I’m 1800hrs in (with probably another couple hundred making mods), Rimworld is pure crack in all the best ways possible. Hands down the best $30 I’ve ever spent on a game.
Everyone plays a bit different, personally I’d recommend playing the vanilla game for a bit and using mods to flesh things out or iron out any rough edges in how you experience the game. The modding scene for the game is absolutely phenomenal, if at any point you’re going “gee, there’s got to be a better way to do X, deal with Y, or add more Z”, there’s probably a mod that does it, for example I like designing my colony fairly early on (so I have something to build towards), but since the existing mono-color plan gets confusing pretty fast (what was wall and what was workbench, tool cabinet, light, etc), I find More Planning to be a bit of a must have. As a blanket statement, the Vanilla Expanded mods are very well done and integrate neatly into the game (that said, they aren’t necessary meant to all be run at once, so you can pick and choose what you want and go from there).
I have a pretty decent list going, but if we’re just talking a short list of personal favorites, I really love Megafauna, Frozen Snow Fox’s Bionics, and Cyber Fauna. (Oh and a shameless self-plug for my own mods)
Enh, I’m not so sure about that, one of the most unique parts of RimWorld is that the primary goal is to tell a story. Even the best stories need a bit breathing room for the action-y bits to have weigh. RimWorld is filled with stories about colonies that ran out of food in the dead of winter, lone survivor types that either bleed out or later died of infection after a freak hunting mishap, or trying to hide from the flames and wait out the raiders/ murder machines. It may be waiting, but I find that more often than not (especially in the early game), it’s either a welcome break after a hectic day or an edge-of-your-seat fight-for-survival kind of waiting.
Not on steam deck but I play it on Linux pc and ps5. One of the coolest things about it is cross save, you can save your game on pc or ps5 then continue from that same spot on the other platform.
Some things are a bit small and apart from cutscene camera angles or really zoomed in there isn’t much detail visible on the characters. I played with kb/m inputs mapped to have better utilization of deck controls. Some low fps bits here and there but generally great.
Grim Dawn is so good. If you have any interest, just go for it. I don’t even play many games like that, and I’ve put tonsss of hours into it now. Super underrated soundtrack too, imo.
The multiplayer is full of ultra skilled people who have played for years, so a steep curve. Best FPS campaign ever though, so I recommend it for that.
I have found that some games like this, sometimes I do really well if only because there is such an established way to do things well that my flailing about catches people off guard. Sometimes not following meta is a shock to expectations. I’ll win by sheer incompetence.
Maybe this will be the actual sale I pull the trigger on Sonic Frontiers I said I wasn’t going to spend any money on games for a while but I really sonic and they seemed to have nailed this one.
Anyone got recommendations for cheap or interesting indie games this sale?
I bought Touhou Artificial Dreams In Arcadia during the October sale and it is a bit of a hidden gem for fans of the old SMT JRPG games on SNES. I also picked up Lunacid but have not got that far in it, but it seems like a strong revival of the classic Kings Field games.
Recursed, just £1.67. It is a brilliant puzzle game, completely mind bending stuff about recursion and jumping into chests inside of chests while taking another chest with you so you can jump inside it…
Wonderputt Forever - £2.20. Prettiest minigolf game, animated to excess. Less than an hour to beat unless you go for optional challenges. You may have played the original flash game a decade ago.
I picked up GTA 4 , I was going to get rdr2 cyberpunk , hogwarts and sifu if they had hit the right price but I’ll leave it for a future sale. I picked up the mass effect trilogy earlier this year for 9.99 now its cheaper. I also picked up a humble spaced out bundle too recently so I have tons to keep me busy.
Definitely a great game. Recently had a pretty big update adding enemies and combat that has been fun so far but you can also just disable combat mode for a chill time building your swarms/spheres
Paid mods is almost never a good thing for the game itself.
Almost every mod out there is addressing some (real or perceived) deficiency in the base game. Good game studios look at what’s popular and either pull those features into the base game, or work with the modder to do the same.
Adding a paid mod system changes that cooperative relationship into an adversarial one, where modders see their revenue stream attacked by the game maker.
I have an example, most of DCS World’s content is made by external people, each “mod” that adds a new aircraft priced at full game price, and is actually worth the money.
Bohemia is trying to do something similar to Arma, with some community mods being sold as essentially DLCs.
I can’t say I don’t like the model, if the content is big enough. No microtransaction crap though like the first iteration of paid Skyrim mods. Those sucked.
There was initial paid mod attempt that they walked back due to player outcry, not because the paid mods themselves caused any problems. Which doesn’t really work as an example of “paid mods are almost never a good thing for the game itself”.
The Creation Club has been around for years, so technically speaking “paid mods” have been around in Skyrim for a while. Which maybe suggests that paid mods aren’t going to cause problems if they’ve been in place for this long?
If you want examples of games where the situation with mods is much worse than it is for Skyrim, you could look at literally any other game that exists. For one indication of that, if you look at the front page of nexusmods.com right now it appears to list the games it covers in order of mod files downloaded. Skyrim is #1 (SE) and #2 (LE) on the list. The next three are other Bethesda games. Skyrim Special Edition is ahead of the first non-Bethesda game on the list by an order of magnitude. You will not find a game anywhere else offering anything like the quantity, quality, and diversity of mods that Skyrim has, and this is a large part of the reason it ranks among the best-selling games of all time.
They're mad to try and mess with the model that has proven itself more successful than anything else for more than a decade.
In addition, mods always end up in a situation where someone’s work was stolen, which no one cares about when it’s free. Everyone’s just using everyone else’s stuff because it’s all working to make a better ecosystem
That all changes when people get paid, justifiably
In addition, mods always end up in a situation where someone’s work was stolen, which no one cares about when it’s free. Everyone’s just using everyone else’s stuff because it’s all working to make a better ecosystem
<span style="color:#323232;">Creations can range anywhere from simple cosmetics or gameplay tweaks to entire new quests and encounters - it's up to what you can conjure! Our internal document available to Verified Creators has some specifics, but in general:
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Creations must be standalone, so it cannot depend on other community releases, free or paid.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Creations must be all-new to qualify for release. You cannot re-purpose older releases – or work by other authors, unless contracted.
</span>
They’ve had those before and it hasn’t worked. Maybe I’m just cynical, but I’ve never seen an official supported modding marketplace exist without a significant number of free mods being sold as paid by not the original developer
Maybe I’m just cynical, but I’ve never seen an official supported modding marketplace exist without a significant number of free mods being sold as paid by not the original developer
The only paid mods that Skyrim has are the ones for Creation Club, and I haven’t heard of people getting through the approval process with stolen work.
reference: every single marketplace that lets anyone upload things that in some way drives revenue back, from app stores, to youtube, to music platforms.
Almost every mod out there is addressing some (real or perceived) deficiency in the base game
Emphasis on “perceived”. In my experience, the vast majority of mods are for things that I would never have asked for or expected from the developer.
Like Thomas the Tank Engine being everywhere. Or the other day I visited a friend and he was playing Civ 6 as Luigi from Mario. Or adding guns to Skyrim. Or adding tons of sexual content.
Should that content just not exist (licensing issues aside)? While I’m grateful to the noble people making and giving away mods for free, if I could start a decent side gig with it I might start making mods myself.
I can’t imagine myself ever buying a mod, but it seems like opening the platform up to allow creators to monetize is better than closing the platform entirely, or relying on the generosity of a few enthusiasts. Seems like this closes a gap on the spectrum from making your own indie game, getting a job as a developer, or using some DIY creator like Dreams.
Bethesda’s goal, as usual, is rent-seeking. They can’t penetrate more markets, so they need to make new ones, and what better way to do this then to hire what amounts to contractors doing gig work. They don’t even have to pay them except in commission, which is a really scummy thing to do.
Some people see this as a way for mod-makers to make money, but mod-makers already have those! Every mod I’ve seen and every modder I’ve talked to has a donation link you can send money to, and the ones who didn’t had organizations and charities you could send your money to instead.
It’s not exactly that, yes they want to get fees/rent that I agree, but this at least the current idea is not a walled garden, devs can decide not put it in there, or put it there but free. Of course if that changes in the future, and that might be the plan, then that’s another topic.
Every mod I’ve seen and every modder I’ve talked to has a donation link you can send money to, and the ones who didn’t had organizations and charities you could send your money to instead.
Yeah but they cannot enforce it or totally make it a paid mod. A Bethesda implementation would be more enforceable, well maybe not so much on PC, due to piracy… but at least on consoles. So if somebody said, look this is good content I am not giving it for free, they cannot currently do, (in part maybe due to EULAs too… not sure, but not just that).
It is exclusively about money for Bethesda. You can tell by looking at the last time they implemented paid mods, where they took a 25% cut for doing nothing. They offered no quality control, no resources, and boy howdy were a lot of paid mods stolen content, but they didn’t care because they wanted that money.
As to the modders, the only offer Bethesda can give is a wider customer base, but the assumption that you will make more money offering your mod for a price isn’t founded. We will see a large amount of shitty mods clogging the store using asset flips to maximize returns, because that’s what makes big money on mobile right now. Mod quality isn’t going to be enhanced by this: Mods will remain the same. You will just more of the bad ones. $99 horse dicks, anyone?
The issue Valve had with this was that they weren’t willing to do the basic vetting needed to ensure a mod’s content is legitimately owned. For a full game, made from scratch in Unity, that’s not necessarily easier to verify, but the bar for entry (and to making something interesting for viewers) is high enough that a developer can be harshly penalized for breaking it. And of course, it has still happened, wherein a little Superman game is found to have been completely stolen from someone who put it out for free.
When you have a big complete game like Skyrim, and one mod only needs to do something silly like put Thomas the Tank Engine’s face onto a greathammer, it’s a low bar for entry for something some people might actually want, as opposed to shitty Unity asset flips. Still, the storefront needs to be sure that THAT developer owns Thomas’s face (they don’t) and that they put the work into applying it (they might have just pulled files from some obscure Nexus Mods entry and hoped no one noticed).
Ownership verification is tough. I seriously doubt they’re actually putting the time in.
Valve had no issue with it. They went through with the release until the huge backlash when even the most loyal communities, like /r/pcmasterrace, were suddenly all about getting rid of Gabe from the sub banner and building a new client to replace Steam (1, 2). All of Bethesda’s most recent games were getting heavily review bombed on Steam and elsewhere. These things forced Valve to backtrack.
The review bombing was the form of communication used to inform Valve of what I just described. The prime complaints were based around lack of authenticity in many of the mods that first requested payment - many mod authors saw their work stolen and reposted.
But do they need to for the copyright case? Aren’t most pages on internet, like “Here is where you can sent us a DCMA request, we will take it down after checking it”.
Then they don’t need to vet it until there is a request, still that is work not gonna lie but they don’t have to check every single upload stuff, plus they probably would have a report system or similar if the issue isn’t copyright but idk that somebody uploaded something illegal somehow.
Of course maybe I am missing something and there is some laws that require active monitoring of each uploaded stuff.
You’re not totally wrong; they could operate that way, wherein victims of theft would report what people have re-uploaded as their own. But the problem is, this puts the onus of policework entirely on mod operators, who have their own lives and livelihoods. Imagine you wrote a mod as a hobby for four years, spent some time abroad, came home, never heard about the mod workshop stuff, and then discovered that your mod blew up in popularity under someone else’s name. Plus, Valve would need to moderate and figure out who is telling the truth (lest a bad actor make a fake claim on a legitimate mod seller). That kind of situation is often unrecoverable.
You can even read stories about the wars that photographers have over this kind of thing - photos are the kind of thing people pass around like candy, even though some amazing ones take tons of expertise and effort for the photographer to take; they often struggle to get websites and magazines to pay the ad revenue they’re due for each time they’re shown. It’s much like the mod workshop would have been - a very “low friction” environment for reuploads.
steamcommunity.com
Aktywne