You’re welcome! I’ve played 46 hours of it in the ten days since I bought it and I haven’t played more basically only because we’re on vacation now and I have to work to afford living lol.
The premise is that the planet starts about (with default settings) thirty days away from beibg destroyed by a meteor. You and the other couple dozen or hundred people on the server have the obvious goal of stopping that meteor. But nobody actually makes you do it and since you all start with stone tools and wheelbarrows, none of you even have the means to do it in the beginning.
The idea is that you band together with other like-minded players and form a settlement and each of you specializes into a different set of professions (for example, I am a shipwright and logger mainly but also have a small pottery workshop going). In time, you find new ressources or ways to utilise already discovered ressources to eventually build cars, boats, larger settlements and stuff. While that is happening, you can (and probably want to) set some rules for what is allowed and forbidden in your settlements radius (you widen that radius by increasing culture, mostly via decorative items). The rules you set (and players actually have to vote for and come to agreements with) almost always follow a simple “If x then y (else z)” programming logic and can be incredibly creative. Once voted for, those rules are law and can’t be broken by the subset of people affected by that rule. Seriously, one town on my current server basically gutted themselves accidentally by miswording a law. They intended a specific player to be forbidden of doing anything in their town but the wording was "If {name} is resident then prevent ". But since, yes, that player on the server was a resident of something (another town or their own homestead, doesn’t matter), so condition true, every citizen in town was banned from doing anything meaningful, since it wasn’t worded as “prevent {name} from doing xyz”.
Very expected that they’d shut down soon after launch, after all the coverup they tried (and failed at) to perform. I just didn’t expect that it would be that soon after launch.
I’m quite excited to see what comes of this. With the amount of stuff to do in No Man’s Sky, I’m interested what other systems, aside from procedural generation and base building, they will transfer over to this high fantasy genre. The dragonflight mechanic seems similar to how the starships steer, although more refined to a natural looking way of flying.
Psygnosis simply for Drakan. I recently replayed it and it holds up pretty well, even if the melee combat as Rynn is a little clunky.
Another one, who is still around and very successful in their niche, is Egosoft. X4 at release was a little so-so, but mostly due to performance issues and me being spoiled from years and years worth of mods for the previous games (but also, without any of the really good DLCs, only three of the six or so factions are in the game).
So SteamDeck, Valve Index and pushing back against the short-term money maker that was NFTs until half a year or so, among other things, aren’t scary enough projects when you’re “just” a game developer and distributor?
You’re right. After Dark was one of the first(?) DLCs and I’m not sure if bikes were part of that or the eco-friendly DLC but bikes definitely are not part of the vanilla experience (I have quite a few DLCs that are important to me and no bikes yet)
It depends on how big of a role precise movements play (that are controlled by mouse on KMB). And how much I gain from the analogueness of controllers. Take Death Stranding for example: Shooting is relatively few and far between and it rarely requires high precision when you shoot (most weapons are either splash damage grenade-types or fully-automatic with a generous enough amount of ammo). The trekking along to deliver packages feels much better on a controller. So DS is controller territory for me, even if it involves shooting.
Red Dead Redemption 2? Couldn’t imagine playing it half as well with a controller, because most guns have a very low rate of fire, gunfights are a lot more lethal and (thanks to the “Scroll Wheel Movement Speed” mod) I am able to casually meander at different speeds even while getting all the benefits of playing with keyboard and mouse.
A bard/artist game that really makes use of the creative potential of music/painting. A great example of a “tech demo” of what I’d like is the magic system in Tchia. You got a ukulele that you can play super freely (possibly the most realistic thing if you don’t play it irl), but depending on what notes you play, you unleash different spells (kinda like in the old Zelda games with the ocarina).
I would absolutely love if the creative spell freedom of Magicka (or Fictorum) was combined with the freeform instrument play of Tchia.
You have some items that are not lost upon death (either by them being special and “blessed” or by you paying some in game gold to insure them (costing you every time you die), but everything else? On your corpse, ready to be taken by the nearest player and even humanoid enemy. More than once have I seen a lich just grab some of my stuff and cackle off back into the dungeon.
Aside from being able to lose stuff on death, there are actual Thievery skills ranging from sneaking to pickpocketing and lockpicking (for stealing from player homes or when you unearth treasure chests). There is a “safe overworld” but many popular private servers have removed that. You might go about your daily business to grab some stuff from the bank teller and next thing you know, a grandmaster thief took your precious sword from your backpack (there are a lot of skill checks involved depending on how many possible witnesses there are (player and NPC), if the thief is invisible, how heavy the item is and such).
I really hope people don’t get over this just because Unity went “we’re sorry we got called out for trying to screw you”. Unfortunately, like with how little effect the Reddit blackout had, I fear most will just accept it because Unity is what they’re already used to.