So, I really wanted to like Pyre. I love all the rest of Super Giant’s games, and I put maybe 10 hours into Pyre. But I think it was just too much Visual Novel for me. I wanted to spend more time playing the actual game (the rights?), but they only lasted maybe 5-10m and then it was back to reading and flying around.
But yeah, the art, sound, writing, and world are all beautiful. Just couldn’t get into a groove.
That was another reason, yes. Apparently you’re supposed to find the parts to the water filtration system relatively early in the game, and it will regularly spit out large bottles of water that help a lot. I didn’t. So yeah, for 90% of the game I’m having to periodically chase Bladderfish for 5m so I can spend 2 minutes spam crafting a bunch of waters, so i can carry several around with me, taking up valuable space in my inventory.
I’m in the minority, I know, but I have mostly negative memories of playing Subnautica. I enjoyed exploring new areas, and the progression of the story, but the hours spent looking for one more resource so I could progress just made me mad. I don’t like save-scumming, but after
spoilerlosing my seamoth to a leviathan for the 3rd time, I said fuck it, and save-scummed regularly.
I had just finished playing Outer Wilds and my friends said “oh, then you would love Subnautica!” No, not the same kind of game at all. I say all of this so that anyone thinking of playing it has the right expectations: if you can’t find the one thing you’re looking for, I recommend just looking up a guide on where to find it. I don’t think the game funnels you to the correct areas well enough for you to find everything you need naturally.
I’m thinking apple from 15 years ago when they were first establishing this marketing strategy. The first few iphones were hard to get your hands on at launch, which is why people started lining up.
These days Apple has their manufacturing pipeline down and can accurately estimate, and mass produce to meet demand. Analogue and TE will probably never have enough demand to justify mass production of any of their products. So it behooves them to err on the side of scarcity.
Yeah, I see them as the Teenage Engineering for retro hw. They both have an Apple flavor to them: create a unique, highly polished designed, and use scarcity to sell the product.
As a small batch hw company, that’s definitely the safer route to go, vs over-producing your niche product and then not being able to sell them all.
My new pet theory is that CS:2 came out so that Valve had all their IP sitting at 2. So then at some point, when their audience is too old to play games anymore, and the youth don’t even know that Valve ever made games, they’ll release a 3-box with HL3, Portal 3, LFD 3, CS:3, TF3, and DOTA 3.
Would both people always have to be playing at the same time? Or would it be possible for one person to play and progress while the other person isn’t playing?
I think the idea of an open world RPG with more than one player, not necessarily competitive or coop, but each with their own quests and motives, is interesting. I’m often hanging out in discord with friends, and we’re all just chatting while playing different games. We might as well be playing in the same world, and occasionally influence each other.
You’d have to somehow make it clear to the players that the goal is not to party up and just walk around doing everyone’s quests together, though. Ooo what if it was the world of the last airbender, and each person started as a different bender in a different part of the world? And maybe one person is secretly the avatar, but they don’t know until they’ve progressed. Ok, I’ll stop intruding on your idea lol.
I was hoping this was the direction Dyson Sphere Program would go. I think it would be an interesting twist on the factory management genre if nature was working against you; not in a Factorio “aliens will attack you if they see your pollution” way, but a “you’re producing pollution, this is creating more in-climate weather that is damaging your factories and changing the landscape dynamically” sort of way. I think this was the natural next step given that the game is already about climbing the Kardashev scale, producing more energy so that you can construct the means to produce exponentially more energy. Seemed like the natural next step would be exploring the balancing act that has to happen to achieve that energy production without also creating systemic issues for yourself that make it infeasible.
Instead their latest patch adds aliens that attack you 😕.
I’ve only watched gameplay of Terra Nil, but it seems like it’s just an environmentalism themed puzzle game. You could replace all the titles with colors, and all the buildings and what they do with arbitrary rules, and it seems like it wouldn’t look anything like an ecosystem sim. It would be like taking the game Lights Out, changing dark spots to “growth”, light spots to “wastelands” and saying the goal is to balance out the ecosystem.
I didn’t see the late game though, so maybe I didn’t see where it shines.
The WoW raiding experience, but without the MMO, and possibly the addition of rogue lite elements (each raid is a run with its own progression, but wiping would be allowed and embraced).
The format of DRG or Gunfire Reborn is pretty close, but 1) I prefer the high fantasy setting of warcraft to the gunplay, 2) I’m not interested in procedural levels, and 3) I want the focus to be on polished boss mechanics.
Dungeon Defenders is also close, but 1) you’re defending instead of delving, and 2) it is also focused on killing waves of trash mobs rather than boss mechanics.
Destiny bosses are sometimes well designed, but 1) don’t care for the gunplay, 2) classes hardly matter, 3) it’s a max of 6 people, and I think closer to 10 is the sweet spot.
Gauntlet from a few years back was probably the closest, but still far from the mark. It could have used more mechanic heavy bosses, more meaningful gear, and a larger party size.