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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.
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.
Patch Waiting Game
Waiting for game patches is a dangerous… game.
For a minute there, I was hot and heavy for Grounded. Then the 1.0.2 patch hit, featuring some nice Quality of Life updates, but also a substantial nerf to an item I was actively using (Toxicology Badge). Barely more than a week later, they rolled out 1.0.4 which rebalanced a lot of the weapons in the game more generally, retooling some of the Mutations. Around this time, I started seeing reports that there was still a bug with the final battle, and not the Arthropod kind. So, even if I wanted to plow forward with the game with my inventory wildly fluctuating, I wouldn’t be able to see the end screen.
So… I waited. Then started playing something else. And here I am, nearly a month later, not having touched the game at all. At a certain point, I start having to get a gut check for how likely it is that I would ever actually come back and finish things.
Obsidian is now teasing Patch 1.1, set to hit the testing servers on November 28th. Certainly no sense in getting back into the game just to miss out on being able to travel up ziplines, right? Right.
I am waiting around for RimWorld too. A few months ago now I actually bought both the Royalty and Ideology expansions on sale. Haven’t played a game with them yet though, as I had other games I wanted to get to first, lest RimWorld consume all the oxygen in the room. Then the Biotech DLC was released, which sounded right up my alley. But of course you have to wait for all your mods to be updated to support Biotech first, though. Then Tynan mentioned that they are working on a patch that will feature cross-DLC integration for the first time. Can’t start a new game without that, right? Right.
Patches, man.
It feels good knowing developers are (usually) improving the game. On the other hand, that means you have to choose between continuing to play a good-enough version, or waiting for the better one.
Patch Purgatory
There is a special sort of exquisite suffering involved in waiting for game patches. Like, there is an acknowledgement from the game makers that a problem exists, and they even have a date listed for when the problem will be fixed. That’s good! Fantastic, even. But it’s going to be next week. And seven days is so long from now, but it’s also entirely reasonable to have patches scheduled for certain days, and last week was Thanksgiving… so, yeah. Purgatory, basically.
Over on the Fallout 76 subreddit, Bethesda has laid out a general cadence for upcoming patches:
December 4, 2018 – Next week’s update will bring an increase to the Stash limit, as well as a variety of performance and stability improvements, balance changes, and multiple bug fixes to the game. We’ll have full patch notes available later this week ahead of Tuesday’s update. […]
December 11, 2018 – The next update after December 4 is currently planned for the following week. Like previous patches, it will include a variety of bug fixes, but we’re also planning to bring some more notable changes and features to the game. You can catch a preview of these improvements below, and a full list of changes will be included in the December 11 patch notes.
The post itself has actual details, but the big ones to me are the Stash limit increases and better boss loot on the 4th, and Push-to-Talk, (limited) Respec, and CAMP improvements on the 11th.
There are also a variety of possible bug fixes and balance changes that could materially improve my enjoyment of the game. Melee right now is incredibly OP, for example. I’m running a Rifle/Sniper build myself, and the fact that there are no rifle weight-reducing Perk cards (Gatling guns can be reduced to 2 lbs but a machine gun always weighs 20+ lbs) and apparently Legendary Hunting Rifles don’t exist in the game is a big bummer. Adding in a Perk card might be out of scope of a “bug fix,” but if they made getting the Lever-Action Rifle schematics easier to acquire, I would suddenly be back in business – I’m still using a level 25 one with no mods at level 50, because it’s still awesome despite the reloading glitch.
In the meantime though, it’s tough. I’m always dancing around the 400 lb Stash limit each time I log into the game. For the longest time, having too much Steel was a common event, but the moment you essentially delete 1000 pieces, you suddenly need that amount for something else, such as crafting bullets. There are vendors out in the world, but most are on a shared Cap limit, such that you can only vendor X amount of things each day.
The ideal solution to all of this is to simply not play the game until the patch hits. Which is perfectly acceptable as a solution… provided you aren’t actually that invested in the game in the first place. If you are though, god help you.
In An Age 
Hurry Up and Wait: March Edition
Mar 4
Posted by Azuriel
Since I am already looking stuff up for myself, may as well write it down for others too.
Games – Waiting for Sales
Nightingale is the blogging topic du jour and I do admit feeling a bit left out of the same conversation everyone else is having. Similar to Enshrouded actually, although I see less posts about that for whatever reason. While I would like to say that I’m waiting for Nightingale to release their offline mode out of principle, the reality is that… surprise! It’s not on sale. That’s literally it.
May not have to wait for too much longer though, because my research indicates the next sales are:
It’s not guaranteed that the above games will actually be on sale more than their 10% EA “release” discount, but it’s worth the gamble in my eyes. Either there will be a steeper discount, or I can continue waiting while the games get (presumably) better.
Games – Waiting for Updates/Release
It may seem a bit weird seeing Stardew Valley on there, but at one point last year I had the urge to download the Stardew Valley Expanded mod, only to find out that ConcernedApe decided to put out another update with new stuff 4 year later. Guess the dude is taking a page out of G.R.R. Martin’s book. Anyway, it felt silly to start playing a mod that may or may not immediately work with a new patch.
I was originally excited for Diablo 4 to hit Game Pass, but then I remembered that I hadn’t thought about it at all since it was even announced. Like, zero interest. I’ve played all the other ones though, so may as well keep the streak alive. This time for free*!
As for the Early Access games on the list, I have come to understand and eventually accept that hitting 1.0 releases with them are usually irrelevant. For example, I waited until 1.0 to play Smallands (Impressions post pending), and yet there’s an update coming in April that will rebalance crafting and more patches on the roadmap to enhance the pet/mount system. So… whatever I was waiting for in 1.0 is kinda irrelevant. This problem is especially bad in life-sim games like Coral Island, Sun Haven, etc, which have added post-game/marriage quests material that is pretty important for fans of the genre.
Other Media
Dune: Part was released in theaters March 1st. I have been eagerly awaiting this for a while, but haven’t actually went to any movie theaters for years before COVID, and I’m not about to begin again now. So, optimistically, I’ll be waiting 2-3 months before this comes to a streaming service so I can watch it during the time I should be sleeping.
3 Body Problem is something I’ve already talked about recently. I am wishing it the greatest possible success, because I really want the second book to exists as some kind of Season 2. It would be quite the spectacle. And as for Fallout, I talked about that too. My body is ready… even if it is possibly dumb.
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Tags: Dune, Hurry Up and Wait, Nightingale, Sales, Stardew Valley, Waiting