I dug my sim racing gear back out recently and have been putting in quite a few hours into the rallycross mode on Dirt Rally 2.0! I’m currently trying to tell myself that I normally only do this for a month or two a year, and that I don’t need to buy a sim cockpit to do it with! 😂 Although I could use it for American and Euro Truck Simulator, so maybe worth it.
I decided to give Vintage Story a try. I was not prepared for what I was about to experience. I can already say it's not for everyone. It's like if you took Minecraft survival mode and then turned it into an actual survival mode. One of the first things everyone makes in Minecraft is a pickaxe. It took me about 2 hours to get the first pickaxe and then another 10 hours (though I did a lot of other things before upgrading my pick) to get the next tier of pickaxe. I probably would've gotten it quicker if I had only focused on that but I had a lot of other survival needs that had to deal with. But to go over what you need to make your first copper pickaxe.
Obviously you need copper. Copper bits can spawn above ground (and a small hint that everyone mentions. If there's copper on the ground there's a small vein of copper right below it in the first layer of sedimentary rock). When you've collected enough copper you need to smelt it and cast it. To smelt copper you can't use wood, you need to use charcoal. How do you get charcoal? You make a charcoal pit and burn wood into charcoal. You need an large amount of wood. How do you get wood? You make an axe. How do you make an axe? You flintknap an axe head and combine it with a stick. Now we can smelt copper but how do we cast it? For that you need to create a pickaxe mold. To create a pickaxe mold you mold clay and then fire it in a pit kiln. A pit kiln is pretty much a hole in the ground that you fill with the clay mold, dry grass, sticks and wood and then let it burn for a whole in game day. When you have a mold you put molten copper into the mold. But you can't just take molten copper and stick it into the mold. You need a crucible to hold the liquid copper and tongs to hold the hot crucible. A crucible is made the same way a mold, you form it from clay and the fire it for a day. Tongs are probably the easiest part of the part of the process as you need just sticks and rope (which you make from cattails). If this feels like it takes forever it's because it does. This is why it's not for everyone but my god did this push the right buttons because unlocking the pickaxe felt like a real milestone.
And in case anyone cares what I did for the next 10 hours, I harvested probably about 1000 tule plants to make a thatch roof. I started a farm and collected different kind of seeds (because you need to rotate crop to keep the soil healthy). I made a cellar because your food will spoil within days if you don't stick them in the cellar. I collected enough copper to make a copper anvil so I could make more advance copper tools. I prospected the land to find tin and lead veins so I could make other metals than copper. I foolishly believed making leather might be easy so I hunted some animals until I looked up leatherworking and then gave up because I hadn't found limestone (or it's equivalent) to start the tanning process. Instead I started to make compost from the leather which I will later use as a fertilizer. Oh and I made a fruitpress to make juice from all the berries I've found.
It's a real survival experience and I'm definitely enjoying the complexity of it all. There's an in-game survival guide that is pretty informative so I don't need to go online to understand how something works. The game also has a very customizable gaming experience. You can very much tailor your experience to be a bit less survival or significantly more survival. You can also modify the worldgen to fit your needs which is something that got removed from Minecraft. There's also a really good modding support. So far I've added the Carry On mod that lets me move chests and barrels around because when I expanded my base (to have more space for my stuff) moving my stuff around was a pretty annoying experience. I also have my eye on some other mods but those require starting a new playthrough and I want to get a bit better grasp of some of the mechanics before pulling the trigger on a new playthrough.
TL:DR I absolutely recommend Vintage Story to anyone willing to put in the effort it demands. You will be rewarded for that effort.
Depends what you like, but I’m still nostalgic for old school WoW and find myself wanting to play every now and again but don’t want to subscribe for a whole month. My recommendation for that would be Turtle WoW, it’s an expanded vanilla private server that has it’s own launcher and everything so it’s pretty simple to get started with.
Still suffering my way through Blasphemous. I think I misjudged the length of it initially as I had heard it’s fairly short. I’m probably over halfway now, though. I’ve played about 13 hours and just killed Exposito.
My notes are more or less unchanged from last week. I love the story, lore and world building. The atmosphere is cool as hell and the art is great. Gameplay is janky, clunky and has an overabundance of platforming for a game that strews instant-death hazards generously all over the place and has a bunch of projectile-launching enemies hand placed to cause maximum annoyance. Plus the controls are clunky, hitboxes are janky and jumping onto and grabbing a ladder is way harder than it should be. And did I mention every single enemy deals contact damage that jolts you to the side and often knocks you off an edge?
The bosses meanwhile have been cool designs, but not really that complex or challenging. I think it’s been 3-4 tries per boss on average. They’ve been fine, but not really worth trudging through the rest of the game for.
So overall it’s been a mixed bag. I respect the game for its artistic vision, and I understand that having the player suffer is meant as a sort of method acting to go along with the game’s theme of the virtue of suffering. But I don’t know, I’m not really having fun playing it.
Still banging around BO6 and Synduality. Intermittent sessions of FF16 and Space Marine 2. Played some Warframe last night, still grinding for the new frame that just came out.
If you want to check out some classics look up project 1999 for EverQuest or the classic world of warcraft servers. RuneScape isn’t a bad choice if you’re into the grind.
Modern I don’t think there’s much I can recommend, even the subscription based games have stores attached now & few or no in game events run by GMs
EverQuest was a throw back, but I cut my teeth on the realm. I would love a simple guy like that again. Also the present events when you find those rare sashes, man that lit up a monkey part of my brain.
I’ve enjoyed OSRS on and off since about 2004, but if you’re wanting to avoid walking simulators, it is the worst offender. A big part of the game is calculating the best possible path to follow. You are making trips to the bank in between every activity and multiple times per quest. Many skills exist just to ease to burden of traveling around the world.
My personal favorite MMO is vanilla WoW. I’m obviously biased but it is just what I had the most fun with back when it came out and I think it still holds up incredibly well today. I play on a private server called TurtleWoW and it is 100% free. They have continuously added their own expansions over time and are currently working on a client that runs the game in Unreal Engine if you desire more modern graphics.
If it seems to old school, Guild Wars 2 is a really good choice as well. I played through the base game and first expansion of FF14 and ultimately wasn’t impressed. It’s great if you like to role play with other players, but everyone is so focused on playing the meta that it took all of the fun out of the game for me. People would kick me out of groups for trying to play with my own personalized set up.
I know, I know… But right now the whole “go there and do the thing, good, now go there and do the other thing” is kinda what I need to shut off my brain and have some fun.
My first modded play through of Stardew valley, first play through of terraria, project zomboid, street fighter 6, and mortal kombat 1. All on my steam deck
Warframe is an unconventional mmo, and there’s actually a bit of rpg in there too, moreso than I would’ve expected coming in. It’s great fun though.
I will say the mandatory trading for weapon and frame slots is kinda annoying, but gets less annoying as you progress and get more access to better grinds.
bin.pol.social
Najnowsze