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Impressions: Vintage Story
Vintage Story is a ponderous, “realistic” survival crafting sandbox in the style of Minecraft. Pretty much the exact style of Minecraft, in fact, although it supposedly has a different codebase that allows it to do some interesting things. How interesting those things are will greatly depend on how slow and methodical you like your gaming.
As with most survival games, you start out with just the clothes on your back. From there, you collect flint or some other hard rock to make tools. In Vintage Story though, you literally make the tools: you place the flint down on the ground, and use another piece of flint to “knapp” (e.g. chip) the other piece according to a voxel pattern. Combine the knife head (etc) with a stick in your Minecraft menu and voila, a flint knife. This will allow you to collect things like reeds to be turned into baskets or dry grass to help start a fire. You can’t just punch everything to get the proper resources here.
At this point, Vintage Story doubles-down on the intentionality. Flint tools are fine, but you really need clay to get to the next stage of development. Search far and wide for clay deposits, dig up a bunch, and then place some on the ground. You now have the option to create various clay vessels, like bowls, cooking pots, storage vessels, jugs, and so on. Crucially, you will also need tool molds, such as for a pickaxe and hammer. All of these things have to be sculpted, voxel-by-voxel, which is equal parts tedious and zen. Once completed, congratulations… you have still have raw, wet clay. Now you need to dig a hole, fill with dry grass, sticks, and firewood, light it on fire, and then wait 24ish hours for the pieces to harden. Oh, and make sure it’s covered from the rain and also away from flammable material.
Next comes copper. While traveling the overworld, you may come across a few pieces of copper nuggets on the surface. You can collect these – and mark your map since there is ore underground there – but will likely have to pan sand/gravel for additional nuggets. Once you have ~40 copper nuggets, you can begin the smelting process. Which requires charcoal, because firewood cannot hit the necessary temperature. Making charcoal involves digging holes, filling it to the brim with firewood, building a fire on top of that, lighting it, and then covering the whole thing up. A day later, you have charcoal. Go back and heat up the nuggets in a (fired) clay crucible, and using some wooden tongs – can’t have molten copper in your bare hands, of course – pour the copper into the (fired) clay tool molds… and wait. Once it cools, you have a copper pickaxe.
And now, finally, you can dig rocks!
I typed all that out because that is the type of game Vintage Story is. Mostly. Cooked food spoils at a reduced rate inside a clay Storage Vessel, and at an even further reduced rate in a cellar, and at an even more reduced rate if the food itself is stored in a clay Crock Pot sealed with animal fat. Neat. Meanwhile, you can construct your house and cellar by punching dirt blocks and placing them ala vanilla Minecraft. Making flint knives and other tools is a cool process, but the blade and handle are just magically connected somehow. I bring this up because the process of making a bow meanwhile requires twine, made of flax fiber, collected from flax (or looted from Drifters). Getting the first “tier” of armor above basically nothing requires Resin, which only comes from Pine trees at world creation, and only at an extremely limited chance. Like… why? We can hold molten copper in wooden tongs but can’t get some pine resin from pine trees?
This sort of strained duality extends elsewhere. Wolves and bears are dangerous and will kill you in 1-2 hits. You can avoid them though by using a nerdpole, e.g. quickly placing blocks underneath yourself while jumping. Ore deposits are “realistic” in that they follow veins in specific sort of shapes. Getting to them can be sped up by either digging straight down and nerdpoling your way out, or creating an infinite waterfall via bucket and swimming straight up like in Minecraft. Crops take ages to grow – sometimes more than 1-2 in-game months – but animals generally spawn everywhere. Pemmican doesn’t exist, and not every animal has fat. And so on.
Those design choices are one thing, but the one that’s a bit more unforgivable (IMO) is the back-loading of content. The “real” game doesn’t really start until you can make wooden boards, which requires a copper saw, which requires a copper anvil, which requires enough copper nuggets gained from mining with the copper pickaxe. How do you get copper nuggets to make a copper pickaxe you ask? Panning sand, basically. Anyway, wood boards give you a ton of building and storage options, but the big ones are buckets and barrels, which then allow you to process things into leather, pickle food, and basically… everything. I understand that perhaps the intention was a sort of “congratulations on surviving until the Copper Age!” but that doesn’t mean the early game should be less interesting.
Vintage Story also suffers in the “now what” department. Surviving the first winter with limited resources is a massive struggle. After that? Farms will provide all your caloric needs rather easily. You can eventually craft some windmills and other mechanical tools to automate some tasks too. There are caves to explore and Drifters to fight and teleporter devices that can send you to far distance places. But… that’s it. I’m not saying other survival games do not have a similar endgame issue – there’s no “point” to 7 Days to Die or ARK – but the crucial difference is that playing these other games is, well, fun. They have good moment-to-moment gameplay, they have character progression mechanics that make you want to reach the next level, and so on.
That sort of thing is missing here. Once I finally got my Copper pickaxe and then realized how difficult it was going to be to find copper nodes, I was basically done. Plus, you know, if you lose your Copper Pickaxe somewhere (either by dying in a deep hole or via durability) you have to literally start all over.
Having said all that, Vintage Story is definitely a novel approach to the more traditional survival crafting genre. It is not in early access, still gets beefy updates, and was built from the ground up for mods. Indeed, there are supposedly a lot of mods out there that tackle many of the fundamental issues that I have brought up. I may end up rolling a new world with some of these mods installed and see if that smooths out the experience and make it more interesting.
Which, for the record, it was for a time. Just not enough. For now.
Impressions: Abiotic Factor
Short version: Highly impressive survival crafting game in Early Access.
The overall vibe Abiotic Factor has going for it is the original Half-Life (complete with polygon counts from 1998) from the perspective of the scientists. You play as a new recruit to a secret Australian (?) underground laboratory doing SCIENCE… on things from another dimension. Something happens literally during your first day of orientation, the base goes on lockdown, and you are basically on your own to escape.
One thing I loved immediately was the novelty of the survival experience. Playing this game reminded me of playing Subnautica for the first time when none of my “punch trees” experience applied. Sure, the wooden crates give wood, but you’re mostly in an office setting at first, and wood isn’t even really what you need to craft the basic items. You might not think slinking through cubicles, snatching keyboards and breaking monitors for their sweet, sweet coils while hiding from alien monsters would be fun… or maybe you would. Because it is. There was some primal pillow fort energy when I set up my base in the gym area, hiding in terror from the rampaging night bots, and then making forays into the break rooms for literal supplies – including buying food from the vending machines to tide me over! – while getting my in-game bearings.
Are there some rough edges? Sure. One of those edges is, in fact, somewhat systemic: being a survival crafting game at all in a relatively linear, plot-driven narrative. While you can possibly spend in-game weeks in the first area, the fact of the matter is that you need to specifically craft X using resources from Y to open the next area Z. Once in that new area, you will encounter new obstacles, new crafting material, and new things to take into account, which is good. What wasn’t immediately clear to me though is that I should have packed up everything I built in the first zone and carted it with me rather than starting from scratch in the new zone. It certainly feels lame leaving an upgraded workbench that can auto-heal and warm you by proximity and going somewhere with a dearth of the more basic building materials. It especially felt super lame when I got locked into an extended journey sequence that resulted in my entire plant farm dying from lack of water while I was gone. So much for utilizing the more advanced cooking options, eh?
Aside from those sour grapes though, Abiotic Factor nevertheless gets high marks from me. While most workbenches require power and thus need to be located near power outlets, everything else can be placed just about anywhere. Which includes literal ramps and platforms that allow you to skip certain areas entirely. Now, whether you actually want to skip any opportunity to hoard bundles of pens, deconstructed file cabinets, and other debris is up to you. Personally, I tend to steal everything not nailed down and sometimes even that stuff too. You just never know what may come in handy.
What I do know is that I liked Abiotic Factor enough to stop playing, so the devs can finish cooking.
Impressions: Icarus
TL;DR: Empty wildlife murder simulator.
To understand what Icarus is all about, you need to know what it was about. At release, Icarus was intended to be a sort of survival roguelike, where you are dropped off at a location, fulfill a mission before the timer expired, and then bailed on the world (including anything you built) within a few days. In fact, it was originally so hardcore that if the timer expired before you left – and it counted down even with the game turned off! – your character would straight-up be deleted. Successful missions granted you a currency that could be used to both research and then later buy items that you could then bring with you planetside in the future. For example, instead of starting at zero every time, you could start with an upgraded spacesuit, a backpack with bonuses, weapons, etc.
As you may imagine, that novel approach didn’t sit well with many people. Indeed, it’s difficult to imagine a worse genre mashup… although I suppose 7 Days to Die somewhat pulls it off (e.g. eventually enemies get too tough). But generally, the beginning stages of punching trees is the least interesting part of survival games, and losing progress is the worst. Icarus had both. The developers suddenly had to pivot, and so they eventually released a more traditional open-world survival mode.
The pivot has taken some time, although the developers have sustained a weekly update schedule for over two years now, which is impressive. Or would be, if the game was fun or interesting at all.
The fundamental issue with Icarus is that there isn’t much going on. There is a relatively solid survival crafting framework in place, with XP and levels and recipe unlocks and talent points and such. The world is gorgeous and thick with trees, bushes, rocks. There is even a semi-voxel thing going, with fallen trees being satisfyingly split into logs, and ore/rock nodes deforming exactly where you are hitting them. All of which will sustain genre fans for a few hours past the refund window.
But after a while, you start to realize what you have in Icarus is basically the window dressing of other games. A forest with deer, rabbits, wolves, goats, moas, bears? A desert with hyenas and scorpions? Snow biome with polar bears and mammoths? Other titles like 7 Days to Die, The Forest, ARK, etc, have those things… aaaaand the rest of the game game. Without the parameters (and timers) of Missions, the Open World aspect falls flat. Technically, you can craft a radio that opens up both short and longer-form Missions even in the Open World, but you still run into the issue of “why.”
“Why do anything at all in any game, eh?” Because shooting zombies and looting things is fun? Because delving into caves and uncovering mysteries while running from mutants is (supposedly) fun? Because dinosaurs are fun? With Icarus, what you see is literally what you get. Kill thousands of animals to farm XP and unlock more crafting benches so you can kill more animals efficiently. Or build a quaint little abode in the woods. Which is fine for the people that want to do that, but you can also do that in (cheaper!) games that have more meat than potatoes.
In an effort to be totally fair, I did go ahead and run a few Missions, e.g. the way the game was designed to be played, once the open-world lost its luster. And… it was pretty much as bad as it seemed. After the tutorial one, the next Mission was to collect up meat and vegetables into two different drop pods. Cool. What they neglected to mention was the fact it was going to be like 150 Pumpkins, 200 Carrots, and so on. The only possible way of gathering that much was going to be setting up a farm, and then hanging out for a while. Which I did. Next was the meat, which was something absurd like 300 meat, 400 hide, and 300 fur or whatever. I got about halfway through murdering literally every single mammal that moved before the tedium overtook me and I uninstalled.
Having said all that… is there anything good going on in Icarus? Sure. Although it is a limiting factor, the existence of oxygen as a necessary meter to watch gave texture to the survival experience. It helps that Oxite Ore is in most places, so you aren’t as constrained as in, say, Breathedge. The storms in Icarus are also interesting. Staying outside in one fills up an Exposure meter that begins hurting you when full, and the storms themselves do damage to most buildings. Now, you usually just spend the storm inside your base running around and smack-repairing things with a hammer, but it elevated “weather” from a pure, ambiance detail in most games to one that you must account for. And you do have to account for it: your walls will collapse if they take too much damage from the weather or anything else.
That’s about it, though. Part of me feels bad for the devs since they likely had to scrap a lot of their post-release plans when they pivoted to a more traditional open-world structure. But then I look at how much they are charging for the game + DLCs in its current state and those feeling go away.
Impressions: Once Human
Once Human is an open-world survival crafting MMO whose Beta details I mostly received filtered through the amusing lens of Bhagpuss. Based on those posts, I wishlisted the game and promptly forgot all about it. Then Tuesday came along and now its officially released. I played for almost six hours straight on that first evening, and not because it was, as my 5-year old terms it, a “stay day.”
Nor, incidentally, because the game necessarily deserves it.
Let’s start with the Pros, I guess. First, the game is free to play and not obnoxious about it. By that I mean I did not seem to get prompted to buy the Battle Pass every time I opened a menu, or had a red exclamation mark on my UI until I opened the shop, or the myriad of similar design disasters. Indeed, there is a Wish lottery mechanic (for cosmetics) somewhere in the game, but I was not actually able to find it. Maybe it unlocks later? I found a few vendors who require obscure currencies for vague items, but near as I can tell, none of them were extra bag slots, carrying capacity, or the like.
Second, Once Human does seem to support a rather robust survival crafting experience. You are encouraged to build a base immediately once out of the tutorial, and you can do so almost anywhere not already occupied by other players and/or the pre-existing set pieces. I also really appreciated the ability to go into “flight” mode when building, rather than having to awkwardly maneuver your character every which way. Collecting resources from trees/ore nodes is not too onerous at this early point, and you are overall encouraged to revisit points of interest to collect junk items that you then break down into smaller components to craft new items.
Then it struck me: Once Human is basically Asian Fallout 76.
Viewed from that lens, the veneer started to peel. Is the base-building better than Fallout 76? Absolutely not. Crafting? No. Quests? Nope. Environmental storytelling? Nonexistent thus far. The feeling of collecting and hoarding resources? Not even close. Both are post-apocalyptic, both have cryptids, and Sanity is basically Radiation – both reduce your maximum HP until healed and, hilariously, grant you special abilities if you accumulate too much (Whim vs Mutation).
I originally didn’t want to complain about the Once Human combat system in these early stages – tutorials going to tutorial – but it’s… trivial. Every creature died to 2-3 hits with a torch, and having access to guns makes it even more ridiculous. Presumably mobs will sponge more bullets later on, and there is a dodge-roll button, but the fact that Once Human will be releasing on mobile phones in two months does not inspire confidence. The boss (or mini-boss?) fights were more interesting, and seem to be where the devs spent most of their imagination capital. Not saying that Fallout 76’s combat system is groundbreaking or anything, but it nevertheless has a heft to it even early on that is definitely lacking in Once Human.
Again, it’s possible this is all a bit unfair this early in the experience. The map looks huge, they give you a motorcycle within the first few quests, the Deviation (pet-ish) mechanic seems akin to Pals from Palworld, which could be interesting. The notion of Seasonal world resets and ever-changing “scenarios” is fairly unique in the survival space, and could go a long way in keeping the experience fresh. Time will tell.
Time will also tell if I don’t just end up reinstalling Fallout 76 and playing that instead.
Impressions: Keplerth
Not going to lie, the name “Keplerth” was both intriguing and ultimately accurate.
Keplerth is a top-down survival crafting game reminiscent of Terraria, with art assets straight stolen from RimWorld. Other reviews mention this as being a post-apocalypse knock-off of Necesse, if you know of that one. You will punch trees, create crafting benches, craft gear, and then tackle bosses to unlock the next tier of equipment, resources, and mobs. Rinse and repeat.
There are some interesting innovations to the formula though. For example, there is no XP here. Instead, you unlock new genes based on special resources that drop from basically everything in the game, e.g. plants, mobs, minerals, etc. The genes start simple, with stuff like +5% Evasion or +10% Attack Speed. Towards the beginning of the game, you have plenty of room to “equip” every gene you unlock; later on, you have to choose amongst them and their potential synergies.
I also appreciated how equipment bonuses work. Essentially, each piece of gear has a random set bonus and a random set bonus score (+0 through +3). So, the leg armor you craft might have bonuses to +Defense or +Pet Attack instead of the +Melee you were looking for. And even if it does have +Melee, the final set bonus may only trigger when you have 7/7 equipped and the piece you rolled grants +0. While random can be frustrating sometimes, many survival games are kind of rote in that Iron armor is Iron armor, and thus you only need 22 Iron ingots total to kit yourself out on that tier. This at least means you need to collect a buffer amount of resources. Later on, you get the ability to spend other resources to “reroll” the tier bonuses, so it is not too frustrating for long.
Where Keplerth struggles is… kinda everywhere else.
A lot of the mechanics feel half-baked. One of the early tutorial quests involves you attracting other survivors to your base with a communications tower. What the game doesn’t tell you is that the survivors… don’t really do anything. There is an entire elaborate construction station to create fancy furniture, but ultimately the survivors need 1 (one) recreation item (hot tub) and their heart meter will eventually fill and you click on them for money. That’s it. They do not defend your base, work the fields, or anything. You can also have farm animals like cows, chicken, horses, etc, and they will reproduce asexually as soon as their food meter hits 100%. Cooked food does require a variety of meat and plants for pretty useful buffs, so there is a point to all this, but it doesn’t always make that much sense. Like why have Horse Meat in the game when eggs are really the limiting factor for advanced food?
The special material mechanic I praised earlier is also a bit uneven. A lot of it felt natural at the time, as you just pick up all the things and new stuff seemed to unlock every 5 minutes or so. Eventually though, once your gene grid fills up and you start needing to examine what’s left, you start to realize that 5-6 of the missing genes require Thorns or Apples or some early-game stuff. Luckily the grind isn’t too bad since you can chop most everything down and replant it near your base to more quickly get additional chances when harvesting it – as opposed to having to wander around for more natural-occurring spawns – but the amount of things tagged to Thorns specifically is a bit odd.
What kind of broke the game for me though was one of the mid-tier boss drop weapons. Up to that point, you may have some melee weapons, bow and arrows, some early guns, and so on. Even with guns, there were some trade-offs with damage versus shooting speed. Then you get a 100% drop of an energy beam gun that deals constant damage with zero ammo. While it technically is out-classed in DPS later on, the utility of being able to trigger knockback, certain genes (“each hit adds X effect”), and the lack of ammo makes everything else feel dumb to use in comparison.
Later bosses also get into SHMUP/bullet-hell territory, which forces you to turtle up with your genes and equipment, which makes the fight last ages because you are no longer specced for damage.
Having said all that, I did end up playing the game for ~25 hours or so, somewhat obsessively. Keplerth definitely hit a stride for me after about the 2nd boss, once you unlocked the ability to tame battle pets, get some better weapons, better genes, and start finding other human settlements to spend money at. It is unfortunate how that petered out in the endgame, but what else can you do?
Play something else, I guess.
V Rising: All Done
I’m done with V Rising after about 56 hours.
I technically did not “beat” the game, but I am done. All bosses have been defeated aside from the last two: Adam and Dracula. I have maxed my gear and spells, acquired a Legendary weapon, and was otherwise facing down 5-6 additional hours of “gitting gud” before seeing… I don’t think there’s even credits screen here. There have been tough bosses leading up to this point, but these last two have multiple phases and Adam even requires the crafting of a special consumable to even access him for an hour. I think I could eventually take down Adam by investing in crafting a different endgame weapon, or swapping out spells during a fight transition, but honestly fuck that.
Overall, I stand by my earlier assessment of the game, e.g. it’s OK. I did develop a deeper appreciation of the visuals though and the overall art direction. Running around the map during daytime became an interesting game unto itself, as you tried collecting resources or fighting mobs only to have the shading tree collapse from an errand attack. The sound that accompanied increasing exposure to sunlight was also very satisfying (if not deadly). The moment-to-moment gameplay was satisfying.
What is less satisfying is the grind on the macro level. As stated before, there is no XP here, and mobs themselves rarely drop anything of value, so there’s really no point to combat. The whole vampire fantasy takes a bit of a hit when you rush from house to house rummaging through dressers for bits of cloth and paper. A lot of that has to do with some of the absurd recipes.
Here is an example of what I’m taking about. I need Power Cores to craft an item. Crafting them requires 18 Radium Bars + 9 Charged Batteries for 2 Power Cores. I’m just going to ignore the Charged Batteries, because you basically just farm Depleted Batteries from certain enemies and then have to juice them up out in the world. The Radium Bars on the other hand… oh boy.
- Power Core x2 = 18 Radium Bars + 9 Charged Batteries
- Radium Bars x4 = 135 Tech Scrap + 9 Sulfur + 3 Sludge-Filled Container
- Tech Scrap = mob drop and/or mining resource
- Sulfur x1 = Sulfur Ore x45
- Sludge-Filled Container x1 = 9 Glass + 9 Mutant Grease + 3 Iron Ingot
- Glass x1 = 45 Quartz
- Mutant Grease = mob drop*
- Iron Ingot x1 = 45 Iron Ore
- Radium Bars x4 = 135 Tech Scrap + 9 Sulfur + 3 Sludge-Filled Container
Again, all of that for two (2) Power Cores. You need 9 Power Cores to craft the highest tier of necklace. So that’s 90 Radium Bars. Which might not have been as bad as it felt if there was a reliable way of farming for Radium Bars directly. Instead, at best you are running around 1-2 areas breaking all the boxes in a desperate hope that you can get 5-10 Radium Bars from drops. That shit immediately reminded me of Warframe, and it feels outrageously dumb for the same reasons. I can sorta maybe get behind mining for ore as a fledgling vampire, but endgame Dracula-esque vampire overlord reduced to breaking open boxes for loot is too much. Farming enemies? Good. Breaking background clutter? Bad.
One thing that made it better/worse were servants. These are people you capture and then turn into vampires, who then can be sent on resource-gathering missions. While it takes a bit to set them up – they have to basically be equipped with the same gear you have, which means grinding some more – they can return fantastic amounts of resources on a real-time basis. To a point. There are several time increments you can dispatch servants on, such as 4h, 8h, 16h, and 24h, but the difference between 8h and 16h is not 2x the loot. Which means you are better off logging on, dispatching servants for 4h or 8h, then logging off. Sometimes they get injured, so they cannot be immediately be sent back out.
So, anyway, there I was, logging onto V Rising three times a day to dispatch servants because I no longer wanted to spend time manually farm resources. And remember, I’m already on +100% global loot. Once I realized that I could only play more of the parts of the game I enjoyed by playing it less… I did so. And then discovered that the other games I was playing instead were actually kind of fun and rewarded me for playing them more. Imagine that!
Arguably, none of this is how V Rising is “meant” to be played in the first place. You’re supposed to be out in the world with your chums, farming some mobs, attacking (or being attacked by) other vampires and stealing their loot, defending your castle from destruction, and so on. Theoretically, it would feel like less of a grind if there was more grind, insofar as you wouldn’t be hitting the endgame wall as early. Or something. But by the time I got there, I kept asking myself: why this over Diablo 4 or whatever? At least there I had something to potentially look forward to from killing all these random mobs.
That’s V Rising. I give it props for melding the survival crafting and ARPG genres in an innovative way, and overall being a very slick game. I can see how other people might play it for hundreds of hours with friends and/or internet strangers. But it doesn’t really deliver a better experience in any individual one of the categories compared to other offerings. And while it does offer most of the trappings of a good vampire fantasy, it shrivels up in the sweaty heat of an unnecessarily grindy endgame.
Impressions: V Rising
V Rising is a hybrid ARPG with survival-crafting elements, sorta like Diablo meets Age of Conan. The approach is pretty novel, but there are some awkward elements that diminish the experience a little bit.
To start, I am playing solo on a “private server,” which is basically just single-player (like with ARK, Conan, etc). However, it is very, very obvious that the game is centered around and balanced on a more public, multiplayer and even PvP experience. For example, by default, you cannot use any of the Waypoint portals if you have ANY resources in your inventory. This option can mercifully be changed in the server settings, but the map itself consists of lanes, specific camps of NPCs, and then dozens and dozens of nondescript castle areas. Which is great for multiplayer servers (options!) and PvP (lanes forces players into channels for encounters), sure. But there really aren’t any exploration aspects, no map secrets, no particular reason to go to out of the way areas. Unless, of course, you were hiding from/laying in wait for other players.
The progression system is also a bit weird. First, there is no XP. Instead, your character’s power is based on Gear Score – you deal/receive damage based on the difference in Gear Score between you and your foe. Increasing one’s Gear Score is achieved by unlocking technology via killing bosses and consuming their “V Blood.” This is not necessarily a linear process though. Killing the boss that gives you a Workbench to craft better weapons results in a huge power boost. Other bosses might just give you ability to turn into spider, or upgrade gems into better ones, or similar. You can tackle the bosses in any order (provided you have a decent Gear Score), but nevertheless there are times when things end up… uneven. For example, I just upgraded all my armor and now find myself ~10 Gear Score higher than like eight bosses I have yet to kill. And none of those bosses will see me improve my Gear Score at all.
Progression-wise, it is also worth mentioning that there is a recipe/research component as well. You can unlock Copper weapons by killing the appropriate boss, but getting the next “Merciless Copper” tier requires the recipe to drop from random loot. Sometimes you can purchase the recipe from a vendor’s random stock, and other times you can randomly learn it by consuming Paper or whatever at a Research Desk. So, random, but with grindable guardrails.
Having said all that, is the game even fun?
I guess. I mean… probably? Sure.
At the time of this writing, I show ~22 hours /played. My solo server has loot bumped up 2x, item stacks 3x, Waypoint access on, Durability and Castle decay basically turned off (25% of normal). I don’t feel “bad” about these custom settings because, just like with my time with ARK, the “normal” settings are absurd nonsense. You can dispatch vampire servants to collect resources for you, but they take real-world hours (2h min, 24h max) to return. Considering you have to grind resources to craft equipment for them to wear so they can… err… help you skip grinding resources, they are of questionable merit. Of course, the servants could help defend your castle from other players trying to break it down and steal your resources, if you were into that sort of thing.
From a strict, gameplay-only sense, V Rising is OK. It’s a kind of Diablo-lite where you can hotswap weapons to mix and match abilities (which share cooldowns), while also tailoring your two spell slots and one ultimate move to your preferences and/or the boss’ tactics. Enemies are fairly straight-forward where I’m at in the game, but the environmental factors add layers to strategy. For example, there are patrols of NPCs not just within each camp, but also throughout the lanes in the world. These patrols can include bosses, sometimes ones way beyond the difficulty of the area too. This brings opportunities as well though, as sometimes patrols can be lured into attacking other factions or even having two bosses attack each other! This makes the world feel a lot more interesting than what I normally see in the genre.
Anyway, I’m still playing V Rising and have every expectation to keep playing for now. Whether that is due to the underlying gameplay being better than I am giving it credit for, or because I am starved for new survival-crafting experiences, I cannot say. What I can say is that if you expect a Diablo experience, you will be disappointed. I definitely spend more time hitting rocks with a mace than I do hitting enemies for loot. But don’t expect something akin to Terraria/Starbound either, because the crafting is prescriptive and environment static. So… yeah. V Rising is its own thing and it’s fun enough for now.
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.
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