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Video game thread
I've been playing Captains of Industry, and Len's Island lately.
The first is a kind of mix between factorio, a city sim, and a terrain flattening sim. The latter part doesn't sound fun, but is weirdly the most satisfying aspect of the game. If you ever wanted to dig a giant pit and dump it all into the ocean, this is the game for you.
Len's Island was described as an isometric Valheim in a review and that has mostly been true. Generally an enjoyable game if you like the genre, but nothing too ground breaking or unique.
Len's Island is interesting: it's a technically well-executed game with a lot of effort put into it, that's also just painfully shallow. Lootless-Diablo-clone could work even if it wasn't unique or groundbreaking, there's just not enough meat on the structure. I finished the third dungeon a couple days ago, and there's only been six normal mook types (+3 reskins) so far, one unique boss per major dungeon, and most 'mini-bosses' just consist of rooms with a ton of mook-spawner cocoons. You can beat the first major dungeons just by dodge-rolling and spamming normal timed hits, the second starts to force you to use a shield and/or weapon skills, but there's only a couple skills per weapon, and that seems to be about as deep as combat gets. In theory, build variety around the enchantment system or skill point system should drive a lot, but they're pretty easily solved, too, and there's not a ton of choice economy around what items you'll upgrade in what order or how you focus on getting specific gear. There's several weapons, but most of them suck for the mook-heavy fights, and of those that do work there's not really enough difference to justify enchanting multiple. It wouldn't matter as much if the rest of the game was really compelling -- I love Vintage Story after all -- but so much of Len's Island focuses on combat or dungeon splunking that it's pretty frustrating, not just a chore, but a boring chore.
((Also, struggling with the UI. Why is the inventory and the build menu tied so closely together that you can switch from one to the other by mouse-click, but if you use the build button you can't interact with world items and if you use the inventory menu you can't place a structure?))
Maybe a slightly more complex combo system, or changeable special skills, or more reason to hotswap weapons, or cheap area denial combat potions? There's a lot of set pieces in the dungeons, maybe make them matter more than just being 'don't fall into this lava'? The devs are allegedly still working on the game, so maybe it'll change down the road.
The SO's gotten back into ARK, with Survival Ascended's Ragnarok release, so I've been pulled a bit into that when I can. The game is and always has fallen into the 'great idea, awful execution' from day one, both on the technical side and on the game philosophy one, and it still shows now. ASA and the new map release are better than ASE: gone are the fifteen-plus minute load-times, the frustratingly bad building system, and there's been at least a little effort to avoid the numerous outright glitches. ASE's Ragnarok was never really completed, and while there's a few missing critters in ASA's Ragnarok, it at least doesn't have whole biomes that were stapled on without being populated. Other parts aren't improved; whistle commands are still painful to use without a long keybinding session, combat is very floaty and weightless and depends on gameish stats that often don't make sense. I'm not as opposed as some to stat sticks, but if you're going to let a solo direwolf easily take down a pack of five carnos that each individually outweigh her, I need some way to actually tell that's going to happen other than jumping in and hoping, or memorizing a breakdown of how a critter's stats tie to their levels. And some parts are outright worse: the devkit is an astounding 1TB, which manages to break my record for 'western game developer was here', the new engine is very GPU-intensive even at its lowest settings, support for unofficial servers manages to be worse(!) probably downstream of the new owners partnering with a server provider, and ASA's Ragnarok manages to have more mesh errors than the already-notorious ASE version. There's a bunch of more interesting taming options than the old 'hit it with a club/tranq arrow and shove food up them', but a some of them suck, and a lot of the better modded solutions to the taming dilemma haven't been ported from ASE. Running a small dedicated server with wildly tweaked rates gets away from mandatory no-lifer play while still making most tames weighty enough to be meaningful... and it's still more commitment than I can really put into it.
But it's very much the only effortful game of its kind, with maybe Palworld as competitors. Nightengale devolves into a dungeon spelunker and the pet system is a joke, and a lot of the few others in the genre either don't exist or work even worse. I have some hopes for Amiino -- Palworld meets Hi-Fi Rush-style combat is a match made in heaven, even if the music integration ends up more muzak -- which when you're looking at Chinese gatcha f2p for innovation is a worrying sign, and that's eta 2026.
My gaming tastes have changed so much now that I have kids. In many ways the shallowness of the game is a plus rather than a negative. It's just wrapping a bunch of game elements I've played dozens of times into an isometric action game that I haven't officially completed. And that's enough to occupy my brain in my few hours of off time, or during my partial off time when I need to drop the game at a moments notice to handle something happening.
The sailing and exploration is fun. I think I'm getting close to exploring just about every game mechanic it has. I'm not sure I want to grind out the fishing mini-game. It's similar to mining other resources, but with a failure option. I've always hated fishing in games. I'm still confused why devs bother adding it. (Dave the diver was great, but that is mostly spear fishing).
I'll play it for another week and then leave on vacation and forget it/drop it while I'm gone from my PC.
That's fair. I'm one of the weirdos that likes fishing minigames, but still has seen times where it goes too far. And the multiplayer for Len's works well enough that I could see it as a fun family thing.
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