Actually (and I’m almost apologizing for doing a “well actually”):
Valheim was written by Iron Gate AB
Deep Rock Galactic was written by Ghost Ship Games
Satisfactory was written by Coffee Stain Studios
All were published by Coffee Stain Publishing. The Coffee Stain mark is really prominent in the startup sequence and a trifle deceptive for that reason.
Yes, that’s what I was trying to say. I didn’t mean they were from the same dev team.
Clearly then, Miller, you are possessed of good taste and excellent discernment.
We’ve liked all three games, but two of them failed to engage my wife or I.
Satisfactory didn’t have adequate “build a pretty base” stuff to engage her. Deep Rock Galactic’s heavy gunner felt like he was firing a peashooter and my pals who’d join have the tactical awarenss of a Disney fictional lemming, so the experience was swiftly frustrating.
Valheim? We’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of it, and I’ve put the brakes on playing until there’s more content so we don’t collectively burn out. But we were about ready to track down the boss of the plains zone.
Satisfactory never grabbed my wife too hard (she likes to build nice things, doesn’t care for optimized delivery routes), Deep Rock Galactic didn’t engage me because
Will I get a mod warning if I flame myself for posting without giving it a once over? Because I richly deserve it.
I’ve been playing a lot of Valheim. I’m solo, and I’m a cheater.
When I first prepped for the swamp zone, I got my gear as good as I could get it from the Black Forest. I loaded up enough gear to form a gate once I found a swamp, and I went exploring.
And exploring.
And exploring.
Well more than an hour later, having run like a fool everywhere I could think of, I finally found a website that lets you plug in your world seed and get a map. Turns out that my initial landmass didn’t have any swamps. So I went to the northern tip, built a boat, and slowly made my way across the ocean to the swamp. Hopped off the boat, ready to build a table and a portal–
–and got swarmed by a half dozen new monsters that tore me the fuck apart.
So I spent 20 or 30 minutes loading up with my second-best gear and some food, returning to the launch point, building a raft (all I could afford by now), and piddling my way across to the swamp. Knowing what to expect, I landed and ran away–and got chased down and murdered a second time.
Ragequit, go to bed, consider that there might be cheat codes.
A fly command and a god command later, and I’d recovered my belongings and built a new outpost in a convenient meadow near the swamp’s edge, and continued with the game.
Since then, I’ve used God judiciously: if I’ve died 2-3 times in a given place, I’ll God it up just in order to recover my loot and give myself some breathing room, then take it off. I also used it to get past Bone Mass, because there’s no way I was good enough to solo that beast.
The death penalty in this game is brutal, and I hope that they consider softening it, or at least having a softened option. (e.g., give you invisibility until you recover your body, plus 10 seconds, or something like that). It’s crazy fun planting carrots and exploring and fighting on-level monsters, but goddamn there are some moments that make solo play damn near impossible.
I’ve mentioned it before in this thread, but that was my biggest disappointment - granted, that’s on me, it’s a “feature” to many/most others, but it dampened my enthusiasm. I am much more of a builder/explorer/crafter, and I don’t mind some combat challenge, but I was often getting swarmed in the early phases.
So I God. I also sometimes do that in 7 Days to Die, which is pretty easily survivable even for an old man, but often I just want to build (and 7DtD has a really good build system).
Yeah–they really need to add some different difficulty levels into the game. That said, once I made peace with being a giant cheating cheater, the “oh shit GOD!” maneuver became pretty easy to manage. (I have no shame in using it when deathsquitos chase me from a nearby plain, because come on deathsquitos that’s not cool.)
I’m probably gonna institute a Safety Portal Safety Poral system. Currently I have one portal at my main base called “Explore,” and I plunk down the other end of that wherever I’m exploring. But I have to deconstruct it and port the supplies to a new location as I move forward. I might make an “Explore 2” portal, so I can move forward with Explore 2, go back and deconstruct Explore, and then move Explore forward, rinse and repeat. It’ll save me from “Oh shit GOD!” occasions when I’m moving the forward portal and get ambushed by some asshole critters.
For what it’s worth, when we were exploring, we always did the exploration by ship.
If you’re still in a karve (the one that needs bronze), stay out of the ocean at night and avoid the plains fullstop, but everything else is fine.
If you have the longboat, you can outrun the sea serpents if you have favourable wind, and if you can’t outrun the deathsquitos, they’re most likely to bash themselves to death on your hull (but it’s not guaranteed, so having enough food buffs to survive a hit or two doesn’t go amiss).
So we bring a quick retrieval kit with us: A portal, a bench, and enough wood to throw up a quick wall. The bench has the added effect of keeping monster spawns some distance away so you get a bit of breathing room, and the wall buys you a little more time to decide if it’s worth it AND keeps monsters from immediately smashing up your bench, as that’s usually their first target.
Once you’ve got that minifort, you can then proceed to explore as you wish. I often went stealthily with a decent shield and troll armour; if you know a deathsquito is coming, you can just stand with your shield out, let them hit it, and then stick 'em with a decent sticker. If you can’t just sneak around anything else, you can certainly outrun them.
That’s helpful! I don’t know if I’ve upgraded my shield in awhile, I’ll check tonight. The problem with deathquitos and my longship is when I accidentally sail into the mouth of a river thinking it’s an inlet between islands; I’m freaking terrible at turning the ship around. Didn’t realize they could kill themselves on the hull. That’s helpful knowledge.
I’ve not been carrying a mini-fort with me, but I think I’ll start. My longship’s storage is full of junk right now and I need to clean it out at some point.
Last night I realized I’m an idiot, again. I’ve been exploring the mountains repeatedly, and dying repeatedly, and not finding any silver. Eventually I returned to the swamp to farm iron so I could upgrade my pickaxe, and on a lark I clicked on the wishbone.
Uh, yeah. When you die, it, like everything else, unequips, and you have to manually re-equip it. I hadn’t done so after my first death, and so I’ve spent an hour or three traipsing across the mountains without having it equipped.
Oh well. Back to the mountains tonight!
I don’t know… I like it. And I typically don’t like crafting/building games, especially when there are survival aspects to them. They’re typically too grindy for me in relation to the in-game progress.
Valheim is a bit different- the pacing of your technological advancements and moving up through the biomes is extremely well done- it starts out hard, then gets pretty steadily easier as you learn and build better stuff. I haven’t really felt like I’m beating my head against a wall yet, unlike so many other games.
That and this game seems to REALLY be geared toward group play versus solo play. It’s a whole lot easier with 2-3 compatriots than it is solo.
Yeah, my brother got me into it, but I haven’t been able to schedule time to play with him (he’s starting a new job and moving to a new city, so life’s busy). I really look forward to sailing a longship with a full crew.
Solo? Its 100% a grind at certain places. That could be another adjustment: I wonder if they could pull a Diablo, and increase the difficulty/number of monsters based on the number of players in an area.
I fully admit it’s grindy playing solo. But as a team, it’s surprisingly not. A big piece of it is that you can divide up the labor- one person goes and hunts/gathers, another chops wood, while the third may be building the new longhouse or stretch of wall or whatever.
And it kind of lets you scratch your itches in that way- I have a buddy who’s ALL about the building- he loves actually building cool and pretty buildings. For some reason, I dig the farming and hunting. And our third seems to be more of an explorer. So we’ll all do our own things for a while, and then we’ll get together for a sunken crypt crawl for some scrap iron, and then bring it back in shifts. Then back to what we were doing, etc… Periodically we’ll go viking, and see what’s nearby.
For whatever reason, and for us, it’s neither high pressure nor grindy. It seems like we always get something useful and new done each session, which is nice and a big change from a lot of games (especially MMORPGs) where it seems like I can play a couple of hours and not have materially done anything to advance my character or anything else.
Been playing a ridiculous amount the last two weeks. Progress is slow, but I’m getting there. After visiting multiple mountains and mining well over 300 silver (maybe 400? 500?), and upgrading most of my gear, and getting stacks of hundreds of arrows (poison, obsidian, even needle), I finally and trepidatiously summoned Moder, expecting a fight even nastier than Bonemass.
Uh, not so much. It might have been glitchy, but Moder never came close to me on the ground, and the breath weapon attacks almost never hit me. Instead, Moder would land and crawl around in some spot a couple hundred feet away, while I pegged her with poison arrows until she took to the air.
It was a slog of a fight, maybe 5-10 minutes, but not remotely scary.
And now I’ve got a nice little base in the plains, with lots of blackmetal and a new blast furnace. I’m trying to decide whether to build a new forge setup here (with all the copper/iron that requires), or to farm blackmetal until I have enough to make a voyage home worthwhile.
The game absolutely hits the incremental progress thing just right.
I cheat like a mofo in my single player. I also cheat a little in my server. Mostly just getting decent weapons and armor.
I’ve killed the fifth boss at last. One change I’d love to see is not having such a dramatic difference between weapons when it come to killing bosses. As it is, it seems like damage resistances almost force you to use a particular strategy for each boss. It’d be better IMO if the player could choose the strategy, not the monster.
Yeah, that’s a particular genre though. The Witcher and Monster Hunter games are the same. Part of the challenge is finding out the best strategy to use against a particular enemy type. They aren’t intended to allow every strategy to work. It’s sort of like wishing that a car racing game let you drive at your own pace. Sure, there are games that let you “cruise” and check out the scenery but then it isn’t a race.
That’s really the trick to it, I believe. Unlike other games of a similar style, I’ve never felt like I have to climb a vertical cliff to get to the next level- it’s all been sufficiently gradual to not be discouraging or particularly frustrating. Challenging- absolutely. But not that sort of anger or despair inducing level of difficulty that other games have.
We haven’t played too much lately to be honest; I think our gaming pendulum has swung back to “Escape from Tarkov” again for a while.
Having fought the fifth boss and gathered another hundred or so iron and 200 or so black metal, I’ve reached pretty much the end of what’s interesting to me. Until the next patch, I’m so happy that Below Zero is fully released.
It’s sort of like that, but it’s also a bit like a racing game where there are a lot of different cars you can choose from, but you have to choose one specific car for each race. I get that idea; I’d just prefer that a player could specialize in one weapon and have it be reasonably effective across the board.
I understand, sure. That’s how I approach most RPG/adventure games; I try to find a particular build and develop it, and enjoy perfecting that playstyle. When you can’t do that because everything is situational you lose out on that fulfillment. I would imagine it also hurts the replay value of the game; if there is one path to victory for each enemy then why bother doing it again? It’s not like you can try a different approach on a second playthrough, because there is no second approach.