Agree to disagree. But then, I have >1300 hours in Rimworld. It’s possible I have a much stronger feel of it and that’s colouring my perspective of this new game.
It’s hard to say at this point, but there’s a lot in the trailer that makes me think “Timberborn” and only a couple of frames and pixels that make me think “Rimworld”. And given that their marketing tagline is “inspired by Rimworld” you’d think they would show off any Rimworldiness a bit more in the trailer.
Pawns in Rimworld have a deep backstory, full sets of skills, family, dynamic relationships with every other pawn in the world, a full inventory including every bit of clothing, and with the DLC, they gain the potential to earn royal rank, biomods, cybernetics, and spellcasting.
There are some frames where they’ve selected the mice and they don’t appear to have much in the way of RPG mechanics. Certainly nothing of the same scale as Rimworld. Plus, the scale of the game precludes telling the same kinds of stories. You can tell by the scale of it that mice are meant to be cheap and plentiful. I’d imagine in a good run in this game you might easily have over 50 mice. Whereas on any reasonable difficulty of Rimworld, you are lucky to have more than 10 pawns.
To explain myself a bit more: one of the key distinguishing features of Rimworld as what Tynan calls a “story generator” is the focus on characters. There are heavy rpg mechanics baked into the characters in a Rimworld colony, and the colony typically has relatively few members. This combined with the storyteller system has the effect of creating a much more personal story. Contrast that with most Banished-like games, of which I’m including this one, where your characters don’t really have much of a personality and are relatively fungible.
I guess if you don’t play a huge variety of these kinds of games it could superficially resemble Rimworld, but it strikes me as a very different beast. Like I said, to me it looks much more like Timberborn. The only part of the trailer where it looked anything like Rimworld was the couple of frames where they appeared to be designating some blocks to be mined in order to create a tunnel.
“Takes inspiration from Rimworld and Civ” looks like a bullshit tagline. This is a city builder, not a rimworld-style colony sim/story generator or a 4x game. It looks much more comparable to Timberborn, Against the Storm, or Banished. Which isn’t a bad thing. Those are all great games. I just wish there was a bit more honesty in the marketing here.