items to repair your gear. Some of the bugs I am facing do indeed still pose an incredible threat even with all my gear, so don’t believe you can necessarily gear your way past everything. Plus, there are required boss fights in this game, including different Phases and novel attacks.
And this is kinda what gets me about Grounded. The setting, premise, and story do not match the gameplay. Teenagers from the 90s shrunken down and running around their backyard for flimsy story reasons leads you to believe this is a game that might appeal to younger players. On Normal difficulty, it most decidedly is not a game for younger players. Or older players that may be reflex-impaired. Every time I think I’m hot shit crushing bugs left and right, I take two unblocked hits and I’m sprinting away chugging healing potions. And this is in a game where I can hit Save after every encounter!
I have my frustrations with Grounded, but I’m still here mainlining this game for like 3+ hours every night. There isn’t anything special about the story, and yet I find myself eagerly traversing the yard to clear out the labs to get the next morsel of plot. Or, if I’m more honest, to unlock the next piece of gear and craft the latest weapons from the bones exoskeletons of my enemies. And all this feels fine to me, as there is a definitive conclusion on the other side. No “keep playing until you get bitter and jaded” purgatory here as with ARK or other survival games.
So, yeah. Grounded. Not the worst way to spend 50+ hours.
In An Age 
Blizzard Decimation
Jan 26
Posted by Azuriel
It’s been rough going in the game development world, and it’s getting rougher: Microsoft has laid off 1,900 Activision Blizzard staff. Layoffs are an expected reality after corporate mergers, and certainly the industry trend is towards cutting staff this past year. But this… also cuts a bit deeper.
There’s some irony in Blizzard’s abandonment of the survival game project just as Palworld is eating the genre’s lunch – copying existing games and making them slightly better was Blizzard’s whole M.O! No doubt the layoffs were planned months ago, but part of me wonders whether the calculus would have changed had they known of Palworld’s viral success. Then again, if Blizzard released something to less acclaim, then that would be pretty embarrassing.
I’m actually low-key devastated that we won’t see Blizzard’s take on the genre. It may seem like there are a lot of options available – and there are – but it’s quite rare to see AAA development in this space. Right now, it’s like… Fallout 76 and maybe Grounded. No Man’s Sky might count? Just imagine your character running around with the detail of Overwatch rigs. Blizzard already has experience building giant, seamless worlds too. Although… hmm. If you squint hard and ignore the questing, I guess WoW itself really might feel like a survival game already. Maybe that slight overlap was the problem.
In any case, another unfortunate outcome of the axed survival game is the fact that the devs working on it were pulled from other areas months ago, only to be laid off. From a Hearthstone Reddit thread:
On second thought: oof. Book of Mercenaries was not good content, Twist has been an epic disappointment, and Caverns of Time was an insane cash-grab that’s especially egregious considering they “paused” Twist for months. Meanwhile, Duels
iswas… cut from the same cloth, let’s say. I don’t want to kick anyone while they’re down or anything, but I’m starting to wonder if Blizzard was really assembling an A-Team for the survival project. Maybe these devs were the ones most willing to take risks to see what works. And perhaps the monetization strategy wasn’t their idea. Who knows?Oh well. Pour one out for the game that was not to be.
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Tags: Activision Blizzard, Hearthstone, Layoffs, Microsoft, Survival