Transcript
Speaker: Hey everybody, this is Trevor, also TH, from the I Think You Should podcast, the podcast that you're about to listen to. ah This actually started out as a solo project that I wanted to find people to partner with, but as you'll see from this first episode and the ongoing ones from this season, ah my friend B and I, as my co-host, it just was too perfect a combo. were having too much fun, so we decided to stick with it. That's how you got the I Think You Should pod that you're about to hear.
Speaker: If you want to reach out to us with topics, offers to be on an episode to talk about something you're interested in or you think more people should know about, please email us at Ithinkyoushouldpod at gmail.com.
Speaker: Like I said earlier, this is a season, so we recorded a number of episodes that we'll be releasing over the next few weeks. It started in the fall of 2025, and you'll get a chance to hear our thoughts on a bunch of different things. So, thanks. Enjoy.
Speaker: Okay, welcome to I Think You Should. It's a podcast about things we think you should watch, play, listen to, read, I don't know. Hi, I'm one of your hosts, Trevor, also known as TH Paul, and this is...
Speaker: I'm Bea McBurney, the other host, apparently. The other host. The other host now. So fun story, folks. This is episode two because Bea and I recorded an episode thinking like, okay, we're going to talk about CozyCore games because one thing I know about Bea is she loves her some CozyCore.
Speaker: And then we had too much fun and decided, fuck it, we're just doing this as a as a co-hosted show. Like, that's what's happening. I think it was the correct decision. Yeah. It's definitely a correct decision. We like talking to each other and we don't give a shit if this thing lasts, you know, four hours. It's fine.
Speaker: um Although I don't I don't know if we'll have enough time to talk about our topic today for four hours, but we'll see. But before we do, B, is there anything cool you're reading, watching, listening to right now that you want to mention?
Speaker: um Oh, you know what? i do Actually, yes. i yeah just watched, because i'm i am I am a femme of a certain age, I just watched the Lilith Fair documentary. that What is Lilith Fair?
Speaker: Oh, Trevor, you're kidding. I'm not. i'm not. i might have to Google this while we're talking. Okay. So Lilith Fair from 1997 1999 was an all-female music festival that was started by Sarah McLachlan.
Speaker: I like it already. Yeah. So it was started out of spite, basically, because the music industry, while it is still very much male dominated and very patriarchal back back in the 90s, it was even more so to the point that radio stations wouldn't even play female artists back to back.
Speaker: And you couldn't get two female artists on the same bill because people wouldn't buy tickets. Allegedly people wouldn't buy tickets. So Sarah McLachlan out of spite, which is my favorite way to do things, decided to start a music festival that was all female artists. And it ran for, for three summers.
Speaker: Okay. And it, it was like, Sarah McLachlan and Paula Cole and Joan Osborne and like all of like the head late all of the late 90s like femme rock folky icons but also like some of the older femme rock icons so like Emmylou Harris and Bonnie Raitt and you know like the Indigo Girls and Tracy Chapman and like all it was just this like very estrogen fueled
Speaker: festival embracing like feminist ideology and it it was like it it was welcome to everybody for attendance but like it was very queer focused and very queer forward and like I went when I was in oh god 97 and 99 I was like late middle school early high school and it was like the first kind of like place you could feel okay to be yourself and Mm hmm.
Speaker: Because it was like, that's very that's pretty early. Yeah, like i I, we are roughly the same age, I think I graduated high school in 2004. So like, this is I remember, you know, people were still calling each other gay as an insult at that point, like that was still an acceptable way to behave.
Speaker: you know, at that time. So this is like pretty ah forward thinking. you'll You'll forgive me perhaps for thinking like this sounded like Lollapalooza, which I always thought was a female-centric. Yeah, yeah. Okay, okay.
Speaker: So it is. know like Lollapalooza is not, it's not female-centric because it was started, what, what, Perry, what's his face from Jane's Addiction, who I don't like. He's the one who started Lollapalooza, but it was kind of in response to Lollapalooza. It'd be like, Lollapalooza is still mostly male artists, right? It was like largely dudes on that bill. Interesting, okay.
Speaker: Right. So like, why, why do I have the perception of Lollapalooza as being more, I guess it's because like the Dixie chicks. Okay. All right. Yeah. okay cause now it became like Okay. So like in the nineties when it was still a tour, cause you have to think Lollapalooza wasn't always a festival. It was a tour.
Speaker: Oh, interesting. Okay. Right. So like back in the late 90s when all of like it was it was Warped Tour and it was OzFest and it was like all of like the big touring festivals were largely male centric. And like they might have a female artist kind of like splashed in there.
Speaker: Sure. But it it really wasn't it like it wasn't equal. or It wasn't even like ah ah a reasonable amount of percentage of of female artists. So this was like the first all female. And like granted, it was female fronted because a lot of these women had bands that that had men. Yeah, you had, of course, yeah.
Speaker: Right. So like it was all female fronted artists and then like it evolved to include new artists like never heard before artists, you know, like Cristina Aguilera played their second stage at one point, you know? Yeah. And like Nelly Furtado and all of them, but like India are already did it. Yeah, exactly. So like it they just did a documentary about it because with like 600 hours of previously unreleased footage they went through. It's a lot of hours. Yeah, it was it was great. And they interviewed a lot of the a lot of the artists who were on Lilith Fair in you know for all three of those years. And of course, they interviewed Jewel, who I have political problems with. But like I really enjoyed that they kind of got as many people as they could to sit down and talk about it, including Sarah Maglin, who I have loved for my whole life. Yeah.
Speaker: Listen, Sarah McLaughlin got all of us to care about every dog and every shelter. Animals. Yeah. I think she infested my wife's brain, which is why we have our cat, who, you know, we affectionately called Dump Cat Barry because he was rescued from a dump.
Speaker: And our rescue dog. But also, we'll have to table the jewel political thing because i was unaware. Okay. That's interesting. I have a lot of reading to do. Yeah. But like i if you are 90s kid or if you're like an a younger person who is like, oh, I wish I could have gotten a Lilith Fair. like This documentary is for you. There's actually a young Brandi Carlile in there, too. What? Brandi Carlile, who is... one of the biggest voices for queer art and like also music and folk music. And like, she's amazing, but she attended Lilith Fair in the nineties at the gorge, which is like the music venue of all music venues. So like, she's in there talking about how it influenced her. So if you are like a nineties music lover, watch it. It's on Hulu. It's very, very good. Highly recommend. That's what watched. That sounds awesome.
Speaker: Um, I was going to talk about, because I believe I told you Alien Earth ended yesterday, yeah the finale, and we discussed that I was trying to decide if you should watch or not. I'm going to table that, and i'll I'll give you a quick bit of info why.
Speaker: The finale is a finale that is very obviously setting up a second season that they have not been guaranteed yet. so I don't know how I feel about it yet. I enjoyed the show, but i don't know if I'm going to recommend it to you yet, but that's not going to be my thing.
Speaker: um I teach a science fiction course at the high school I work at, as as you know, and ah we're working with hard science fiction right now, and I showed them The Martian, which I do every year. i have Have you seen The Martian?
Speaker: No. Okay, I'm going to recommend to everybody who has any interest in Really well written tense but very funny ah drama to watch the Martian.
Speaker: It is one Matt Damon is incredibly incredibly good when given the freedom to be funny. and to have a sense of humor and charm to him and not just playing like I think you know as a villain in The Departed I think he's excellent in that role too but like when he gets to be funny he is really good and this movie is great also the cast is insane like Donald Glover is in it in a very minor role Jeff Daniels and Sean Bean and oh my god I'm gonna blank on her name Kristen Wiig make up the trifecta of like
Speaker: NASA officials. Also, also I'm not going butcher his last name, but Ojafor, I think is how you say it, who played... Did he play Killmonger? I don't know. He was he was in um black out there now it's gonna bother me anyway the cast is crazy um and i'm only naming couple of those because sebastian stan and uh jessica chastain and michael pena are all part of the crew that matt damon is on so if you don't know the concept of the story it is a science fiction novel in which we have begun to sort of explore mars with manned missions they have to leave suddenly and uh
Speaker: Mark Watney played by Matt Damon is left for dead because they lose contact with him in the middle of a storm. And they think he's been killed. Chiwetel. He's in a Firefly. He's in Firefly. Thank you. He's phenomenal this too. Oh, he's in Serenity. He's not Firefly. But you know mean. You know what I mean. We know. We know. Also, Benedict Wong is in this too as the propulsion lab scientist. Like, its cast is just ridiculous across the board.
Speaker: But like the whole concept is within the first five minutes, you know, Damon gets stranded and left behind because they think he's dead. And then, of course, lo and behold, he's alive. And the whole movie is then about, OK, so how do you get this guy back, given all the challenges of space travel and the you know insane amounts of calculations and science that go into it?
Speaker: And what's super funny about this, is I had a student today who was in another one of my classes where I showed a Kung Fu film. Because when we do, I teach a Chinese studies class and I teach them about Kung Fu. And I have this great film called Fearless that's all about Ho Yanja, who's like the the godfather of Chinese Kung Fu or Kung Fu, right?
Speaker: um And she's like, you're really good at picking movies. I was like, I'm like, but what do you mean? She goes, well, that one in Chinese studies was great. And this movie is awesome. I was like... I guess I'm gonna take that as a compliment. you know, I'd like yeah to to hear that I was a better teacher and you got better at, you know writing comprehension, critical thinking, but Hey, good at picking movies. We'll take it.
Speaker: Um, but just having seen it as many times as I have, every time I watch it, I'm always thinking like, cause I do this every time. I think every teacher that is worth their salt does this, which is you go back and look at the stuff you teach and you think, what could I, what should I swap out? Maybe what's more contemporary, more relevant or whatever.
Speaker: And every time I, you know, settle on The Martian because it's PG-13 and therefore I don't have to get permission to show it. And then they watch it and I'm like... I think I'm going to struggle to find a replacement for this. It's it's just that good. And the the novel, which is also very good by Andy Weir, he's a very underrated sci-fi writer. And i he's got another movie based on one of his books coming out called Project Hail Mary next spring, which is also supposed to be very hard sci-fi with Ryan Gosling as the main character in sort of the Matt Damon role. Interesting. yeah so anyway i'm gonna say the martian i was charmed by it for the 10th time that i've probably seen it now um still makes me laugh at certain scenes uh it's just got a great tone and sense of you know everything to it and conveniently it's about surviving which is what we're gonna talk about today check out that segue check out that segue done Yeah, so we're going to talk video games again, going to survival crafting. And this was a pretty quick decision on our end, I think, that this was a topic were going to cover because we played a lot of survival crafting in a very particular game that will definitely come up, and we will only have positive things to say about it um yeah in a minute. But, Bea, I have to start with a confession about survival crafting.
Speaker: yeah um I never played Minecraft. Yeah. Oh, okay. So you did you did you play Minecraft? Yes, but not until I was older. so like, and I'm going to be also blasphemous. I played Minecraft on an iPad.
Speaker: I mean, so did my son. That's what he he has it on the PlayStation now, but that's where he started playing it. I got it for him as I bet. I find the controls on just I mean, like to say to sidebar it, I find the controls on the iPad to be much more friendly for motion sickness. Just, you know, if you are a person like me who ah first person is the devil. yeah the The controls on iPad are much more friendly to motion sickness than they are on PC, which is where I eventually bought it once I built my PC. And by I built it, I mean my friend built it and I paid for it.
Speaker: That's fine. I bought mine pre-built because of who I am as a person. that's That's fair. Convenience is king. Yeah, so to to define a survival crafter, the general concept I would say is you're dropped with almost no resources onto some worlds, whatever it is, and then you have to find and you know get those resources and then upgrade what you find to get better resources. And in most cases, there's like a level progression, not character-wise, but zone-wise. You start in different biomes, right? is that Would that suffice as the general description of a survival crafter? Sure, yeah, yeah.
Speaker: um so So the only one that I had played a lot before we got on the one we're goingnna talk about probably, I guess, at length at some point was Terraria, which is essentially 2D Minecraft.
Speaker: um yeah But I never thought of that one as much as a survival crafter. i don't i mean, you are surviving and you are crafting, but I think because it's not 3D, you don't throw it in the same category as like a Minecraft...
Speaker: There's a weird bit of like platforming and um there's definitely exploration to it that I really enjoy. And I think that's the thing I like the most about survival crafters is the exploration piece. Yeah. um But yeah. So what, what would you say is your current gold standard survival crafting game right now? Yeah. I thought, you were so we both played Icarus. So tell, tell, tell everyone what Icarus is and how that one works and we'll get into what we like and maybe don't like about that one.
Speaker: So Icarus is a space-based, well, you're not in space. You are dropped from space onto a planet that, like, the premise there's, like, a failed a terraforming situation that has made the planet unlivable. But, like, you're dropped down there to gather resources. Basically, you're, like, a you're you're a cog in a wheel. You know, you're you're a hired company man you are not high up you're a grunt kind of a person and you're down there to like get stuff for the people who are back ah up in space on the ship and i have to say i have to say the thing i like the most about icarus at the drop was the the setup for the character the idea that you're just this grunt like when they give you the mission of like go build a hunting lodge for the vips that will be coming to this planet i was like oh i like i like this tone that they're striking this is very funny to me yeah and more of that as you progress so like now once you get into their most like the most recent world like once you get into sticks there's even more like character development oh cool they like added more story and with icarus there there is like a youtube series that that lays out the premise of the series which i really like that that they did that too there's a it's a like nice little extra on top of it but like essentially you're dropped down there with nothing but like your enviris suit and you have to start you literally have to survive and we're talking oxygen we are talking food and we are talking shelter and it there are levels in terms of like you can make it easier you can make it you know really really hard if that's your vibe but like
Speaker: playing it just normal it is kind of punishing at the very beginning i was gonna when you first started i think it's yeah yeah yeah i i so i i solicited your input when we started playing uh my friend zach and i who will be a guest on this podcast at some point and um he He reminds me of our mutual friend, Shiny, as in he will break a game over his knee by figuring out how to make it, how all the bells and whistles on the back end work and then exploit the shit out of them.
Speaker: honor So he figured the game out very quickly. Whereas I am much more of, I play games like I'm playing a character in a story. I know, big surprise. I write i like to write really long books. So why would I do? yeah so i the thing I think is most interesting about this game that I want you to talk about is the two modes it lets you play in. There's that persistent mode, and then there's what I presume is the original mode, which was yeah the mission mission mode.
Speaker: So tell us about the just difference between them, I actually think this is the most innovative thing they did with the game. Aside from the fact that it is, by the way, fucking gorgeous. It is the best looking of these games by a mile. And i keep improving it. yeah That's insane. Yeah.
Speaker: it is It is stunning. So ah I've played this game since early access. So this game pre 1.0 and into like early 1.0 was you built your character, which is like just, you know, you face voice, but you don't ever really talk except for like when you fall down ah and you drop onto the planet to to do a mission.
Speaker: And the mission is timed and you have to finish that mission within a certain amount of time and get off the planet in order to survive and you don't get to take anything with you so you could go down there and build the Taj Mahal and be have the highest tier tools and have all of that like all the bells gongs and whistles be sleeping on a feather bed but at the end of the mission you leave the planet and it's gone And you had to do that for every single mission.
Speaker: You had to go down and start from scratch again. And in order to keep your character from mission to mission, your leveled up character, you had to get off the planet before the timer ran out.
Speaker: Because if the timer ran out, you lost your character and all of your progress. All of it. And because of people like me, they decided to make another version of the game where that doesn't happen.
Speaker: Because that's terrifying. Because the the community was so vocal about it, they decided to create an open world. So there is open world and then there's also like outposts. So open world is a persistent...
Speaker: ah world. So you can drop down into it by yourself, with your friends, whatever, and you can pick pick a spot, build your base, live your life, go off and do your missions, and stay on the planet. So there's like a device you build that you get the missions sent to you as opposed to having to go back up into space to get them. Yeah, essentially a radio tower kind of thing. Yeah, exactly. And then there's there's the outpost, which is essentially their creative mode.
Speaker: But their creative mode has caveats that I don't love. But yeah, so like open world is it was the the new addition. You can still do mission based stuff if you just want to drop down, do your do your stuff and then leave. But the open world is I want to drop down. I want to make a base. I want to build it from thatch into wood into stone into blah, blah, blah, blah. blah And like.
Speaker: Right. I want to explore this whole world. I want to go off and do all these missions and still have a place to come home to and not have to go up and down every time. so it's a very cool idea. I mean, it's a it's a fantastic game. And just talking about it now makes me want to go back and start playing it again. um I don't remember why. i think we dropped off it mostly because Zach basically cruised through the whole thing. Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker: and i And I fell off because I had other stuff going on. So I will probably go back and maybe even solo it at some point. But I do want to say there's two two things about it that I want to mention.
Speaker: And I'm not the typically a graphics, like, whore, but this game looks ah unbelievable. Like, it's it's so stunning. Yeah. at every turn and I'm kind of blown away how it worked. Cause like, I just did an upgrade to my PC where I upgraded my graphics card and power supply substantially.
Speaker: And it still ran phenomenally on my old one, which wasn't bad, but was still, you know, it was, Oh yeah. I was running it on a potato. I was running it on a 10 60 and it was gorgeous. It's incredible what they were able to do with that. The other thing that I will tell you, and I, maybe we mentioned, I mentioned this before, but this is the funniest criticism of the game that I'd ever read.
Speaker: so One of the things that's really unique about the premise of Icarus is that there's no other human component to it. Like you are the only person on the planet, essentially you and whoever else you drop in with. In early in early game, there are NPCs in late game. Oh, interesting. On the new world there are, but on the base game there are not. You are correct. Just wanted to add that. Are there NPCs and also human enemies?
Speaker: No. No, no, no, no. It's not like Rust, where you're going run into people that are human. So my point here is going to stand, because one of the criticisms I read in the Steam reviews was somebody bitching very lengthily, as one does, about how there aren't any, like, raiders or, like, whatever, like, like it is in Borderlands or something like that. Oh, yeah, yeah. And I remember sharing this with Zach and both us just looking each other like, that's not the fucking game. Right, that's not the whole... The wildlife is the threat. The environment is the threat. One of the things that might turn people off from Icarus is the distance you have to travel often to complete tasks and missions, which is a thing I believe is by design, based on my experience, which is like, you're meant to feel like...
Speaker: Going on a mission. Yeah, you're solo. You need to stock up. you need to prepare and you need to be ready for that journey. Like the journey itself is part of the experience, which if you're looking for that is an awesome feature. And even if you're not, it's still not something that's insurmountable. You just have to plan for it. um Right, right, right, right.
Speaker: i have I have a lot of good things to say about Icarus in general, but that one, i understand entirely why that is the top of your tier list. It's just, it's so good. It's been out for four years. So they they released it to 1.0 in 2021 and they update it every single week to this day Yeah, it's insane. Every single week, there is an update to it.
Speaker: And we are on week 198 of weekly updates. So are you aware, just because we're talking about Icarus, are you aware that there is a new game from them from the same company that's coming out?
Speaker: yeah I've seen. I've seen tell of it, but I don't know anything about it. OK, I only mentioned it because we looked at it today. It's Rocket Works is the company.
Speaker: Stationeers is the new game that they are coming out with. I actually think, an no way sorry, it is out. Stationeers is already out. yeah Yes, and this is a ah game in which you are constructing and managing a space station, um and it does not appear to have any sort of combat side to it, which I am less inclined to be interested because I do like the threat of outside threats, whether they're animals whatever, but because it's by these guys, I'm intrigued because I think that they know what they're doing and I would be really interested to see what they do with that. But they are actually making another game. And I believe that one's going to fall in the survival crafting category too.
Speaker: So, yeah. um I think... Yeah, i you should be. um So i think I think the other survival game, the one that I'm going to tout as the best one, and you know where I'm going to go with this. You know what I'm going say. I'm ready. I'm ready. It's not the one we'll talk about at a later point. So we're tabling Abiotic Factor, which okay is my game of the year.
Speaker: Yeah. It is. I mean, like, it's i'm it's amazing. You're allowed to have. an i and and And that's based on the fact, like, people will be like, Silk Song. Like, i haven't played that. Also, I didn't like Hollow Knight. Sorry. um I know. god i know. Did you just hear the rumble? I just heard our podcast die at episode two. But no, Abiotic Factor, I actually told Zach and Derek, again, people who will be on this podcast, that um to me, despite the fact it contains all the elements of a survival crafter, is not a survival crafter. I wouldn't define it that way.
Speaker: Because it has a very defined story with lots of NPCs. and heavy, heavy, heavy, like, lore that is, like, progressive. Was it RPG-ish? Yeah, I think it's much more in the RPG first, Survival Craft second. Zach disagrees. We'll argue it on the podcast, because going to podcast just about that game.
Speaker: Got it. No, but you know what my my apex is. It's in Shrouded. I think in Shrouded is the best survival crafter. um And the way I would describe in Shrouded is if you took...
Speaker: Breath of the Wild or whatever the follow-up to Breath of Wild was. um Tears of the Kingdom. Tears the Kingdom and you turn it into a survival crafter because they very blatantly rip that off by it you get a glider and you get a grappling hook um and you're in a fantasy world and that has basically just gone to shit. Everything went wrong.
Speaker: Everybody's dead ah and you are resurrected and are trying to rebuild that world. And... The graphics are gorgeous. They have that same vibe as ah Breath of the Wild and Tears the Kingdom, where it's got a nice, colorful, like, really beautifully colorful, not at all bland style to it. It's got a lot of really cool enemies, and...
Speaker: it has one of the best character leveling systems where it's one of those big wheels where you can, you know, follow a strand out to every direction and they label them things like warrior and priest and whatever, but you can mix and match with no penalties. There's really no downside to messing around with a whole bunch of different combos.
Speaker: Um, and you recruit various NPCs that you essentially resurrect by finding their souls and you can resurrect a whole town eventually that you build.
Speaker: um It has some of the best building mechanics. like We will discuss this in a minute, but you are a builder by heart. And it would it would tickle you because this is a beautifully done where anything that doesn't work with the snapping on, which if people don't know, snapping essentially allows you to lock a piece of a build next to another piece that's already down.
Speaker: You can easily turn that... Yeah, everything's great. This does a really good job of being able to turn that off and get exactly the shape you want without it feeling like it breaks the the shape or clips through. it does They do such a good job of that. I don't know how they programmed it.
Speaker: um But it's like it has a fantastic look story. um It's got some really fun boss fights. It also has instance dungeons, which are more robust than ah the game we haven't named yet. And.
Speaker: and I know. We're getting there. We're getting there. They're called they're called haunt they're called haunt hollow halls. And those are like, you want to get your buddies together and you want to go grind through a multi-stage dungeon um with like hordes of enemies.
Speaker: And it is, it is like, you have to plan for it, but they are super fun. They platforming is kind it's like raid style. It's like, fun Yeah, no, wait it it it is a raid-style dungeon built into the Survival Crafter.
Speaker: And they have now added this gem-socketing feature where you can now add magical abilities to gems that can socket into various weapons. ah They have a really cool... One of the better combat features where...
Speaker: You can be a wizard type with, like, a staff, and you can cast spells. But you can also just carry a wand around and a shield, and your wand just, like, throws fireballs at people. And it's not tied it's not tied to your, like, mana or anything. It's just a wand. Like, it's just a... It's like a ranged weapon.
Speaker: So you can have a pretty cool, like, elemental, like, attack weapon, and you can also have a bow and a sword or whatever. Like, it's really... Yeah. And the I will say the thing that stands out to me the most, the combat in that game is superb.
Speaker: The, um, hit boxes are like nothing about that game feels unfair. You could absolutely underpowered beat a much tougher enemy just by being good enough. Like if you can souls it, you know, like it's in, uh, you know what i mean? Like you could really like, if you could get good, so to speak and have an, and tear apart an enemy much better than you. yeah,
Speaker: Yeah, it's still not quite in 1.0. They just added a new biome, which is the underwater biome, which I've not played yet. oh But everything they add has been, it has looked incredible.
Speaker: It has played beautifully. And yeah, I stick it up there among my favorite games. I've played it all the way through its updates twice, and it's still not finished, if that gives an idea of how much fun I think it is to play.
Speaker: So my question for you is, you know how you know how I play survival crafting games, which is like I'm kind of the homesteader, right? Correct, yes. Is that possible in a game like this?
Speaker: And it's still i have worth playing it. I have incredible news for you. do you want to know what features they do not have in Enshrouted that I know you despise? Please tell me. I want to hear you say it.
Speaker: There are no raids. Oh, I love it. Your base does not get raided. In fact, what you have to do is put down a flame, which essentially creates a grid that you can now build in.
Speaker: And that grid also stops enemies from spawning. So what I did that was super fun was I would clear a town, right, that's got enemies in it, and then throw a flame down to start rebuilding the town.
Speaker: um Yeah. It's super cool. Yeah. No, you could totally play that game and just be the person at home doing the building, doing the crafting. ah You know, you could go out and care grab resources nearby without having to go out and fight anything. i I'm so trying.
Speaker: I don't even I don't mind fighting stuff because like even even now that like I play a lot of Icarus, I'm like over 300 hours in that game. So like you've had to do some fighting. i can I run around and I can kill stuff and I can fight if I have to. I have no problem doing that. It's just that like i'm I'm not going to go do the boss fight with the guys that I'm playing with because I'm really more of a liability than an asset there. so it's like, I don't mind going out and being like minor minor things that I have to fight. I don't want to run into a boss arena and be like, oh shit.
Speaker: No, and and and the bosses in Shrouded are heavily gated to got it location. They don't leave, there's no wandering bosses, anything like that. The only thing that it might restrict you from is that to get skill points, which you level up with, every time you level up, you get skill points. But if you want to get more skill points, you have to cut down where called Shroud Roots, because there's this mechanic in the game where the big bad is essentially this poisonous shroud that's taking over the land.
Speaker: When your character enters it, you have a timer that starts. If the timer runs out and you're still in the shroud, you die and you drop all your stuff and you have to run back and get it. um Which is can be frustrating but never feels unfair, if if that makes sense. um The shroud roots, you have to go find them. If you cut them down, it grants you a skill point.
Speaker: I do not remember what proximity you have to be in to earn the skill point, but I do think you have to be fairly close to... You don't have to cut the root down yourself, but you need to be relatively close to it to get the point.
Speaker: So that might be the only one, but even then you could not do the shroud roots. You just won't be able to overpower certain skills or whatever. Right. I mean, in the game that we're not currently talking about, but we we probably should talk about the elephant in the room. i I did attend several of the boss fights and I was like witness. i I was there, but I just kind of didn't do much because I knew that I was just going end up dying and then having to run back and get all of my stuff.
Speaker: so Okay, so let's let's talk about Valheim, because we've we've named our two big favorites. right You and I played quite a lot of Valheim with some of our other friends, Clues and Shiny specifically.
Speaker: And then also with some of the Penny Arcade crew, and and yeah one Joshua Price. um And I'm using his government name. Yeah. And so my biggest issue with Valheim, the game, before we get into the production and stuff, actually, you know what? Before we even do that, Valheim.
Speaker: So Valheim kind of made the survival crafting genre explode because it dropped sort of out of the blue. And everybody who kind of got into it early access went, holy shit, this game's amazing.
Speaker: Case in point, it was also 2020.
Speaker: which I don't know if you guys know, if stuff was going on. We were all stuck at home for reasons. yeah You too? Oh my God. what I know. So like it it dropped at the right time. I do think it benefited from the fact that it did a couple of things. Number one, it's about Vikings. Everybody likes Vikings. They're cool. ah Number two, it does look beautiful, particularly the water effects are so good in Valheim. Sailing a Viking ship is a really amazing experience in that game still to this day. Like they did that incredibly well.
Speaker: Three, it had enough of a sort of tonal mystery about it. with like you drop in the, and unlike some of the other games where you drop maybe randomly and, or your start in like a particular spot, this always drops you at these standing stones where you have to,
Speaker: kill the bosses of the world and place their skulls essentially on these stones and like you can see this like progression towards some sort of you know ultimate ending in theory where you have defeated all these godlike figures right and so it had those going for it and also you know the whole 2020 thing um right graphically It's nothing to write home about aside from the vistas. PS, PS1, PS2, PS2 graphics. Like the yeah the art style is not hyper realistic. They do a good job with it. Like, they do make it work.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah. If you're looking for something... Like, like Icarus and Enshrouted, different art styles entirely. Icarus, hyper-realistic, Enshrouted, much more, like I said, Nintendo-coded. But, like, they're beautiful games. This game is is beautiful, but in...
Speaker: In its own way. In a unique way, yeah. And it also benefits from its random generation, which both, we didn't mention this, but both Icarus and Entrouded have standardized maps. You get one map in the case of Entrouded, and it's three now with Icarus, or is it four?
Speaker: ah I think it's i think it's it's technically three because Null Sector is in Stix, so I'll say three. and okay I have to correct myself maybe, but I think it's three. we We're on the third world, and that's, I think, where the top the top is right now.
Speaker: Okay, so for those aren't familiar, with the idea of procedurally generated, you know, you can either have a randomly generated map, which is essentially a seed that randomizes locations with some parameters, obviously, put in, so you don't get dropped in hell right off the bat.
Speaker: um And then... You know, a standardized map is one map. Everything's always in the same place. Icarus and enshrouded do the one map, everything in the same place thing. Valheim has seeds where it's random every time, which is always kind of a draw, which is like, oh, what's this one going to look like? What's this going to play like? Where are things going to be? Am I going a really cool vista or something like that in this spot?
Speaker: Which always made it kind of fun to pop in and start a new world. So you and I played Valheim. um You actually got, you know, interviewed and had your work posted on Polygon at one point. I did. For your base.
Speaker: The first base, yeah. The first base, which was a good one. ah And then... We all kind of stopped playing because the game never went anywhere. So do you want to explain this odyssey that this game has gone through? So in early access, the devs, as devs so often do, set a really ambitious roadmap. Like, ambitious roadmap. Aggressively ambitious. And they were like, we're going to have this in by end of this year. We're goingnna have this in by end of that. Like, they were promising a new biome, like, every six months or less. It was...
Speaker: wild and we're like, wow, maybe they're really going to do it. Because they dropped us into early access in this game with, what, five bosses ready to go. Was it five? I think so.
Speaker: I'm thinking of the different biomes. At least four. Yeah. cause Well, I think four. Because I think the planes was the Last one. Meadows. oh I forget them about the mountains. I forgot forgot about the mountains. You're right. Yeah. It's five. Yes. Yeah, it's five. So they're five biomes. Dropped us into early access with five biomes ready to go and five bosses ready to fight. So the early part, and I say early because the roadmap they gave us had a ton more content.
Speaker: Yeah. The early part of this early access was, had a lot of content and a lot of places to go and a lot of like upgrades to do and lots of leveling and lots of exploration and all of this. And it was so great. And it was a different time and we were all playing video games. I want to say like, I played this game at one point for 16 hours straight. Like I believe that yeah because we were so into this game and wanting to explore and wanting to uncover new bosses and do all of this stuff that we were just like,
Speaker: we were just speed running this game as much as we possibly could because we just loved what was happening in it because it it hadn't really nothing like this had happened in right in a really long time and for all of us to be able to play it at the same time It was great. Well, let's be clear. A part of it too was, like you said, 2020. There was a huge element of escapism there because we were not able to go out and do things with people. Even me, a very big introvert who prefers to stay away from people most the time, wants to go out and do stuff. And like giving you a world that you could explore and discover and find new stuff and do it with your friends was immense outlet. And sitting on a Discord chat for 16 hours gave you that interaction you desperately needed.
Speaker: Yep. it you got to go explore with your friends without being near one another and especially our friend group which is like you and i are close to each other geographically but most of our show group is kind of spread to the four wins right it's like right kind of all over the place but like this game gave us all the escapism and the interaction and the fun. And like, cause it, it is a real goofy ass game at times. And, but it's a really, it's a really good, good game with the right group of people. But like, then hundred percent you get, you get to, you get to the fifth boss, right? Like you grind your ass all the way to this fifth boss. And then there was nothing because, yeah
Speaker: the The team that set this aggressively ambitious roadmap couldn't reach their goals. And we all, anybody who plays games knows that that happens.
Speaker: People set roadmaps, roadmaps get shattered. How many games get pushed a year, two years, five years? Silksong. You know, like, it's just how how many games have we been like, how long did we wait for, for, not for oh not that game the the pirate game that we were all like oh this game's never gonna come out and then uh yeah yeah i was it's not sea of thieves but the other one it's not sea of thieves it's the other one that wasn't as good could talk about that for a while too but it's just you and we're not gonna fault i'm not gonna fault a dev team especially because this dev team was small
Speaker: They were like a few people and they got, I think, up to 5 million consecutive players at one point. And they were not ready for the amount of people that started playing this game all at the same time. Oh, they, I mean, they dominated steam, the you know, the gaming platform, like, yeah,
Speaker: for most of 2020. And yeah, but to, to be fair to the criticisms, they didn't spend their time or funds wisely. No, no, no, no, no. Which was part of the problem. Like you said, delays and things with aggressive roadmaps, those happen all the time.
Speaker: but they never really expanded the size of team. And I, I'm saying this as, I remember this from being in our channel with discord as being the most apologetic for them for quite a while, because I remember just being like, I think we're a little spoiled at how fast companies push out,
Speaker: updates and things like that and we need to be a little more patient that went away after the first year i think because nothing really happened and i got tired of sort of being like well let's give a small team a chance and i'm not saying that i'm down on valheim i will probably play it whenever they finish their 1.0 version in the year 2075 uh i have 100 hours in it in the last two weeks like i i'm still playing the game and yeah it is still a good game However, they made some poor choices in the development process and or just bit off more they can chew.
Speaker: But then the other thing that for me, I was disappointed was, so you mentioned there were five bosses and four or five biomes. So since then, two have been added. Right. And they suck.
Speaker: They're not great. They're not great. great I will say the building materials from those biomes, some of them are great, of them are terrible, but like the actual biomes themselves are...
Speaker: not super fun for exploration purposes. Well, so for people who don't play survival crafters, one of the most beneficial things about playing like the most sort of like, in um like, you know, what's the term I'm trying to think of? Like the the dopamine hit comes from finding the new crafting material and making the new thing and being like, oh my God, that's so cool that I can make this thing now. And then you just like want to work toward making the next thing.
Speaker: So The problem with Valheim was the the the first expansion area was called Mistlands. And unfortunately, they took the first part of that title to heart. Because that place should look beautiful, but it is covered in fog at all times.
Speaker: And it's a real shame because... They had some cool ideas. For one, there were NPCs that could become enemies, but you could also just sort of coexist next to.
Speaker: For two, materials were really cool, and it had this neat verticality to it that made it like a really beautiful looking area. Now, the problem is verticality doesn't work great in a game with fall damage when you can't fucking see where you're going. Yeah.
Speaker: So correct. Correct. um I am of the opinion that if you were going to correct course on mist lands, you need to make the mist less opaque and more translucent so that you can navigate it with some difficulty, but it's not impossible.
Speaker: Because one of the mechanics they created was, you know, creating wisp lights that, you know, push the fog back. I think that's a cool idea, but the fog needs to not be so goddamn impossible to perceive through. But the is that I like the little mist lights, especially from a decorating perspective, but also from a mechanical perspective. They don't do that much.
Speaker: As somebody who has dropped into that game specifically to build in Mistlands, I was like, this is going to be dope. I'm ready. And then yeah I was like, I had to throw out so many of those orbs to even be able to see what I was doing.
Speaker: Yeah. And that is the fundamental problem. And then they doubled down on bad choices because they made Ashlands as their next biome, which was on. The idea was sieging various volcanic castles. Now,
Speaker: Here's the thing, guys, about survival patterns. You can go real hard on um a crafting aspect or the surviving aspect. Or you can mix and match a little bit.
Speaker: But if you're going to survival with enemies, your combat has to be good or at least passable. Valheim's combat is bad. It is just not good.
Speaker: um Supposedly, they did a major overhaul recently in an update. I've not played it recently enough to know if that has had an effect. But the idea that I would jump into that game, this is a game where, frankly, for me, if I'm facing more than three enemies at a time, I'm like, well, I'm dead.
Speaker: You know, right three is a manageable number, um ah yeah obviously, unless you're several tiers of gear higher than the enemy you're dealing with. They're talking about Ashlands, from what I have seen and read, is essentially just constantly being under attack.
Speaker: Yeah. And that sounds fucking miserable to me. Because one of the things about Survival Crafters is when we talk about biomes, like new zones you discover with new stuff to unlock, when you enter that zone, you obviously have gear from the previous zone, which is, of course, slightly underpowered compared to the stuff you're going to get in the new zone.
Speaker: Mm-hmm. So what that means is for the first you know couple forays into the new biome, you're getting your ass kicked, or at least you're playing more cautiously because you know you're underpowered.
Speaker: So in a smart ah survival crafting game that plays this way, in my opinion, what you do is you allow the player to have the chance to sort of you know craftily plan their attacks to get the resources they need until they can stand toe-to-toe with their enemies.
Speaker: Ashlands, as far as I understand it, is designed essentially to kick you in the teeth from the drop. Right. And that's what we felt about the plains, the desert, when we first went in. Which was the last biome in the original early access drop. yeah In the original drop, when we were like, all right, we have to get powered up to to get ourselves ready to go to the plains because, like, oh, it's brutal. Once you get in there, there's an enemy that just, like, literally flies and just stabs you to death on one hit. And now we're talking about a biome in in Ashlands that it's like, good luck finding anything because you're just going to be constantly fighting stuff.
Speaker: Yeah. And I think that that's, unless they overhaul the combat in a robust way, yeah that's a huge mistake. I they've done a bunch of it. I just don't yeah i don't care enough. Because I think what what's happened with val with Valheim is that they really stopped communicating with the community.
Speaker: For a lot of it, because it was like, all right, when's this next thing coming out? And then they they weren't giving updates about the content they were really just talking about. It's like, oh, it's it's it's it's this time in the country that we are in. So we're all taking a six week vacation. It's like you should not have led with that.
Speaker: yeah Don't start there. Yeah. It's yeah like, i I love that you guys are are getting the breaks because I think crunch time is absolute trash for a lot of, for game devs and all of that stuff. And I think you guys should be taking breaks because it's very, very important. However, yeah you have you have promised us gameplay or you have promised us updates and you've given us nothing.
Speaker: I feel like their tact should have been to come out after their aggressive roadmap fell flat. Yeah. And just say like, hey, we never realized this game was gonna get this big this fast. right We promised that stuff out of the because we were really excited about how many people were into the game.
Speaker: We're now realizing that given our team size, and the fact that wanna keep it small, we're gonna have to stretch this roadmap out, be patient with us. well then and with 5 million consecutive players, they had a ton of like connectivity issues and server issues. Back-end problems they had to solve. never thought they would. yeah They had to do so much troubleshooting and so much of that stuff. They couldn't focus on, because the team, again, is so small. They had to focus on... fixing what they already had instead of moving forward and then they got stuck doing that and move and the forward movement basically stopped and then they decided to blow their money on a horse yeah i knew we were getting there
Speaker: Yeah, they bought a horse, guys. They bought a horse. I mean, like, hey, look, listen, you make a lot of money, do what you want with your money, but like, hey if your roadmap's gonna slow to a crawl, maybe purchasing a horse and announcing it to your fan base is not the best move. I'd keep that one under wraps. It just got really like the the taste and but in your mouth just turned sour after a while. And you're like, I don't care how much I love this game. I really don't like as a player and as a community yes how i feel like
Speaker: I've been neglected and now you throw and like they now they do updates right they do these these like weekly herbs not weekly fuck not weekly they do these rant they do these occasional updates to be like hey this is this is the new thing that we're working on and here's a picture of the thing that we're working on and here's a picture of a build most of the time it's subpar but you know it's it's not It's not enough, frankly. And like, you're not, youre it's just go on girl, give us nothing. That's kind of what the vibe is. So like every time there's a Valheim update, like we all laugh about it because we're like, okay, you still haven't given us anything. And they're like now we're working on the deep north and it's like, okay, so you already have a mountain biome. What are you doing? Yeah. Right. like what And and i want to be I want to be clear. I think we both agree. when when Whenever they hit 1.0, like, we're going to play this thing. Like, it's it's still a game I'm going to play. Technically, they've already released it. to like i mean, like... Right, true. Yeah. but Technically, this game is has been out. It is early access. And yes, it came out, sorry, in 2021. I apologize. It wasn't 2020. But, like, we it was we were still at home is the thing, guys. So, like, the...
Speaker: This game has been out for four and a half years at this point in in early access, but still it's been out for four and a half years and you're you've given us very little since after those first like five or six months. So most of the people who were playing it loyally and at at length are no longer playing it.
Speaker: yep I would argue that a lot of people don't even have it installed anymore. I don't. I do only because I use it. I use it to build in because it's so easy to break. Right. So like it it is a great game because you can you can use cheats in it where you can't use cheats in Icarus. So I really enjoy the cheat aspect of it that I can go in there and free build.
Speaker: in like a grown up Minecraft kind of way, which I love. So like, that's why I still have Valheim installed, but every now and then I'll like kick it to my, like my back burner SSD, as opposed to keeping it on my game drive. Cause I really just need the space. I'm like, get out of here. You know, like, yeah so the game is great. It's just, I feel like they fumbled the bag when it came to the community.
Speaker: Well, the communication piece too, I think. like I just yeah feel like it's perfectly fine if they got overwhelmed by the explosion of popularity for and everything else. But like, and it's also fine that they set this aggressive plan that they couldn't follow through with, but the way they've communicated about it has just not been handled well. And and it may just be that these are people who do not do that stuff. Well, hire a PR person. I don't know. Like just, just one, anyone. yeah Sometimes you can be too honest with your community and that's just going to piss a lot of people off. Like sometimes you should hold stuff back, right? Like just, you know, yeah read the room.
Speaker: guys I remember vividly the first time i ever went to Iceland, I was on the plane and a guy who sat next to me introduced himself, real nice guy, he starts talking to me and he explained that he was essentially an engineer.
Speaker: And I was like, Oh, that's kind of cool. And he goes, well, but I'm not the engineer that actually like knows how to do stuff. He's actually, he's like, my engineering skills are actually pretty low. He goes, But most engineers that really know the the deep shit don't know how to talk to people.
Speaker: So I go in and do the talking for them. Like, that's what I'm here to do. And it's like, that's sort of what I thought the Valheim devs needed. They needed somebody who was like, I get what you guys are doing. You're doing a terrible job communicating it. They they need what the grounded, like the Obsidian crew has, is that yeah they have people that are the ones doing all of the talking to the people.
Speaker: right like they have the community engagement they have the community leader i forgot what they're called the community managers there they are yeah but like a game like grounded which is also another great survival crafter game i was gonna say i want to mention four other games yeah grounded was one of them which grounded to just recently came out it's in early access i haven't jumped into it yet because it's still a little bit too early access for me to get in there right now but like It is it is on the it is ah it is in my periphery. But like the Obsidian team, they have the core group of people that are in charge of communicating with the community.
Speaker: yeah And yes, they could be working on the game as well, but their their really main focus is to almost be spokespeople for their game. It's They're doing PR. Yeah.
Speaker: You need that. You need a certain personality if you're going to try to engage your community and not piss your community off. I'm sorry. Because gamers get pissed off very easily. They're very short-fused. And you know, like...
Speaker: you have to know how to spin things to, to be like, Hey, this is going to be late, but we have this new thing to offer you. And you're like, that's exactly what you need. You have to like, you have to hold back and be like, yep, we're still working on it. And yes, we've heard what you're like. It's just, right I feel like in my eyes, the Valheim devs just didn't have a person in the front to be like, all right, guys, here's our new update. And like giving me like a little morning DJ,
Speaker: judging a little bit as opposed to being like we are the developers of this game and therefore we are going to give you i'm like i don't i don't need that i don't need that i need you to lie to me a little little shit on the idea of pr as a as a profession but like there is a role for that there's so necessary Exactly. um Yeah, I hope that they work it out. I am excited to eventually go in and play the game in some form of finished state and see what looks like. think other thing, before we move on, I think what a lot of people were also pissed about, because I literally just thought of this, is when they released the biome updates, after all of us had gone through, leveled up, played hundreds of hours of this game, beat five bosses, some of them multiple times in order to farm mats, They said when they released the new biomes that we would have to scrub our whole world. I forgot about this. We have start again.
Speaker: yeah so for those who don't know, when games are in a you know sort of early access or current development but playable, a lot of times what will happen is you'll have to wipe save files because whatever changes they've made are so...
Speaker: complete that your old files will no longer function with all the new updates and you can get around that with enough time and work on the developers end of things but it is a time and effort issue and I think you were correctly assessing people were really frustrated by that I had actually forgotten about that point but i remember quitting for a while after that yeah because of that very it just re-pissed me off that's why I remembered right right and and and it's because i will say one of the things that Valheim did not balance as well as some of the other games we're talking about is there's a grind to all of these games, right? There is a grind to get the gear, to make it to the next biome, to be able to do the next thing.
Speaker: yeah And in Valheim's case, the first two zones that you go through, the first two biomes are meadows and then the black forest. Your favorite. Is that right? I do love the black forest. I i like the aesthetic. um And the problem is that the black forest to get the necessary materials,
Speaker: is the longest grind, I think, in the game. At least yeah to my experience. Because you're you just stuck there for a while. You have to get... this is getting a little nitty gritty for people, but you have to get two different metal materials, tin and copper separately. And then you have to combine those to get bronze and right both of those metals takes a long time. And ah so you do kind of drag to that part.
Speaker: So when we're saying they're asking you to restart, it's not like you're restarting game. You're like, I'm excited to play through this game again, necessarily. You're being forced to restart after having made potentially like some people made massive cities, you know, i don't know what you're talking about.
Speaker: Right. Yeah. I don't know. Yeah. what Why would you know anything about that? you mean, you mean a full four story boathouse complete with paved road that you could take a wagon on towards your base. That's so weird. Oh my God. It's so weird that somebody would be upset that that would just get wiped. Yeah. Multiple gate houses and a moat. no way.
Speaker: Anyway, don't have to bring up past trauma. But ah yeah, no. So that was a big issue. You're right. Like they. Yeah. They dropped five biomes essentially over half the game basically done when they released the early access. And then they were like, just kidding. By the way, um you have to wipe all that start over.
Speaker: And people were justifiably like. what the fuck? Why can't you find a way for me to preserve what I have and and have the update? Bugs would have obviously popped up. They would have had to troubleshoot a bunch of stuff, but there was definitely a way to do it. And that you're right. That absolutely.
Speaker: But they basically were just like, LOL, too bad. And then they just like moved on, right? right just Because I assume on their end, their thought was like, well, we're trying to get this new content out. And so we're not focused on whatever the old shit was that you dealt with. Where everybody else is like, but that's my fucking life, man. Yeah, we don't care that we've that you've sunk 300 hours into this game. we We care that you're getting a new biome. And I think that was a bad taste for a lot of people. And they're like, you've moved on and so have we. Goodbye. And that's what happened. So I don't know how many people are still actively playing Valheim like i have play in a real like gameplay kind of a way I will say i log in and because they allow cheats it's a great if you like Minecraft and you like building in creative in Minecraft which is my bread and butter you will love building in creative it basically a cheat mode.
Speaker: in Icarus it is truly delightful and ah if you ever want me to elaborate on that then you can I will give you my socials at the end of this and we could talk about it forever She's not kidding. It will be forever. You will have to, you will exist in eternity with Bea telling you about this. um But yeah, I do want to talk about a couple other survival crafters that I think are worth mentioning. um The first one we already talked about, Grounded, which you've played a lot more of than me. I barely dipped my toe in it.
Speaker: But it's a survival crafter that's essentially, what if Honey, I Shrunk the Kids was real? Right. It's great. That's a great concept. Sold. and Take all my money. Yeah. Like that's and they've now released a sequel, which my question to you is I for the in this case, Grounded has a story. Does Grounded 2 is a continuation of the original story? Is that what they're it's a continuation of the story. There's a very cute trailer that explains how it links to the story. So when you see the initial like, hey, this this is the Grounded 2 trailer. It tells you how the kids get shrunk again. And oh, yeah. lot And why? And I do think with the cool thing about Grounded, I mean, there's a lot of cool things, but of things that's a real good hook with it is that you're playing kids that like get shrunk and have to like deal with it. like That's a really neat feature. And there's there's a story to uncover as you explore. And it's it's like, if you're i mean if you liked the Honey, I Shrunk the Kids films, you should just go play Grounded. like You really should. It is such a fun game in that way. It has a good sense of humor to it too. um
Speaker: I really like the voice acting for the different kids in it. Like, I think they did a good job with that. It's like a very underrated feature of that that I would highly recommend to people. um Yeah, totally.
Speaker: Yeah. The another one I would mention is Raft, which is by this point kind of oh survival. pride Yeah. Yeah. so that's a That's a great one. um Raft is if you're somebody. So here's the problem. If you're me, ah I've discovered through playing some of these games, my I think I have the last phobia.
Speaker: so raft is tough um but yeah you're literally on a raft trying to survive you're floating from island to island there is a story to kind of unpack as you go i played a good chunk of this there's also a shark that perpetually follows you so if you like jaws there you go uh bruce i believe is the name he goes by yeah because that's the name of the shark machine that they gave it in the jaws films is that right yes bruce is the shark in jaws yeah Yeah, and that game is pretty fun. And again, another one that's good to play with other people. but like I will tell you that this whole the whole Raft story, because I have played through the entire game, excellent.
Speaker: Worth it. Yeah, I started... So the interesting thing about Raft is that the story is something that sort of slowly gets revealed. At a certain point, you're just floating around getting materials and trying to...
Speaker: to make Yeah, because you have to hit certain places in order to even get into the story. And because it is randomly generated, you it's a real risk as to like whether you're going to... mean, you have to gather materials in order to get the thing that tells you to get to the right place. So it it is a lot of like free floating around for a while. Yeah. Yeah, that's one that, ah because Zack Derek are so big on the survival crafters, i um I might try to get them into. i think that It's really fun.
Speaker: I think it would be more fun for me. I played it solo. I think I'd have more fun playing with other people. I think that might help with the philosophobia side, too, because at least somebody could tell me the shark's about to bite my ass. That would be good. and the best part is, I mean, if you play it solo, and again, you're like me and you like playing in a calm environment, you can play in calm mode in which Bruce does not attack you.
Speaker: Yeah, i should probably turn that on. But yeah, I mean, the... The thing I like about Rapt is one, that's also a really beautiful game. like yeah I like the art style in that one. It's ah how would you just go it's very colorful.
Speaker: It's bright colors. very colorful. It's much more blocky. like it's It's got a blocky kind of... It's not pixelated, so we're not talking Minecraft. We're just talking the illustration style is a bit more blocky. That's what it It's almost cel-shaded.
Speaker: Yeah. It's got a cel-shaded style, which I really like. i'm I'm a big fan of the Borderlands art style, and it it has that sort of vibe to it a little bit. But prettier and third person and as first and third person worth also also important. Yeah. yeah um The two others I was going to mention one is Return to Moria, which is the dwarf crafting like Lord of the Rings themed game, which I am a huge fan of.
Speaker: I think everybody should try it. If you're a fantasy geek like me, you definitely should. um The thing that's really... give you an idea of the tone of this game, when you go to mine, your dwarf starts singing. And if there's multiple dwarves, you all start singing together. my God. So maybe you and I should play this together. I don't know. We might have to jump on That would be so fun. Yeah. It is a really great game.
Speaker: It has the Valheim combat problem to a degree where the combat's a little clunky. But its clunkiness, I will say, is to me more excusable because really the clunkiness comes from the fact that your enemies are big hit point sacks.
Speaker: So it takes a lot to bring them down. Yeah. especially as far as i ended up playing it it also for people who aren't sure if they would rather have procedurally generated or randomized maps versus a static map it offers both there is a static mode oh where only some of it is randomized so essentially key uh to give if you're not familiar with the rings uh moria is the mines uh that the dwarves live in that the uh fellowship crosses through in the first book in this story, it's after the end of Lord of the Rings and you're trying to retake Moria and to do so you go in your dwarf, of course, something goes wrong and gets stuck there. And now you're trying to sort of make your way out.
Speaker: And in the static world, certain like key touchstone points, like key zones, are locked into locations. And then the rooms off the sides of those are somewhat randomized. You can also do a version where it's a totally randomly generated, where everything is just sort of like bleeding off the edges of whatever room you start out in.
Speaker: And I have not tried that mode. I have played the static mode, which is excellent. And yeah, it's really fun. It has, if you're a Lord the Rings nerd, it is feeding that with lots of lore drops and stuff that's really cool. You can go visit the place where Pippin knocks the skeleton into the well. And there's like a note by yeah they do a lot of that stuff it's very cool i'm a nerd for that kind of shit i love that okay so here's the best part i'm a big lord of the rings geek too it's just we both are i mean let's be clear but here's the best part if you're true lord of the rings geek the thing that ultimately sell you on this is the narrator for this is gimli as played by john rice davies john rice davies does all the voice lines he voice it oh my god he can't they got him to come in and do it and he does all of it and it's lovely And they're about to release a expansion for it called Durren's Folk, which is extending the dungeon to a new zone, which I think... I can't remember where it breaches into exactly, but it follows the path of when...
Speaker: Durin, you know, who dies. That's the, that's the tune they go to how his path of trees spoilers for spoilers for a book from the 1930s. Yeah. When he when he tries to go into Moria to reclaim it, you follow his path is what I understand from that. So ah that's a cool one. Again, the combat could use some reworking, but it's been a while since I played it. So that might be, might be worth revisiting. um And the last one that I've told you about is essentially, know,
Speaker: ah the true Vikings response to Valheim, which is Aska, A-S-K-A. Right. And I'm playing this actively now with Zach and Derek together. And this is an interesting one.
Speaker: And I'm curious what you think about this, because what it is, is it is a survival crafter mixed with a town manager. So one of the things you do in this game is you build an Eye of Odin,
Speaker: And from that, you can then put Jotun blood in to summon villagers, NPCs, who you can then assign various tasks. They can go chop wood. They can harvest stone. They can hunt animals. They can make meals or farm.
Speaker: okay And you can have a substantial number of them. I think at this point, our current village has the three of us and 25 villagers in it. And so you have to house them. You have to provide, you know, food and clothing and everything else. And there are no biomes. You're on a singular island of pretty good size, as far as we can tell. And and there I don't think they're at full 1.0 yet. So i could be wrong about that, but I can't remember. And essentially, your goal is to survive. You just try to keep growing your community and surviving.
Speaker: There's no, like, endgame... boss to beat or anything like that. However, there are places like cemeteries, wolf dens, shipwrecks, where you fight enemies and can summon bosses to defeat them.
Speaker: So there are bosses in the game. Combat's pretty good. um But the city management part is a much more substantial part of that game. So it's an interesting mix. okay If you're somebody who likes The Sims, I think this is a game that would scratch that itch a bit.
Speaker: in terms of like you're basically summoning sims to do stuff for you and and it also has or like uh don't starve together no no not that one the other one uh oxygen not included oxygen included very similar to that yeah yeah it has that vibe so like it's it's interesting it's very heavily viking themed um It's more grounded in reality, would say, than Valheim in terms of that Viking theme and the gear. Well, I mean, Valheim, you're in, like, not perfect. You're in Valhalla, essentially. Yeah, you're in Valhalla. You're in the afterlife, yeah. This is much more, it feels like that maybe you're Valhalla adjacent. You're in limbo, maybe. There's definitely supernatural enemies. Like, we killed a necromancer the other night. Got it.
Speaker: But... The crafting and the structuring and all that stuff. And the other interesting thing that it does. So in most survival crafters, you know, you gather materials and those materials are then used to make, you know, structures or items, right?
Speaker: What Aska does is you put down blueprints. So for example, if you want to build a forge, you go into your build menu, you select the forge, you place it where it can be placed, and then it will create a space that you may or may not have to level out.
Speaker: And then you bring materials to the blueprint. And once you've brought enough materials, you can build the structure, which is a unique mechanic I hadn't encountered, but it's kind of fun.
Speaker: And it also means that you can actually have, you know, your NPCs build stuff for you. You don't have to do it. Uh, So that one's a really interesting game. It's very niche, I think, in that way.
Speaker: um And I will say it is the most obtuse game in terms of explaining how to play the game that we've played because we were all like, this fucking game makes no sense. Why the how the hell do we do this?
Speaker: And then when you figure it out, you're like, oh, I figured this out. It's like, well, been cool if the game explained that to you. And yes, it does have a bunch of menus that pop up and stuff like that. But its tutorial mode is trash. They need to fix that. I really think that that what they need to do is make a full-on tutorial like level that you play before you jump into the game proper. an intro village kind of a thing. Absolutely. This how you do it. I think that's what the game sorely needs to make it something that people can grasp. Otherwise, you're going to do what we did, which is...
Speaker: We started our first world, we were building a village, and then everybody started fucking dying cause we didn't have enough food. We couldn't figure out why we were not managing the food properly and all this other stuff. And now we have a thriving village that we've got on a pretty nice, smooth, you know, like conveyor belt of tasks getting completed and stuff.
Speaker: It's a survival crafter for you, the player as well. Yeah, it's really, and and it is cool. Like I like what they're doing, but they desperately need that tutorial mode. And like I said, we'll talk about abiotic factor separately later. But one of the things that that game does that's very smart is there's a tutorial at the very beginning that explains exactly how everything works that is tied into the story.
Speaker: It does this very smart thing where it drops you into the game and walks you through the tutorial in a way that not only shows you how to play the game, but also sets up the tone and setting of the game.
Speaker: And it's brilliant in the way it does that. so That's good. Yeah. yeah um So B, m I wanted to end this with a question that I think we should both try to tackle, which is your ideal survival crafter.
Speaker: what okay what What are like the key things it should have to really to really have both the hooks to get you playing, but also...
Speaker: the staying power. Cause I think a lot of these um hit points where we kind of drop off them. So what do you, what do you think? Well, I think if we're doing it, well, for me personally now, like I play survival crafters different than a lot of people because I play survival crafters as an architect, you know, more than anybody. So like, I think, uh, the build system shouldn't be an afterthought.
Speaker: That should be, uh, a, it's it shouldn't be your primary focus because obviously it's not, you know, then it would just be a building game, you know, like that, that, that's not what people are looking to play, but I think it shouldn't be an after an afterthought. I think the aesthetics of it. And I think like, you should really think about how, like how your building pieces look and how they go together and how yeah they clip, they clip through each other and like what your grid system looks like. That's a really big thing because the amount of times I have screamed grid system at every survival chapter I've ever played,
Speaker: yeah you know Because it's like, you really didn't think about how these pieces fit together. And it shows that you did not bring a builder onto your team. like you did not You didn't beta test this with people who primarily build. You didn't like you you you brought in people who like play Rust for fun because they're just really like killing each other. or you know they played i hate that game, by the way. but that's I hate it I hate that game, too. So so like i could I could talk about how much I did not enjoy it. But like you you brought in the people who are like who do the survival bit and just like want to hunt animals at each other. You didn't bring in the people are like, I want to build a city from what you're giving me.
Speaker: So I think your build system has to be doesn't have to be extraordinary, but it has to be pretty damn good as far as I'm concerned. And because of that, your grind level for materials, and not just for build materials, but for all materials, there is a point where the grind stops being fun.
Speaker: So you need to really think about how how how many materials need to go into the thing to make the other thing. You know, like there are games out there that that like satisfactory that you have to build like elaborate spaghetti but monsters of conveyor belts to create parts. But that's like later game stuff. But like in the beginning, I don't want to have to gather 300
Speaker: to make To make a ah four wall shack. Like, that's insane. So really think about your grind factor. And then even as you get into higher levels and things get, quote unquote, easier because they don't get easier. You just get better at the game and you have better equipment. Like, it shouldn't...
Speaker: I don't think that the material requirements should exponentially increase just because you're higher level. So like really think about the grind factor in terms of gathering materials.
Speaker: What else? I think... Well, I do want to say, i think I think you're hitting the main point here, which is it should feel satisfying to move through your game. Yes. Yeah, that's what it is. yeah should You should, like, it can be a little bit grindy. That's okay. I want to be rewarded for my grind. Exactly. And and and the thing that I feel, um again, this is a topic we're going to get into more, but Abiotic Factor did this incredibly well, which is as you progress through it, you feel that reward. You get that rush of, like,
Speaker: Whatever grind you do, the reward at the end is worth it. Right. Like, like, that's the thing where we talked about how the Black Forest, you've run up against it, where that it slows down as you're trying to find all the metal you need to get enough gear to progress. Yeah, I'm going to bounce off a game if like in the second biome, aka the Black Forest in Valheim. requires me to find five things to make one thing you know like exactly especially if those things are rare so like you really need to think of like your spawn rates and your respawn rates in terms of things like i think that's a big deal i know that uh palia ran into a problem with that is that like in early access in beta i actually played that game in alpha They had a really problem. Yeah. They had a huge problem with like spawn rates of stuff. And like, that is a really big deal when you're playing, especially multiplayer games.
Speaker: Is that like, if something disappears and not everybody can have it. So like, if you're gonna. Yeah. And oh, that that's my next factor. So it's like your build system should be good. Your grind system needs to be leveled and rewarding. And a big thing is if you are going to make this game multiplayer, your servers need to be.
Speaker: superior your server you need to test your servers to within an inch of their lives and then go beyond that because yeah it's never going to be enough like every multiplayer survival crafter i have played the server systems have been garbage just absolute garbage because like especially if I'm playing a game I'm gonna have like 2000 buildables sitting on this server and if it just chugs because it's trying to generate everything you know like or because I'm connecting to people that are on the west coast like my my game group that I play Icarus with one's in the midwest and one's on the west coast and the sir and we have a dedicated server and sometimes it chugs so like you really need to think about those for me those are the three things Story, yeah, think of a cool story, but also like Sardew Valley is my favorite game. My grandpa died and gave me a farm. Like, I don't care about the story as much because like, that's not how I play games.
Speaker: so It would be cool if the art was with like, obviously the art needs to be worth looking at for however many hours I'm going to play it. But for me, it's I don't care how gorgeous a game is. If your build system sucks, I'm not going to play it. I don't care how gorgeous a game is or how good the story is. If I have to grind for 40 hours to build something that should have taken me five, you know, like that's going to piss me off. And also if I keep disconnecting or if I'm looking at a slideshow at for frame rate, i'm I'm done. I'm done. So that's, that that's my thing. So what about you? i'm
Speaker: I'm 100% with you, particularly on the feeling that progression feels good. Like you need to constantly feel like you're moving forward. It can be grindy, but you need to feel that sense of yeah gain. You're gaining something every time. um right And I think that that is critical because that that's going to keep me coming back because I'm trying to see the next thing.
Speaker: And I know I'm getting progressively closer. I don't ever want to feel like I am going to be stuck you know hitting rocks for three hours just to get the next thing. An interesting way around that to mention with Aska is because it's funny because, you know, I'll be thinking in traditional survival crafter mode, which is, well, we got to harvest X, and Z. So I'm going to go after these trees and do this and that.
Speaker: And what Zach will always say is like, I'll just get the workers to do it. Because the cool thing about that is you can just automate your workers to change jobs and go do this other thing. And suddenly... They're doing all the grind for you.
Speaker: That's a cool idea. i don't think it's been perfected in the way Aska does it, but it's a very cool concept to automate those things if you want to. I think that's something people that are making these games should look at Aska and see.
Speaker: um The other thing that I completely agree with is that idea that you've got to test the servers. You have to expect, if you're making this game and intending it to be multiplayer, you've got to be able to handle what is going to be thrown at you with that server. Like you just have to, these games cannot be so demanding that you're, like you said, looking at a slideshow the second two other people log onto it. Like that's just inexcusable. Your game is not a game anymore. I'm sorry. I don't want to look at pictures of your vacation.
Speaker: um Like it just, just isn't that thing anymore. And that's the other part with, I really don't care how good the game looks if the progression is good.
Speaker: And, If the story, by which I do not mean you're giving me lore dumps and you're not giving me like NPCs necessarily. Right. i can I can project a story onto the game based on the experiences I have with the game.
Speaker: If you have built that in, you're good. Like that's that works. I think that that's interesting. um And I think Icarus does that better than a lot of the other ones, because you were telling you saying that the lore stuff like they do give you more of a story directly later on.
Speaker: but i use the end yeah yeah But I didn't even need that at the beginning. I got it. clear vibe off of the idea of getting company script using the script to upgrade my guy and then going on various missions and the types of missions and how they're being described to me by the narrator by the way whoever that voice actor is is phenomenal with icarus died unfortunately oh no that's the worst thing within the last couple of years no he did a great job let's just he's great r.i.p but he does a phenomenal job of having that tired like burnt out by the company knowing it's three days from retirement yeah yeah like that attitude comes across so well and it gives you the clear sense of that's what this kind of game and vibe and world is um yeah so i think we've we've hit on it like the idea and uh treat your community with respect because they're the ones playing your game
Speaker: ah Yeah, I think. and And respect does not have to mean you kowtow to every demand. No, no, no, no, no. Yeah, no we're not talking like fan service. We are talking like, we are talking communicate with your community. Weird, I know. Effectively and honestly.
Speaker: ah Yeah, honestly, but yeah, that that's the big thing. Like these are the people that are paying to play your game and could be playing your game for years to come. I mean, look at Icarus. Icarus has multiple DLCs that people have invested in. They've been they've had this game out for several years and people are still playing it regularly. So like treat your community um well, you know, yeah that and that that that matters.
Speaker: And before we go, I want to mention one more game that had popped into my head in this genre that I think I've mentioned to you, but it's the RuneScape offshoot, Dragon Wilds. You did. You did mention it So this is still in very early... um early development it's in early access you can play it i i would say well so uh my friend zach is a huge runescape fan he played you know runescape forever if you're runescape person according to him you should just buy the game anyway um because it's fun if you like runescape but as survival crafters go we played it in super like the day it dropped from early access we grabbed it and played it together it's awesome
Speaker: it's a very well done survival crafter. It has some really fun bosses, biomes. It's colorful. The combat feels good. Um, the building is good.
Speaker: Uh, and they're still updating and fine tuning it. They're doing lots of little updates right now. Um, we both kind of tore through the first three biomes that they dropped with it. We didn't finish the early access version of the game, but we did play through a ton of it. And,
Speaker: It looks to be like it's going to be a real a real banger, especially because it appears, as he's pointed out, all RuneScape stuff goes up to level 100 or whatever, and we're only at like level 20 or something with what they've dropped so far. So it seems like they have big plans for it.
Speaker: ah If you like fantasy settings, it's pretty cool. And... If you're not a runescape person, but are curious about survival crafting or have liked something like Valheim, give it a, give it a couple months, see what they drop.
Speaker: They, they, they literally dropped that game with no warning onto steam, just out of the blue, just popped up. So their next big update could literally come tomorrow. Nobody would know about Cause that seems to be how they're doing it. Yeah. There's a roadmap on their store page. So yeah on steam for sure yeah, check that out for sure. I think that that one is one to watch. I would say, um And while we didn't talk about it on this particular episode, we will talk about it future. I've mentioned my game of the year.
Speaker: It is a biotic factor. However, as we will get into when we do that episode, if you're not a survival crafting type person, you should definitely dig into the tone and vibe of that game before you consider buying it.
Speaker: Oh, yeah. Just because it's very story driven. And if you're not going to be into that part, or if you're somebody who really likes to can be build your own base and design and really cares about the crafting and building, be um this is not the game for you because it does not, for reasons I'll get into when we do that episode, have that element to it.
Speaker: But yeah, I think we've, I think we've covered survival crafters. Yeah, I think so. And I'm not sure exactly what our next episode will be, but it'll be coming sometime.
Speaker: Maybe. Yeah, probably. Yeah, possibly. So if you guys want to find me, ah my website is www.trevorehpaul.com. You can follow my writing and stuff, which I do under the pen name TH Paul, because it is mandated by all sorts of authorities that every fantasy writer must use initials for their first name as opposed to their actual first name.
Speaker: And B, you are going promise to tell us some social contact info for you so everybody can yell at you about... Yeah. Everything. I'm on, I'm on, uh, blue sky. I'm on Instagram.
Speaker: I'm on the tick tocks. The tick tocks. Oh boy. And I mean, threads sometimes. So if you want to find me, I'm pretty much the same username everywhere, which is MX underscore B B E a underscore McB MCB. So that's me everywhere.
Speaker: uh yeah that's I'm I mostly post a lot of nonsense but I like to talk about survival crafting games mostly building stuff so yeah go yell at me about your build styles and have her correct you uh send pictures said please send pics uh yeah and I forgot to mention I'm also on blue sky under th h ball so uh thank you for joining us this has been I think you should and we'll be back at some point with episode three goodbye
