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S2 Ep115: Raft
76 Plays5 years ago
Join Dave and Jake as they sale the ocean blue and complain a lot in this week's episode!
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Thoughts? Comments? Requests for new episodes? Feel free to email them in!
SoapstonePodcast@gmail.com
Like our podcast? Like our podcast! We'll post when new episodes are uploaded!
https://www.facebook.com/SoapstonePodcast/
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Transcript
Big Boat and Wood Shortage
00:00:01
Speaker
Oh, we've got this notion that we quite like to sell the ocean. So we're building a big boat to leave here for good. We're not keen on sinking, so we're all sitting here and thinking. Because we've built it too big and we've run out of wood. Lightly. Lightly. We simply can't leave till we get some more wood.
Soapstone Podcast Introduction
00:00:42
Speaker
How's it going, everyone? Welcome to another episode of Soapstone. My name is Jake. I'm joined by my co-host, as always, Dave. How's it going tonight, Dave?
Muffin Baking Adventures
00:00:50
Speaker
It's going pretty decent. Yeah. Pretty decent. Like decent posh proper or decent okay, not great, not terrible.
00:01:01
Speaker
I'm more so in the okay, not terrible, but usually life is terrible. The reason I'm a step above that is because this most recent batch of muffins ain't bad. I've heard things about these muffins. Tell us the story. I started baking muffins.
00:01:23
Speaker
All right, for our next piece of news. What do you want to know? What kind of buttons? What are you specializing in? Where are you putting your stat points?
00:01:34
Speaker
I mean, right now I'm fucking around with like, uh, apple muffins, which is pretty much just, uh, put some apples, a food processor. This time around, I added some store-bought applesauce and some apple butter to get more appliness. Uh, but it's pretty standard muffin fare from what I've read. And I'm just trying out a variation of that recipe because it seems to work.
Muffins vs. Cupcakes
00:02:00
Speaker
Right. That sounds like just about as much Apple as you could get in a non-Apple product before it just becomes an Apple. You're like, well, I got some Apple skins and some some Apple cores. I've got some Apple slices and I taped it together. I've made I've made a baked Apple. That's what I'm trying to say. But it's Frankenstein together. Yeah.
00:02:25
Speaker
Oh, that sounds pretty good, though. We talked about this a little bit previously. Sometimes, you know, we pregame our topics here. So we had we had the muffin chat. And Jake, watch me eat a muffin. I didn't actually watch. I ever did mine eyes, but
00:02:44
Speaker
No, muffins, what I was gonna say is muffins are the adult cupcake, I think. You've grown up, you want a little more nourishment in your dessert. I'm not saying all cupcakes are bad, but I mean, most of them are, obviously. But muffins, muffins, I think, can provide more. You can go crazy. You can actually have
Giant Muffins as Treats
00:03:08
Speaker
a healthy muffin. You can have a brand muffin or something that doesn't taste good.
00:03:11
Speaker
Hey, hey, hold up. I think bran muffins can be good. There are some muffins which are just shit and at like a point you might as well have a biscuit or something else instead. But as far as unhealthy muffins, have you ever been to giant or Aldi's where they have the four pack of muffins? Like, hey, these are 50% off because you're going to go stale in two days. Like big honking boys that are like covered in some type of sugar and usually
00:03:40
Speaker
like chocolate or pumpkin or they're never plain muffins. Yeah, the jumbo muffins. We used to get those, so one thing that years back when I was in Washington, we had our church actually would like pick up nearly expired food from all of these different bakeries, grocery stores, whatever, and then distribute it.
00:04:08
Speaker
for people that needed it. Go like donate the food basically. Be like, hey, this stuff's gonna be good for like three days. Go to town. And there'd be like pies, things like that. Apple pies were pretty good. They'd have like croissants, but they had those like chocolate, chocolate muffins.
Muffins for Gatherings
00:04:25
Speaker
The big ones where it's just like this is a meal So contained each of those muffins is at least 400 calories. Yeah absolutely crazy So anyways, I love carbs is a The moral of this story I
00:04:46
Speaker
Ain't nothing wrong with some carbs, man. I feel like being able to make muffins, though, is a pretty good life skill. It's like that in pastries, other people will appreciate these type foods. My strat is to just be able to bring something to a party that's not like, hey, Dave's here again with this pile of meat. Cool.
00:05:07
Speaker
Well, if you didn't put it in a pile, if you like arranged it on a platter, maybe or something, the plastic bags are cheap. Okay. The bucket is probably not the best way to convey it, but certain things are just easy to cook. It seems that muffins are kind of in that space.
Introduction to Raft Game
00:05:28
Speaker
Oh, yeah.
00:05:29
Speaker
There are definitely a value food. I read a while back that if you're going to be late for work or something, back when people went to a physical workplace to pick up donuts or coffee or something on your way, because you most of the time just mitigate the entire thing. People are just like, sweet, a donut. And then you're the guy who brings donuts, not the guy that's late for work. And I think muffins could also work in that juncture.
Raft Gameplay Basics
00:05:59
Speaker
obviously less immediate like sugary impact than a donut. Well, hold on. People will hate themselves less. There's always something to be said of.
00:06:07
Speaker
Hey, I, uh, I made these at home from scratch for you. Oh yeah. Well, I brought in some homemade, say whatever you want. I was like, Oh, wow. Yeah. Pickles. You knew it'd be late, like a month in advance. Start the brine. Throw some cucumbers in a barrel. Call it a month.
00:06:35
Speaker
You know, that barrel you have. Yeah. Pickling barrel. Everybody's got one. This one's for whiskey. This one's for pickles. Do not mix them up. Oh man. Speaking of barrels. Yeah. Oh, nice. That was an actual transition. I was going to do that. That was me waiting for the hook to segue in.
00:06:59
Speaker
I'm going to keep coming into the webcam. We're talking about Raft. Yeah. So the two references Dave made was the barrel and the hook. Those will both be important. We'll come back to them later. Stars above. Make note of this listening. All right. So for everybody who is too poor and uninterested to get Sea of Thieves, there's a game called Raft. And it is a, I mean,
00:07:28
Speaker
I mean, it's not strictly true, but it's also kind of true. They're definitely different games, though, right? Yeah, for sure. But Raft is a...
Survival Mechanics in Raft
00:07:39
Speaker
One of them's good. Crafting survival. One of those. Yeah, crafting survival, base building, multiplayer co-op, all over the horsemen of the apocalypse, early access. Yep. Yeah, basically be suspicious.
00:07:59
Speaker
And we'll tell you why. So it's something that I think we both like in theory. It's a novel idea. Um, you kind of start out on like this little, very, very small raft. Um, so if you have multiple people, it gets cramped really quick. But as you use your hook to kind of throw out and scavenge trash and other things are floating by.
00:08:26
Speaker
from barrels, plastic containers, planks, palm leaves, you can start to craft more things. You can start to expand your rafts into more of a boat. And then there is a tech tree progression. But the whole thing is to survive. You have like health, hunger and thirst meters. Yep. So at a point, you got to actually start
00:08:54
Speaker
Crafting stuff so you can sustain on the boat. Yeah, cuz you can't really just drink salt water And you don't have anything to catch food with initially
00:09:03
Speaker
And it's worth noting the setting for this is just open ocean, no real explanation. And all of this trash that you're hooking and pulling in is just constantly spawning with again, no explanation coming roughly past your boat. So you got to hook it and pull it in. Raft is in the WALL-E universe. It could be. If a tsunami hit the
00:09:30
Speaker
the trash wasteland of Wall-E, the result would be more wrapped. Yes, exactly. Yeah, and there's not really, there's not like a plot, as far as I can tell, that would justify that setup. It's fairly arbitrary, but I mean it works from a gameplay perspective. You also start on just like a plank. It's just like a single piece of wood, regardless of how many people are in the world. Yes, I did say that. Yeah.
00:09:58
Speaker
It's just I wanted to emphasize how small this really is. You could almost push people off like right at the beginning on accident. Yes. It's pretty. Thankfully, like you just move with the current. So somebody falls off. You can get back up. But I do wonder in like a more serious storm.
00:10:19
Speaker
because they do have some of those here and there. Yeah, larger waves. If you could just, like, lose somebody, or you have to, like, build an anchor and be like, get Jimmy back on the shoe. I guess I never really tried that. There's, like, a respawn mechanic where if someone else dies, you can actually know that's the way it would work. You would have to hard respawn back on the raft.
00:10:42
Speaker
The alternative is someone can grab your body and then drag you over to a bed, plop you down, and through the magic of laziness be revived. Yeah, we did that pretty early on. So I'd be like, Jake, I'm going to take a nap and I'm just going to fall over. Then Jake would pick up my body and tuck me in. He's like, there you are. You'll be right in the morning.
00:11:04
Speaker
And then I would get stats back, help have a way to get fish or clean water was confusing to me for a point. And it becomes like a lot to maintain to a degree. So we just cheated that way for a bit.
00:11:24
Speaker
It's honestly the efficient way to play is to let yourself and your friends die due to hunger and thirst and then just drag them into bed, let them hit the button and start back up with like half bars for a significant portion of the early game.
Tedious Gameplay in Raft
00:11:44
Speaker
That remains true. Yeah, I would stand by that.
00:11:50
Speaker
So as you get up the tech tree through researching, like I have this rock puts rock in notebook. Ah, yes, I can maybe put rock and something else together to make this. Yeah. Before you actually get a way to get planters to put seeds into grow plants and then cook them because obviously there's no nutrition in a raw potato.
00:12:13
Speaker
You just kind of do what you can, a.k.a. sleep and not eat. Is that true? That there's no nutrition in raw potatoes? I meant in like the game. Oh, OK. You you bake the potato and it's always more nutritious. As you said that, I was like, is it actually bad to eat raw potatoes? And I can't wonder the Irish diet. I don't I don't think it was because they had an abundance of raw potatoes over abundance of raw potatoes.
00:12:43
Speaker
Yeah, the potato famine of calories and nutritious value. Right. It's basically just the same texture as an apple. So it's probably whoa, raw potato. Yeah, it's around the same thing.
00:12:59
Speaker
Apples have to be juiced here, right? Like I haven't bitten into one in a while, like just a raw potato because I'm a fucking adult. Um, yeah, I mean, like they're definitely, um, apples are definitely juicier. There's another, there's another fruit or vegetable. You could probably equate it to.
00:13:17
Speaker
It's not it's not an onion. It's closer to the texture of an apple. But anyways, I digress. Please write in about what texture you think most resembles a potato. Yeah, that's that's what we're going for here. But you mentioned how obnoxious it was to keep up some of those resources. Like you talked about like boil, like gathering pure water is a perfect example, I think of
00:13:46
Speaker
how obnoxious the management in this game actually is. If you haven't gotten that vibe from us yet, we're going to tear into it a little bit. Yeah, there is something in the texture you can get called a water purifier, where you make a cup as a separate thing, you grab some salt water from the ocean, and then you put it on the water purifier where you essentially just cook the water. When that's done, you take the cup, you drink what's in the cup,
00:14:14
Speaker
And then you repeat the process. Yeah. And it gives you a little bit of water because it's a small fucking cup. So it becomes tedious to be like, oh, um, let's say you're playing with a party of four. Hey, does anybody have a, oh, we only have one water purifier. That's cool. I'll wait. Yeah. Otherwise you have a giant boat with four water purifiers.
00:14:37
Speaker
but you still have to keep resetting that. I don't know if you can store water. There's no like certain cooked resources you can like, oh, I'm gonna throw it in the chest and it will never go bad. Yeah. At least in the early game or what we played through, so we played twice, once with another friend and once more recently for refresher.
00:15:03
Speaker
I remember in both cases, we did not have long-term storage for water. We literally just had eight cups worth at any given time from one of these purifiers. And we did have multiple purifiers.
00:15:17
Speaker
earlier, but you have to put down a plank to cook, start the fire to actually purify the water. And so there's a resource consumption going on there too. And I don't know, it's just really obnoxious. It's the kind of thing where I would love to
00:15:38
Speaker
be like, oh, this is something we can overcome. You overcome it, and then you deal with the next problem, the next thing you want to work on. But in Raft, there's so little going on at any given time that these little inconveniences and contrivances and little resource management problems become a significant portion of what you're doing in the game. Certain survival games that do that,
00:16:05
Speaker
You're not familiar with drinking games, are you, Jake?
Lack of Progression in Raft
00:16:08
Speaker
I have heard of quarters. OK, well, there's another one called King's Cup or King's, where essentially each face card, not face card, each card in the deck has its own rule, except for kings. If you draw a king, you get to make a rule. So in addition to everything else, you can say, hey, every time you point,
00:16:32
Speaker
you have to take a drink. So somebody gestures with their hands a lot to way to target them. Yeah. Or after you drink, you always have to put a little green invisible green man back on the cup. Gotcha. Which becomes obviously harder as the longer the game goes, you're distracted or you just become drunk. So it cascades. Right. And it seems like one of those King's Cup rules that like, oh, you also have to drink every 10 minutes. Also, birds are going to attack your stuff that you've planted.
00:17:03
Speaker
Also sharks can attack you and then just keep adding on these like little inconveniences to add. And I'm going to do a big air quotes here. Challenge.
00:17:13
Speaker
which I want to differentiate between challenge and difficulty. And again, making it challenging and rewarding for somebody versus just having tedium. And I feel that this is much more in the tedium camp. A hundred percent, yes. I would never brag to Jake of how much water I drank in a video game.
00:17:35
Speaker
But would you brag about how much monster you drank in a video game? So let me tell you about Death Stranded. Yeah, no, I agree entirely. Some of the games I've played over the years, I have a certain amount of tolerance for tedium if there's other things about the game that I enjoy.
00:17:56
Speaker
Graveyard Keeper was a game that had like a ton of tedium. Other games I've played, Sim games have had a lot of tedium. Minding Asteroids and Eve is a lot of tedium. But there's other things that push me through that, the grind, so to speak, to some goal. And in the case of Raft, we're not really pushing to a goal, we're just pushing to avoid dying. Hashtag no goals. Yeah.
00:18:25
Speaker
And that's not to say that there isn't. You mentioned the tech tree. There is some progression in the game. There's a significant amount more than there was when we last played. But it's all basically locked by having the resources available that only become available once you've accomplished other tasks.
00:18:48
Speaker
And all of those are usually built around. Did you grab tech out at sea? Did you find an island with the resources you needed? Yeah, very linearly gated. Yeah. So the thing we got to this time was, hey, do we have sand? No, where the fuck is sand? Yeah. You want to call it here? Yeah, I'll call it here.
00:19:12
Speaker
Because the first time when we were playing, we're like, all right, we need a Forge. A Forge is how we're going to be able to refine some of this metal, get up to the next tech tree. And it took us a significant amount of time to get the resources together. And this isn't us going out searching for them. You're on your raft waiting for it to drift to an island that has the resources you need.
00:19:39
Speaker
It's a very, very passive process. And while you can do little things like make nets or like expand the raft a little bit, it's all like biding your time with things that you don't actually necessarily want to do in that moment. You don't have that initiative. And then the first time we played, we got that forge. We made it. We're like, hey, we can make like four things. We made those things. And we're like, all right, the next phase of the game is, and there was actually nothing.
00:20:08
Speaker
Yeah, we just kind of capped out. Yeah, there was nothing to do. And it was like us, one or two other people. And that was like. I feel like we did it in like an evening. Yes, it was like three and a half hours. We're like, you want to keep building on the boat? And we're like, no, that's OK. I think my full time playing it a bit, getting people in, trying the game and then playing through all of that was five hours.
00:20:39
Speaker
Full disclosure, I've looked at the wiki, there is a lot more stuff added that you can make now. But it's still locked behind. Huh? Such as? Such as like a snorkel or like air tanks. Or I think you can make bait for the shark now. So anytime you're in the water, one of the mechanics is a shark will attack you within like 15 seconds. There's always a shark nearby. He will sometimes attack the boat. But if you were within the water,
00:21:05
Speaker
He will find you. Yes, this is not a realistic shark in any way. And it actually operates the same way as the birds. So like Dave mentioned, the birds, which will like come down and attack your crops and you like have to scare them off if you actually kill the bird because you're like shot with an arrow or you got like a lucky stab with a spear before it flew off or whatever.
00:21:28
Speaker
there is a period of time before it will respawn and that's the only time that you're not really dealing with a bird pissing you off but early game it's not super easy to kill the bird you don't have a ranged weapon you don't have anything like that so you're just like constantly going back and scaring the bird off so it doesn't eat your crops similar
Playing Raft in Groups
00:21:45
Speaker
deal with the shark the shark has a respawn time if you manage to actually kill it otherwise it will just follow you and follow you and follow you until you land in the water
00:21:55
Speaker
Also, we never actually explained what the shark did, but it starts biting on a piece of the raft. So if it's unattended to, it will just remove a piece of the raft, essentially one tile. Now, I don't remember if it was confirmed previously, but I'm pretty sure that if it, let's say you had a really, really wide raft.
00:22:16
Speaker
with one connecting piece in the middle because you don't know about structure. Let's say the shark ate that. I think the raft would separate. Yeah, you get the main piece still and everything else is lost. I'm almost entirely sure it works that way because there's no way they could handle actually having two different boats, which would be.
00:22:39
Speaker
theoretically, something you could accomplish. You make a small connected piece, two large floats, and now you have two rafts. That's why I always stand on the source block side of the raft. Yeah, exactly. But it's just, it's, I mean, one, it doesn't make any shark. It doesn't make any shark. It doesn't make any shark for a sense to come up and just bite a wooden raft, you know? This isn't Jaws. They don't eat boats, as far as I know.
00:23:07
Speaker
But even realism aside, it's a contrivance and it's something that's kind of obnoxious to deal with. If you're exploring an island and the shark comes over and attacks your boat or the bird comes over and attacks your plants, you have to like run back to take care of it. And this is the opposite of like fun and exploration. This is
00:23:29
Speaker
I have to take my kids with me everywhere and they're ruining everything. Wrap it before you tap it. But I agree. That's why I think this game is better suited for a big multiplayer group because it makes sense to have roles. Someone would be constantly taking the resources like, oh, I will cook and make sure we have stuff available for people who need it. Right. Hey, I'm going to gather stuff.
00:23:56
Speaker
and I will be in charge of lining the front of the raft with a million auto-catch nets. Somebody who is specifically there to guard the boat, they have no other role besides looking for a bird that's coming to attack the crops and stabbing it. This person's playing the game semi AFK. This last role basically is you can actually stand next to the crops and the bird will be scared off also. Oh, really? Yes. Oh, that's convenient.
00:24:25
Speaker
All right, we're going to have one FK player who will occasionally res because they will never eat or drink. You put the bed next to the actual crops, so you just set them down on the bed to revive them.
00:24:38
Speaker
Tactics we found a way to make the game work.
Raft vs. Minecraft
00:24:41
Speaker
There you go But like and that's true the last time like when we played you took care of all of the technology You did all of the tech advancement. I just used the recipes you were finding Relatively standard mechanic, but it's cool. I like that
00:24:59
Speaker
It's just the moment to moment gameplay is too tedious for me. And there's certain things that suck also. Like early game, we talked about how the shark will attack you if you go in the water. There might be a lot of resources you want to gather around an island. Things like sand or like scrap. They're kind of like tucked in the earth under the water a little bit. Yeah.
00:25:25
Speaker
If you get in that water, it's only a short amount of time before the shark is going to start attacking you. And while you could get bait eventually, I think you have to make that from fish, which means you have to get a fishing pole and you have to get on this tech tree. And until that point, it's not fun. You just have to health take some damage, get a minimum amount of resources, and then retreat back to the boat.
00:25:53
Speaker
And this isn't like surviving in the way other survival games work. It's not like you versus an equivalent force. And if you overcome it, you come out better for it or you have some sense of satisfaction. It's just like, well, I'm going to take five shark bites and then I'm going to die. So I'll go for four and then I'll run away. Yeah, it's not.
00:26:17
Speaker
I mean, the easy comparison for a good example is Minecraft. Minecraft, you do have hunger to worry about, but pretty early on, you overcome the issue of hunger. You build a small farm. It's a shit farm. You get a couple of resources. Maybe you get some animals nearby and you have them fuck and you lock them in a room together and you eat their offspring, right?
00:26:42
Speaker
And then you can build shelter immediately to kind of deal with mobs. You can sleep at night so that the mobs despawn and they won't keep spawning at night. Like you have ways to address it. It's still going to be a persistent issue, but once you've solved that issue, it's not as drastic.
00:27:03
Speaker
Oh, I'm hungry. Oh, I've had 64 stacks of bread on me. I'm good. Has it been two weeks? I might need to farm some more bread. Okay. It's not as constant of a timer that is ticking down where you're like, God deal with this shit again.
00:27:21
Speaker
Yeah, in Minecraft the basic needs are so attainable that they're no real disincentive to keep you from doing what you want to do in the game. If you want to go off and you want to explore, awesome. You want to go to the Nether and gather resources, awesome. It's like if you want to start finding ender pearls, fight the ender dragon, great. These are all attainable goals.
00:27:42
Speaker
and the hunger bar is not going to keep you from getting there. In some of the more difficult parts of the game, maybe you want to have good supplies, maybe you want to upgrade your character, maybe you want better gear. Those are all fun things to accomplish, and working toward those tasks is not overtly tedious.
00:28:04
Speaker
The raft is just the tedium part. It's not for that big of a payoff. The tedium doesn't go away as far as the part we play through. Yeah. Maybe they will have a goal at some point in the future.
00:28:21
Speaker
I don't know what that would be. The real joy for me has just been, you can do some things to build onto the raft. You can add other layers to it. You can have roofs. We don't, I think we made like a watchtower on the previous one, which seems super janky because it was fairly wide to catch a lot of things. And then we just had one tower kind of jutting out. Right.
Raft's Early Access Status
00:28:48
Speaker
But outside of that, it seems to really wear itself thin very quickly because you're not doing anything new and exciting. You're not working towards specific goals. Yeah. If you had like a pie chart of time spent playing raft, how much of it is the tedium things you have to do, the basic needs or whatever, and how much of it is accomplishing the goals within the game?
00:29:15
Speaker
Excuse me. TDM is also how much my company will pay me when I'm out of town to buy tea per day. Yeah. Business joke. Oh, it's always like Carpe Diem thing. Gotcha.
00:29:31
Speaker
I don't know if that's a bit. I think that's a lot. I can't tell from your face if that's a bit. I mean, is that the joke you were making? Per diem. Yeah, per diem. Per diem is how much you can spend per day on like business expenses, like food. Gotcha. I didn't actually know that term.
00:29:51
Speaker
I just knew DM day. And so, yeah. And also true. Welcome to Latin lesson. You thought you could escape Duolingo in the, in the quarantine, you sons of bitches. No, lessons are taught here. Welcome to class. I'd love to learn Latin. There's some, you can say some cool stuff. Put vague hexes on people.
00:30:16
Speaker
Yeah. I'm sure people would appreciate that right now. They would legitimately buy into it pretty much immediately. I actually wanted to contrast this also because you said like you spending time dealing with some of these problems. It's actually possible to make a game where you spend almost all your time dealing with problems and for it still to be compelling. That's literally factorial. Factorial is like, I fixed a thing. And then you look over and you're like,
00:30:44
Speaker
That's not going to work anymore. And it's always just going forward and like revising processes, revising logistics, getting all this stuff figured out. But it's moving forward. It's not staying here doing the same stuff over and over again. I also want to provide a little bit of context because I look this up while you're talking. So Raft was initially released as a free prototype on itch.
00:31:12
Speaker
People aren't familiar with that. itch.io is just a website where people release games. They had the Equality Bundle, a bunch of stuff there. In 2016, so it was four years ago, then it launched to Steam Early Access in 2018, which is two years ago as of this recording to the people in the future.
00:31:36
Speaker
This is not adequate progress for a game that's you should like give the benefit of the adult for something that's going to become real fun. Yeah. I feel like it's more of like a side hobby project than a, we would like to release this game for the sake of making a lot of money.
00:31:55
Speaker
Yeah. And I mean, I said it before, but sometimes the fact that you can get an unfinished game released online and then have a bunch of people contribute money to it and pay for it enables things that just shouldn't be released as hurtful as that is to
Comparison to Other Survival Games
00:32:13
Speaker
say. And obviously I'm not the person that gets to decide that the market is a stupid market.
00:32:18
Speaker
But this is why I don't have an only fans. I don't want to endorse that type of behavior. Don't pay pay me for an unfinished product. Let me work on myself. Let me go through therapy and get buff. I'll be back in a couple of years. I'm gonna let you finish.
00:32:34
Speaker
No, you actually have to pay for that. It's something you can be really critical of because at this point, I don't know psychologically what it is that makes me love the idea of playing survival crafting co-op games, but I've had a lot of good experiences with them over the years.
00:32:58
Speaker
I think it's because it is a friend group experience. I've never played one solo and been like, having a blast, just me. It's always like the stories you get out of it where, especially if it is a game that's not fully released and is early access, you're like, hey, I wonder what this interaction is.
00:33:20
Speaker
Hey guys, check this out. This is crazy. Which is something dumb and broken or you have a group effort for something like seven days to die. Yeah. It was nice because everyone was working toward a common goal of survival. So you'd have somebody be like, I'm the digger guy. All I will do is dig. Yeah, what up? That's me.
00:33:39
Speaker
I will be the guy who digs spike traps for when the zombies attack. Certain people would just go collect wood, but you're all working towards a common goal and a common base. Yes. Which, I mean, to be fair, you'd be doing that same here on Raft because you only have one Raft.
00:34:02
Speaker
It's just nothing happens. Yeah, the pacing is really hard to get into. And there were several times I was playing where I was just like, I want to do something.
00:34:20
Speaker
And it sometimes eventually turned into something else. But while I was playing the game, it was just like, I want to do the next thing in the game. And then if you are a Zen, I was like, I want to play a different game, because nothing's happened.
00:34:36
Speaker
And Seven Days to Die has like actual tangible difficulty. It's not just your health as a resource style stuff. There's difficulty spikes. There's long-term goals to work towards. There's large construction projects.
Suggestions for Raft Improvements
00:34:57
Speaker
I'd say in the base building category, it's pretty exemplary for
00:35:03
Speaker
how much content the base building actually provides. And Raft struggles to attain those lofty goals of what you can do, given how constrained it is with a couple of people on a bamboo float. Yeah. There's not a whole lot to deal with it.
00:35:31
Speaker
Because I think right now the options are, do you want to build another layer? Do you want to build what length of stairs you want to build? Would you like an angled roof? What color would you like it to be? So it's fairly simplistic in that regards.
00:35:51
Speaker
I mean, some of the things like in the defense of the game, some of the things that I think would have made the experience better just come too late. Like they have, you can make sales, which improve the speed of the raft. Literally just goes faster based off of however large the raft is, right? You can eventually make engines. There's like, we made a scarecrow, which allowed it to tank the bird a little bit. So it didn't eat all of our crops.
00:36:21
Speaker
There are some conveniences and things you can make. It's just the moment-to-moment pacing to get there doesn't feel worth it. No. I don't want to add to that too. Short episode tonight, no. I actually...
00:36:44
Speaker
So I was curious about this, the mobile survival crafting idea and what it would take to make this actually work. Because now we know about the problems Raft has, right? It's like in order to keep people engaged, you have to have them deal with meters all the time. You have to have them run back and take care of this. What do you think
00:37:10
Speaker
Raft could change right now that would make the game better and more playable, more fun, and actually worth putting more time into. And if you need time to think about it, I can also jump in.
00:37:27
Speaker
I mean, I guess my immediate go-to is it's fucking vapid. It's so fat. It's like the vape, we get it. Hashtag. You just go in a straight line. The trash generation will align to where you are as far as I recall. And occasionally you'll get a little deserted piece of something that has like a chest you can unlock and then that'll
00:37:56
Speaker
drown, or you'll have an island. Now the islands come in like a few varieties, but they're fairly small. And then I think we saw like three different islands and they started like to repeat. Yeah, they had the exact same template. Cool. It's literally, it's identical. I don't have the best memory in the world, but if I know, Hey, this looks like the exact shit I saw before, you've already used your assets. Yeah. So I feel that they could have some more,
00:38:25
Speaker
land exploration. Maybe that's something that we didn't get to quite yet. But just have a reason to get off the boat for a bit. Change up the pace. Because if you're just always on a boat, and you're just making the boat bigger, cool, I guess. But if you could maybe use your boat for something.
00:38:50
Speaker
maybe you come to a fairly tall island where to literally scale it, you need to have a decently tall boat. You need to actually build up to it. Right. Kind of like one of those extendo ramps at the airport
Water and Food Management in Raft
00:39:08
Speaker
or something. That's basically what we've got in boat form. That would be a goal you could set and make it a little more interesting. To be fair, you're going in one direction.
00:39:21
Speaker
And with with paddles, you can kind of direct where you're going a little bit and we can drop anchor to make sure we try and stop by an island. But I think there's a way to go back. So you're just waiting for the random generation seed to be like, oh, that thing, we're going to put that thing in again. Yeah.
00:39:41
Speaker
Yeah, I agree with that entirely. I think having more interesting dynamic content like that would be a pretty big incentive because as it was when we played, it's like, oh, it's another island. Oh, it's a floating thing with a chest. Oh, it's another island. Oh, it's a floating thing with a chest. All right. And there's a bunch of trash in between and that's it. That's that's the game. There's not anything else.
00:40:05
Speaker
Even if you had like some dumb NPCs, you're like, hey, I will trade you this for this. Do you accept? And if you say, yeah, cool, you do an item swap. If you say no, maybe they get pissed and try and attack you. I don't know. Yeah. But that's even just like another piece of content in the game that make it a little less boring and static.
00:40:29
Speaker
Yeah, make the NPC sharks. It's okay. If you give me your flesh, I will give you a brief respite.
00:40:40
Speaker
I think the changes I would make is I would make the Scarecrow a permanent AOE solution for dealing with birds. Because who cares? Like, does it make the game better that you have to go back to scare off birds? I don't think so. I would either double or triple.
00:41:03
Speaker
the amount of water that you could get at a time. Oh, I thought you were going to say, I'm like, Jake, there's a fucking ocean. To like actually clean it. So rather than like one cup of drinkable water, a single serving at a time.
00:41:19
Speaker
you do that, you do purify the water, it still consumes some of the wood, so there's a reason to like keep gathering wood, but it like purifies the full batch. Now you did one purify thing and maybe with like a bucket or something, right? Or a jug instead of a cup. Yeah. And now people have like a purified water source, you know, like, oh, it's getting a little bit low. I'm going to top that off for us. Awesome. It doesn't feel like a micro task.
00:41:44
Speaker
If it rains, maybe fill that shit up for me. How about that? That's not hard technology. We did have a moment where we had the water purifier up and there was a cup in there and we were just watching it rain from the sky and the cup remained empty. It was just like staring at it and just staying because it took a while to remember that you had to purify the water.
00:42:11
Speaker
But that's one of those things where it feels innate enough that I expect a game to have it. Yes. Water catcher. What are the controls? Wazda? Okay. That's pretty standard across the board. So if something didn't have it, I want them to say up front, hey, something you got to watch out for. We did this differently. And here's why.
00:42:30
Speaker
Yeah and I mean like the rain as far as I can tell didn't do anything. So the fact that the rain was there just made an intuitive like matchup to like the forest where we had rain catchers, green hell which we played and had my episode on which had rain catchers and it just makes sense right? Nope doesn't work that way.
00:42:52
Speaker
So those would be some of the changes. I try to reduce the moment to moment tedium by just reducing how much people have to deal with that. Preemptively taking care of problems, also great. Rather than like throwing bait to get rid of the shark or something, maybe you have like a decoy. You can just trail behind the boat. And then if the shark would have attacked instead, it takes the decoy and you're like, all right, well, just set another one.
00:43:23
Speaker
preemptively dealing with some of those problems so you don't have to deal with it immediately in a rushed pace every time would be awesome. And then if you find, because I realize this leaves a gap, if you find that you've reduced the TDM a lot and now people are standing around on the boat,
Raft's Competition and Market Position
00:43:47
Speaker
you need to add things that are worth doing in the moment to moment gameplay to fill that tedium. Cause that's what the game should be. It shouldn't just be the tedium taking all your time. Yeah. Maybe this comes back to like, maybe it is a tech tree achievable. Like I was thinking maybe if you had like chess that you could find, um,
00:44:14
Speaker
on an island. Maybe let's say you built chests on your thing. If your boat reasonably got heavier, and you need to structurally build a wall so that when the weight offset and pushes you into the water, it doesn't fucking submerge. That would be an interesting thing. Like, okay, here's something we have to account for now.
00:44:38
Speaker
You still have the incentives like, oh, it'll be fun to expand the raft to make it more spacious or facilitate. Here's where we can grow plants. Here's where we can collect shit. Here's where we can purify our water, et cetera. Make like a small community. Hmm.
00:44:58
Speaker
but just add another layer to that. Yeah, they definitely needed to, an improvement would be balancing out the tech tree a little bit. So more things were available early, not all locked behind the Forge. So that at no point you're just...
00:45:13
Speaker
like when we first played, you're at sea, staring at the horizon, watching a YouTube video on the other screen, waiting for the land so you can get the thing that you need. That's not playing a game. That's less than a let's play. It's a screensaver at that point. The let's play of rasp is like, let's not. It's brutal. It's kind of true.
00:45:43
Speaker
Yeah, it's in a weird space where I don't think that they could really do anything to it at this point where I'd be like, all right, let's go back and see what they've done. Right. Even with our suggestions, it's not something I would go back to if they had them fully implemented.
00:45:59
Speaker
I think I think if they hit everything basically we talked about, it would be worth checking out again in my book, but it would require a lot to be competitive with just other survival games out there. You could blow up right now. If I was the first guy to come to your village and show you a cool shiny thing, you'd be like, wow, this is blowing my fucking mind. How cool is that?
00:46:25
Speaker
Now, if 13 other versions of me came to your island and showed you the same shiny thing, but slightly better versions of it, you're like, that first guy was kind of a hack, huh? So when you're in this like existing space, this game's economy,
00:46:44
Speaker
you're always going to compare games to other games in that space or that genre. Which things did I like about this one? Which things did I not like about this one? And you're going to compare and contrast. And I feel like for all the other games that we've talked about, either as full episodes or just brief asides,
00:47:04
Speaker
other games have done it better. The forest will still be one of my top games for that. Oh, yeah. Because it has survival exploration. It has difficulty. It has base building. You need to watch out for it. They'll attack your shit and incentivize you to go and explore into the caves where things don't spawn when things are in there. And the game has a plot, which is good. Yeah, that's unheard of. Right. And for an actual. Yes. Well, it checks a lot of boxes.
00:47:34
Speaker
Whereas Raft again, I think it's a novel idea. I just... Its current iteration is not...
00:47:45
Speaker
something I'd ever recommend to somebody. Yeah, I will say the the video for Africa's I was like, I wanted to check to make sure it actually does show a large island and it shows like a cruise ship and it shows all this other stuff. But in our time playing it, I've never seen it. So that's all locked behind some tech upgrade we just never got to. And it just didn't immediately goes from raft to cruise ship.
00:48:13
Speaker
Right. Well, you don't switch boats. It was an explorable location. But yeah, I don't know. It's just not there right now. And enjoy the games with much better pacing. I'd rather play. The forest is legitimately awesome, and I have fun with it every time. More games that allow you to chop down trees need to allow you to make little carts, stick carts. You can load the logs onto you and push them around.
00:48:38
Speaker
Yeah, I got to say for games like that, it was cool to have the tangibility of inventory or wasn't just, oh, I'll throw everything in my Minecraft Steve pockets or it doesn't fucking matter. Yeah. But actually having to drag around a cart or physically seeing it in your backpack, you're like, I have too many sticks. I am sorry.
00:49:01
Speaker
There's the impact on the environment. After like clear cutting a bunch, you saw all of the chopped down trees and the forest and you're just like, yep, I did that. And the cannibals are going to see it. And I might've made a mistake. Here they come, their teeth posing from a distance. Yeah. So.
00:49:22
Speaker
I guess just with how many I've played, I agree with you, Dave. Can't really recommend Raft right now. It has very positive reviews right now on Steam, but it confuses me somewhat.
Recommendation of Other Games
00:49:33
Speaker
I don't know what I missed that other people are seeing. And maybe I'm just playing the game wrong.
00:49:41
Speaker
I think certain people play games for different reasons. So our thing is our shtick. We've played a lot of video games over time. And then when we have episodes like these, we're going to obviously be critical of games.
00:49:59
Speaker
And I think certain people might just play it for, Hey, this is cathartic and relaxing and I just want to do some boat shit with my guys, you know? Yeah. So maybe those people played and had a good time of it. Maybe they just played for a couple of nights and they're sticking around and that was a good time.
00:50:18
Speaker
But like for me, it's not my go-to for entertainment. I get that fear of missing out of playing other games, or if you were up to on Discord, or I would almost even rather call my parents at times than play that game. And it's like... The experience frames of the show. Shout out. I don't know if they've listened to an episode
00:50:46
Speaker
My mom has asked me three times, like, what's your podcast called? Like, mom, we've been over this. I've sent you a link. Don't actually listen to it. I don't think it's for you. She's not a gamer. Surprise, surprise. Oh, that's fair. I don't think my parents would get it either. But maybe they would, maybe they would get raft. Maybe that's the thing. Maybe we're just too familiar with the genre and we played too many examples. Maybe in a vacuum, raft is actually a significantly better game.
00:51:15
Speaker
But as soon as you have options, delicious, delicious options. Well, you wouldn't have regular Diet Coke. Get out of here. But you could eat a muffin instead of playing raft. I mean, who forgoes the muffin in that instance, right? Can we make that some merch? Who forgoes the muffin? It would be in like the fonts and kind of background of Bioshock. It's like a,
00:51:45
Speaker
No gods or king. Only men. Yeah. Who forgoes the muffin? It's just a giant golden statue of the muffin man and the White House with that behind him. Oh man.
00:52:00
Speaker
Yeah, so I don't know.
Discussion on Upcoming Games
00:52:03
Speaker
We'll see how void train goes in the future when that comes out. And by that, I mean, I'll look at it, shake my head and sigh. I will probably look to you for updates on it. I have a bad habit of not really following anything, but having a lot of friends who will follow stuff and they'll be like, hey, this looks kind of cool, or hey, this had an update.
00:52:27
Speaker
It's whatever the opposite of a support group is. People trying to pull you into bad experiences. I have people who try and sell me Tupperware and shitty perfumes. Hey, do you want to spend money on this? Get out of here. Get out of here. Oh my gosh.
00:52:47
Speaker
Yeah, don't need any of that. I don't need any of Raft.
Humor on Early Access Games
00:52:53
Speaker
Maybe this is the motivation needed to get people together to spin up a new Minecraft server or something, because that's a good game that I own. It's much better. Well, wasn't there more updates or actually a release date for... What was the backyard game? Grounded. Grounded. I think...
00:53:15
Speaker
We talked about that earlier that we saw.
00:53:19
Speaker
Which looks kind of interesting. It's live on Steam as of now. It was immediately out the gate. I think they had some login issues and they use like, I don't know if it's like some Xbox service or whatever for the multiplayer for cross-platform. It supports cross-platform multiplayer somehow. And I'm not sure that was very smooth. But this was one I was tracking because it's made by Obsidian, who is a developer. I really do.
00:53:49
Speaker
often times appreciate their games. But they've never done something like this, an open world survival crafting game. And it's just, honey, I shrunk the kids and you play as the kids. That's the game. A bug's life. Thematically seems cool. I can't imagine it's gonna be wildly different from other games in this space. But I am just curious to see where it goes.
00:54:16
Speaker
Oh yeah, and it is early access, to clarify, it released too early access. Yeah, the reviews did sharpen up a little bit, so I think it's mostly positive now. I'm going to see what they trend to and keep an eye on it before I try to convince people to drop significant coin
00:54:36
Speaker
You know what, I feel like we should change early access verbiage. Just like with babies or ejaculation, we should start referring to it as premature. Premature. It is premature. It's a it's a preemie game.
Podcast Wrap-up
00:54:52
Speaker
Not premium. I mean, that would probably that definitely has a much less positive connotation.
00:55:04
Speaker
Well, yeah, but I mean, I feel like that's deserved for early access. I'm trying to think of a game that was early access for like, Hey, uh, this is fucking amazing.
00:55:18
Speaker
Let's see, they definitely have to be a game that was under development for a long time before it actually got there. Okay, Hades, I hear you. I mean, yeah, as soon as Hades playable was released, it was pretty good. Factorio actually was also under the axis for a very long time. Or it may still be, I'm not sure. It doesn't matter, the game is very, very, very playable and complete.
00:55:47
Speaker
Extremely mature, some would say. Yeah, it's still early access. Factorio is technically still early access for the last four years. But those are four years of the game was done and we're just continuing to add stuff and make it better. It's games as a service, basically. That's another horseman of the apocalypse. Yeah.
00:56:13
Speaker
I had to look at the last one, open world. It was early access survival crafting open world for the four canonical horsemen of the apocalypse. Not the ones in the Bible, but the ones in Steam.
00:56:34
Speaker
But yeah, that's all I have to say about Raft. If you want to play an ocean game, Ocean Man, play, play Subnautica instead. It's single player. It's still better. Even if you want to play with friends, playing Subnautica is going to be more fun by yourself than playing with friends in Raft. Probably. No, it's really good.
00:57:02
Speaker
I recommend some Nautica as well. It is even better than Dom Nautica. I don't even know what that is. It was a bad joke. Let's close it out. We'll end it here. Thank you guys for listening through another episode where we rip a game apart.
00:57:22
Speaker
Hopefully we had some constructive feedback for the developers. Sorry that we had to meet you guys like this. But if you would also like to send us positive feedback, you can do so at soapstonepodcast at gmail.com or join the discussion on Facebook where all of our most ardent critics respond at facebook.com slash soapstonepodcast.
00:57:48
Speaker
That is also where I will be putting other posts. Don't expect to come to the end of the podcast for your actual news about the podcast. We'll have some metal talk, but I probably will be posting something interesting in the next couple of weeks. Sounds exciting. Exciting indeed. As always, we'll see you in the next one. Have a good night.
00:58:34
Speaker
you