T w e n t y S i d e d
This week I’ve played more Rimworld.
Instead of trying the new content with the DLC, I had started a new colony because I wanted to start in a different biome and I didn’t like what I had built so far. So I’m about where I was last week but with a better colony.
I also got to play Zombicide for the first time in roughly 10 years. It was fun, even though I got confused because of a card saying something about AP, when there are both actions and A mechanic called adrenaline, and I wrongly assumed that AP meant action points. Me getting confused didn’t really matter in the end because everyone playing was also learning the game.
So anyway what’s everyone doing this week?
Please Help I Can’t Stop Playing Cities: Skylines
What makes this borderline indie title so much better than the AAA juggernauts that came before?
MMO Population Problems
Computers keep getting more powerful. So why do the population caps for massively multiplayer games stay about the same?
The Mistakes DOOM Didn't Make
How did this game avoid all the usual stupidity that ruins remakes of classic titles?
Skylines of the Future
Cities: Skylines is bound to have a sequel sooner or later. Where can this series go next, and what changes would I like to see?
Secret of Good Secrets
Sometimes in-game secrets are fun and sometimes they're lame. Here's why.
After spending much time griping about how I probably wouldn’t want to play Satisfactory again even though it’s finally out and has a bunch of stuff that would have been so much better to have, I ended up saying screw it: I want something first person but light on combat just to move my hands and I’ll at least see how the game looks. And I’ve done basically nothing else since. Turns out I was, as expected, entirely correct that the blueprints make the game far better, I just didn’t expect how *much* better.
Designing blueprints, in the same way that you build *everything else* in the game, is itself an entire sub-game that fixes the entire experience. Instead of trying to perfectly plan it out in your head, or on paper, you can actually build it in the game, at your main base, and then save and duplicate it to the site. That, plus the ability to finish placing buildings with the keyboard and snap coordinates (they call it “nudging”), means you can solve a problem and then have it stay solved instead of needing to perfectly replicate it by hand every. single. time. Trying to solve logistical routing is far less aggravating when it’s not compounded by human flaws multiplied by hundreds of part placements on the facility you’re trying to route stuff into.
I say facility like I have anything that huge, but I’ve just now started filling the second load for the space elevator. However, I also just remodeled my entire starting base with a neatly stacked smelter building that can simply be stacked up again in minutes when I want to engage the second ore deposit, leading up to a series of constructors that can also be easily be duplicated out sideways and/or vertically, leading back down to three different assembly bays that can also be. . . well there’s not much horizontal room so those can only go vertical from there.
And that was my report as of a couple days ago. Since then I expanded my coal power plant and did some exploring, and then expanded the power plant again because I forgot I’d already done have the expansion I’d planned on. And also spent a considerable amount of time on the blueprint pad trying to figure out how to make a decent quad splitter module. Then the next morning I spend like 3 hours running through logic, first trying to figure out how to use priority mergers to actually do anything, then re-cycling lines, dispelling the pretty illusion my brain has been wanting to chase for the last 150+ hours (across three widely spaced runs, to be fair), which is that you need to build anything other than straight line inputs. As Shamus called them, Serial Bus. This is why it’s such a pain in the ass trying to build more detailed splitting logistics in Satisfactory, because you’re *not supposed to*. What is the use of a priority merger? It goes with a smart splitter, and the smart splitter is most useful only when combined with the priority merger. You just dump all the stuff for a set of machines onto one mixed line, using the priority merger to ensure that the lower-count parts will get shoved in between the flood of high-count parts (screws), and either carefully make sure every part is slightly underfed so it never clogs, or run the excess into the grinder.
You don’t need to “cleverly” pre-split everything multiple times to evenly reach the machines, because it doesn’t matter. The game kinda shows you this eventually when you start running water pipes, because *everything* is water. There are no penalties for overfeeding a conveyor belt and every machine has a buffer for each input and output, the only thing that changes between laboriously evenly split feeds and an arbitrarily long serial bus, is that one *starts* outputting on more machines faster. And this comes off as particularly problematic at the same time as the water examples show up, because you need to get all those coal plants firing simulataneously. But given time for those buffers to fill up, the serial bus *will* eventually fill the buffer on every machine and get all machines producing. It *looks* like you need to pre-split things, because after starting up a section of machines and waiting only a minute or two, the serial bus has not had enough time to fill all the buffers, but that’s just an illusion that makes it *look* like there’s a puzzle to solve. And so I have spent absurd amounts of time trying over and over again making crazy tower and spaghetti trying to fix a problem that never existed. Which is depressing.
Add that to the fact that I marathon’d like 50 hours, only have a few weapon unlocks left, and have poked into the last biome I’d never really seen, and all that’s left is. . . building all the factories and stuff to go through the rest of the game (I need to start making motors to get to oil production). Which isn’t bad, but in many ways the main thing I want from the game is actually the exploring, they’ve got a beautiful island with just enough hostility and limited weapons that it’s exciting. I suppose I find setting up truck routes satisfying (though I think the trains are far too cumbersome), and I would like to hear the rest of their story bits (scratches the snarky capitalist AI itch). The alien artifacts now have uses so there’s incentive to comb the world for them (well, except you don’t need the alien tech if you just build more factory, but it’s a very nice incentive for exploring). But I’m pretty sure it’s not like they’ve put any “raid bosses” or anything like that in, it’s a factory building game, that’s what it’s about. And I do like building factories, I think- there is my own personal “challenge” of how I specifically don’t want to clear cut the entire beautiful landscape so I’m always trying to cram stuff off to the side where it doesn’t completely turn into an industrial hellscape. But there’s some big “wow I’m just stupid” energy added to the just played 50 hours time to do something else lack of energy.
We loved Zombicide. Though it kind of broke when they added dogs because… if there’s doggos, who’s not going to play with doggos? And yet, the dogs were crazy-OP, so we’d end up just strolling through the zombie apocalypse cheering on our super-canines and sipping cocktails…
I’ve played a bunch of Monster Train 2. It’s very similar to the first game, but with new content, and I’m pretty happy with that. The new faction gimmicks are interesting and there’s a whole lot of stuff to do. The writing isn’t great, but there’s also not a huge amount of it so that’s not a huge issue. I do feel like the 8th floor boss variants aren’t very balanced with each other – one of them does almost nothing, one of them inflicts melee weakness one time which is rude but solvable, and one of them will straight up kill your front unit on each floor unless you have shenanigans. But generally a fun game.
I played Duck Detective: The Ghost of Glamping. Like the first one, it’s a short and mostly silly puzzle game. I liked it overall but people focused on $/hour of gameplay may want to pass it up.
And I played the demo of The Case of the Worst Day Ever. It’s taking the Golden Idol gameplay, except that instead of dealing with murders and magic and so on you’re solving why some people had a kind of meh day. The gameplay is still fun, but I am considerably less engaged with the story. Still, I’ll follow it and see what people say when it releases.
Tales of Berseria continues, slowly. We’re in the deepest bit of padding now, where the party is flailing wildly in search of a plot. Still working on Tier 5 equipment, which is going slower than the last tiers because the game is still dropping lots of Tier 4 too. Might end up pushing forward until I start seeing Tier 6.
Tales of Zestiria was the original plan to begin with; it’s just that every time I think about playing it I remember how much better and more fun Berseria is. It doesn’t help that I wanted to do a blind writeup of the game, which has turned it into work. But, I’m back after a six-month hiatus, and past another dungeon. This game seems to be leaning into moral quandaries; there’s been lots of little choices to do things like bury a corpse, and I assume it’s got a counter somewhere keeping track of them (but I don’t want to know). But we just picked up a child in a sheer negligee who keeps bringing up bdsm, so perhaps the game’s staff did not take the question of morality seriously enough.
I’ve been picking at Zestiria for nearly two years now, and have yet to make it out of the first town.
Brotato continues. I thought about actually getting the DLC since I’m playing so much, but the reviews state the DLC has bad Binding of Isaac-style issues, where it mostly just dilutes the pool and makes it harder to get good stuff. So, no DLC, just regular old game.
Hard disagree on the Brotato DLC, I thought it was great. If anything the biggest problem is that the new curse mechanic is too powerful, makes a bunch of runs way easier. Maybe super pros think it’s reduced some probability by a few percentage points, but I didn’t have any problems with getting decent items that the game didn’t already have. I suppose it’s possible that all the new legendary unlocks from the new characters actually suck, and thus weaken the power of the legendary pool, but most characters do not need a legendary item to succeed. And again, the curse mechanic makes a lot of characters far more powerful, as well as characters with their own mechanics that make old items more powerful. More stuff, more combos, is good.
I completed Atomfall. I enjoyed the lack of handholding and the fact that you have to pay attention to the various clues to get an idea what’s going on, but that did leave me wondering if I’d missed more details on
what Oberon is and who the voice on the telephone is, or if it’s meant to be left vague. I was expecting the voice to turn out to be Oberon, either wanting to die to avoid confinement or because blowing it up would let it escape.I suppose the ending still leaves that open, so it can stay as a headcanon.I abandoned Foundry after loading a save hitting my head against a conveyor belt and having criss cross around the factory jumping other conveyors and stuff to get to a machine that was right in front of me. Not my building style.
Digimon World: Next Order didn’t get much better either. A story is non existent so far and the gameplay is resource heavy (band aids) without a reliable resource supply. No shops just random gifts at the start of each day.
To play something commonly viewed as good I started Dungeons of Hinterberg. And it is good. Not groundbreaking but a neat action adventure with character and lots variety in design and gameplay that you can hardly set aside once started. I just miss a manual jump button, as the automatic jumping on each edge landed me in endless pits multiple times.
Still playing Conception Plus. Its plot is … weird. I finished off one of the zodiac dungeons in each season, and then it opened up the final dungeon and made me play in it for a bit, although I backed out pretty quickly when I realized that the monsters in it, although ones that I could beat, were a bit tougher and used more resources than I wanted. I think it is possible to simply go through that dungeon and finish things at least mostly off now, but with various Star Maidens and the like I really think I’d like to finish off all the other zodiac dungeons first, although I don’t know if there is any time limit or whatever. That being said, it only takes me a week — ie one run — to finish off a zodiac dungeon, so it shouldn’t take too much longer, although I don’t think that will be enough time to max out or properly level most of the links, but I’m not sure how much time I can take just to do that.
Also, there was a hint that the instructor might be shady, but that might instead be the king, although not really. When confronted and his plan is stopped he implies another time limit, but again I don’t know if that really matters or not.
I also have maxed out the city’s level, but still haven’t figured out what to do with the books I keep getting. I’ll have to look that up.
Rimworld continues, with some quality-of-life improvements thanks to @Philadelpheus. Thanks!
Similar to Isaac, I keep restarting the game to try it differently (start in different biomes, with different game conditions, with custom colonists after installing a mod for that). It means I’m getting pretty bored of the early stages of the game, but, actually, you can get around that by customising the game more!
Currently, I’m trying to fast-track progress to the point where I can open up ancient ruins and rescue thousand-year-old people from cryotubes without having to build a colony for 5 hours first.
The game’s randomness is both a strength and a weakness. One, it means there’s always variety, but two, it means that you’re very much at the whims of the RNG.
– Oh, all my food crops got blight and now my colony is starving. Welp, I guess that means I was planning to go trading, and instead get to spend some time scrambling to feed everyone.
– Hey, a quest came up to deliver some resources to a nearby settlement! Oh, ‘nearby’ means the other side of that mountain range that’ll take me a week of travel time. Never mind.
– Ooh, an escape pod crashed nearby, meaning I can possibly recruit a new perso – oh, it landed right at the edge of the map and the person bled to death before I could even get close to rescuing them. Thanks, game!
Still it comes with the territory, and doesn’t stop the game generally being fun. Back I go, this time with geothermal power unlocked because dammit, I just want reliable electricity from the start this time.
You’re welcome! I’ve tried hundreds of mods at this point, and am always happy to make recommendations. I like RimWorld (I actually backed the original Kickstarter campaign for it), but I do think it’s more fun with some tweaks.
Finished Badlands Crew. Final boss is slightly tedious, but overall I had great fun throughout the entire game. A lot of crew management got simplified (at times even plain unneccesary and automated) in comparison with Bomber- and Space Crew, or replaced with manual driving (of sorts), but should Runner Duck come up with a fourth game I’ll be greatly interested in it.
Also played Sector Unknown Prologue, which is basically a demo for an upcoming RPG. Writing is good, there’s a lot of flavour without infodumping (which is rare and hard to do, so kudos to dev), mechanics are simple, and am interested in what will the full game let me do with the eclectic crew I ended the demo with.
That being said, I see a lot of complicated mechanics relating to the main theme (uprising against a megacorporation) which might either get cut down dramaticaly or even cut out in development, or get so overblown to make the game unplayable. We’ll see in few years, when the game will approach full release.