So basically, a AA studio, combined with a publisher that is still currently being sued by Nintendo, managed to make a game that Ubisoft spent half a billion dollars and a decade to fail at making.
In other news:
Windrose is ‘ok’, but it’s not all that great at this point. A lower price point, good looking, openworld survival crafting game is just one of those markets at the moment with a bunch of interest / hungry consumers. It’s getting slowly oversaturated with lackluster entries, which will likely reduce interest over time though. Windrose is one such entry at this point, and as we’ve seen with many EA entries, there’s a really good chance it won’t progress/change much at all.
Triple A developers aren’t releasing anything more polished / functional, but they price theirs at like $60-80 these days, which kills any interest – heck, it likely helps out these indie studios a ton, as people look at that $80 price tag, see the $20-30 price tag indie games, realise there’s basically no difference in the junk they’re likely getting – but it’s far less painful to buy glitchy half-baked shit at $30.
Wait, are there… many recent EA open world survival craft games with a focus on vehicular combat?
EA games don’t progress with the game’s lifecycle because their business strategy is ‘buy the game every year for various combinations of our rotating feature set we partially retire and partially reimplement but will never give all of it to you at the same time’.
Either that or its the Sims: Please gib $4000 for all the dlc.
But yes, I generally very much agree that at $20 to $30, a buggy but mostly functional game, that there’s a decent chance will actually continue to be bug-fixed and feature-completed as time goes on, with maybe slightly to somewhat less impressive graphics… this is a much better deal to most consumers/gamers than double or triple the price for basically a slightly shinier, just as buggy thing, that probably won’t really be well supported due to ‘buy next product next year!’
There are, though many have focused a bit more on flying ships. For example: Lost Skies, Forever Skies. Though I didn’t say ‘vehicular’ stuff in my comment, because it’s more the broader category of open world survival crafting that’s saturated with half complete/abandoned early access games. Vehicular combat in Windrose is just a ‘niche’ gimmick they’re trying to use to differentiate their offering a bit, and to distract from the weakness of the games play loops in other areas. Even the vehicular combat is pretty routine/mundane after one or two sea battles, as Windrose basically uses the same mechs for all its sea battles currently, with level gating being the only thing impeding progression – eg. You fight a level 2 boat, it’s the same as fighting a level 13 boat, things just hit harder and you need more hp. I mean, it doesn’t take much to pause and think “Hey, this is a game about pirates/piracy, why aren’t there merchant ships to pirate, in a pirate game?” or “If sea travel/open seas combat is meant to be a focal point in the game, why is 95% of travel done via fast travel points, avoiding open sea travel/combat?” (its likely because they realised how boring/monotonous that sea combat would get for players as they progressed, but rather than address that weakness, they put in a “quality of life” benefit to try and mask it). Even in terms of coop play, it’s more that you each get your own boat – a missed opportunity in my view, to have deeper gameplay of having players actually play different functional roles on a single boat, working together as a unit on the high seas.
Just to disambiguate a bit too, EA in the context I used it was about Early Access, not Electronic Arts. I’m not totally sure if that was miscommunicated, as your comment sorta works even with the distinction, but it’s a bit confusing when I read your response and you use EA to ref the company.
As for things getting supported etc, it’s a double edged sword. I still view Valheim as being a gold standard for many Open World Survival Crafting gameplay options/features, but it’s been in EA now for like 5+ years, with very little progress made generally speaking – they’ve added a bit more content, and made some minor mech tweaks, from a player perspective. They haven’t moved on to a “Valheim 2” where they could make bigger changes/progress in the genre. Other developers have so far failed to meet certain ‘standards’ that Valheim set for the genre, and without that studio pushing things forward, the genre feels like its stagnating with sub-standard offerings that chase weird ‘niches’/gimmicks to hide their failings. Like think about proc gen as a game feature in owsc games, and how it enriches the exploration/replayability of the game – Valheims implementation of it is ‘ok’, but it’s not really that random or flexible, in that what they did was generate a large map (4x larger than playable space), and then their ‘proc gen’ just plops down a pin somewhere as the start spot, and then randomizes the biomes on the pre-determined landmasses surrounding. Improving that, and getting truly randomised land masses, as well as the option for players to select world sliders for ‘continents’ or ‘archipelago’ or ‘pangea’, or ‘land locked lakes’ type configurations, is a logical step forward. Such things are pretty much missing though, even 5 years on. We instead get other studios devolving on the randomness of worlds (Enshrouded for example, with its static world / highly guided progression), or we get these infinitely repetitive and meaningless ‘island’ setups like in Everwind. Or we get some frankenstein between the two, like Windrose. None of these approaches is improving on replayability or exploration gameplay – they’re regressing. I’d be more than happy to pay a single AA studio $20-30 per year if they were making clear progress / making games with new/cool/progressively better gameplay and features.
But, yea, what we get ain’t that, be it triple A or double. But $30 now and then, is less painful a trade to get half-ass junk, than $80 + all that paid DLC you mentioned, which is still sorta half-ass junk.
Ah, yeah, I thought you meant EA as the company EA, not Early Access.
My bad!
Other than that, I don’t think I disagree with anything you’ve said.
Yeah, I don’t /do/ early access games myself anymore, I let other people be the beta testers… far too often a game will go to early access too early, and then basically over the next year or two it becomes evident the dev team is only moderately competent, not really good enough to fix problems, add features, and do something, or at least a combination of somethings that is well orchestrated and actually unique or better than what’s come before.
I also view Valheim as essentially the gold standard for the gameplay genre, but yes, it could be so much more, if they actually took the time to do a more serious revamp.
But, thats the problem with an early access approach: To do that, what you’re describing with more extensive biomes and such… well, they basically have to rewrite and expand a foundational layer of the game, and then make sure all the other layers of the game built on top of it, that they’re all compatible.
Whats much easier to do is not futz with the foundation, and add more layers on top, or tweak them and how they work together.
Perhaps ironically, I’ve been tinkering with setting up a proc gen terrain system in Godot, and uh yeah, its actually pretty complicated to get something that both looks and plays well, and can also actually run reasonably well on most people’s computers.
I could build more of ‘game’ based on what I currently have now, but… if I wanted to go back and refine/overhaul it later… I’d probably end up basically redoing just most of the game, in general.
(Though I’m not personally aiming toward ‘open world survival craft’, proc gen maps/levels/terrain/buildings do have more use cases than that.)
Yeah, I’m pretty sure we’re closely aligned on this stuff – though I’m more of a “fuckit, I’mma beta test this shit” type.
The ability to release a ‘new’ game, which has done that fundamental rework of underlying mechanics, is one of the things we lose when we see an extended EA approach – I totally get that its a bunch of work to refine those systems, and its a right pain to try and backport it after you’ve done a bunch of the other bits. Which is why I’d be supportive of a small shop that released a game for $20-30 every couple years, which was just iteratively improving on those back end components., rather than paying $20 once and getting 5 years of very slow, relatively inconsequential content drops.
I still have some hope for Light No Fire, though that’s largely based on hoping that Hello Games learned a bunch of lessons in regards to world building / plot progression type stuff from No Man’s Sky. If it turns out to essentially just be a reskinned NMS on a single world, that’ll be real unfortunate.
I like it kinda. Most of my friends play pretty much every survival crafting game out there, and i skip most of them, because it’s just the same game over and over. Even not playing most of them, whenever they tell me to play this new game, it’s great and different, it’s just the same game with maybe a little thing that is trying to make it unique. Then i refund itbecause it bores me and they play it for maybe 6 more hours and hop on the next one.
Ut’s still the same game again, but at least it feels a little less tedious.
To each their own.
I find the sea battles got boring really quick. I think the game devs knew the sea battles would get boring fast, which is why they have such extensive options for fast travel in the game – to avoid the ‘focal point’ of sea battles/sea travel… they implemented systems to avoid what they try and promote as a key feature of their offering. It feels sorta like selling an FPS based on its first person shooter gameplay, but then implementing a bunch of features like AI bot control, mission spectator mode, etc, to make it so players don’t have to do any FPS gameplay… because you’ve made it so boring you know no one is gonna stick around if they gotta play your game the way its marketed.
Looks cool. As a rule I don’t buy early access games but I will definitely keep my eye on this one.
I’ve been playing this game all week. It’s amazing! Exactly the kind of pirate game I want to play.
It’s basically Enshrouded, but pirates in the 1700s instead of a magic/fantasy world. It’s base-building with quests and adventures. And your can sail ships, battle other ships, build your own ships, etc. which is like Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, but way better.
I bought the soundtrack for the game on Steam and the entire second disc is just sea shanties! The first disc is the first four sea shanties spiced up with instrumentals for the trailers. Even when I’m not playing this game, I’m rocking this soundtrack while I’m working on my computer.
I’m really enjoying this game. I’m considering reviewing it for my “random screenshots of my games” series. It’s about time I wrote another one of those.
I’vr not played it, mostly just amused by AAA shooting itself in the balls, but I may have to actually give it a whirl, seems fun!
Added it to my wishlist yesterday, looks great. Does the soundtrack give band credits to who’s playing? Wondered who did “Old Maui” in the game preview.
The soundtrack itself doesn’t have any credits listed. On their soundtrack store page on Steam, it says “Kraken Express” (the development company) is the artist, composer, and label, with an “other credits” featuring Seán Dagher.
Minimum: GTX 1080ti, Recommended: RTX 3080. oh oh
It’s actually pretty well optimized… For loading times. My frame rate is very unstable and areas where you build a lot of stuff really suffer in the FPS department.
But fast travel loads you in basically instantly which is nice.
Is there a single-player offline mode?
Edit: Yes, apparently:
Is it actually possible to go below 0 on that graph or is that extra 50€ buffer at the bottom just to protect Ubi’s feelings?
Negative value would indicate “paying you to take them”, which doesn’t make any sense, unless there’s a forfeit associated with having any.
Really, share prices should be on a logarithmic graph. You care whether your shares are now worth eg. twice as much or half as much as you paid for them originally. The actual number of shares that you could buy with a given amount of money isn’t as interesting.
… A stock with a negative price would be extremely funny, but no I’m pretty sure that’s not even technically possible, at least… not without high frequency trading fuckery…
Uh its just like that because of it being a webapp widget, trying to support as many possible different kinds of x,y ranges as possible, would be my guess, lol.
This look a good tittle but I will pass. I’m waiting for something else more like COD.
I suggest Squad, if you want to graduate from mostly shit talk and bling, to actual teamwork and tactics.
S&B was literally never supposed to be survival slop.
Right, it was supposed to be mobile slop game design, with AAAA graphics.
You still had to sail around and gather resources, its just that this was visually represented in a very goofy and indirect way.
Whether one likes the game or not is whatever, I just take issue with the article pretending these 2 games are at all comparable beyond being games about pirates. Is Windrose also what TES: Redguard was supposed to be?
So you make a claim and then immediately abandon it, and then throw out another non sequitur.
You really gonna pretend that the actual mechanics of the games bear no similarity, beyond aesthetics and theme?
In both, you are a captain of a pirate ship, who engages in pirate ship battles, for booty, to build up your base and ship and crew into a better or different ship with better or different capabilities.
In Windrose, you’re an actual person as an avatar, and can meaningfully engage in the world, mechanically, as a human… in S&B, you are the ship, your character as a human does not actually exist for gameplay purposes, they’re a customizable ornament for cutscenes and small explorable areas.
Theres the similarities and differences between a survival sandbox based around ships, and a mobile game based around ships, where the theme for both is pirates.
In the mobile game framework, there’s much less variety of gameplay, much of it is abstracted into extremely simplified mechanics, or just menus and cutscenes, mini walking simulator zones.
I’d argue that most people were expecting S&B to be essentially Black Flag, but multiplayer.
You know, you’re a person, who moves and jumps and fights and such.
Survival sandbox is a reasonable extrapolation of that.
Totally abstracting the human avatar into not actually being part of the game’s mechanics… is not a reasonable expectation of an expansion of a game where you are an assassin who also controls and fights on ships.
I don’t consider them to be similar beyond aesthetics, personally. Skull & Bones is a role-playing game. Windrose is a survival game. Windrose is more similar to Ark than any other game I can think of.
Skull & Bones is not a roleplaying game.
There are no impactful decisions you can make that change the storyline of the world / your character’s story arc, there is no character building, there is no roleplaying.
Skull & Bones is a mobile style gacha game, with tons of resources to seek and manage and use, minimal actual gameplay, tons of tiers of items to obtain.
