This one's locked, move on to the next

Finished and posted my Savage Lands review (original transcript below) so that I can start on The Witcher 3 next. I'm also starting to think about doing more experimental format stuff, but I've gotta draft that up before I say any more.

Please ignore the errors, what you are seeing is my script and being dyslexic having spelling errors in it actually helps me to read/speak it.

RMR6 – Savage Lands

Intro

Special thanks to: Randomise User for his tutorials and letsplays on tnhis game

Hello and welcome back, I am redmage and this is my review of Savage Lands, an indie action adventure survival multiplayer game currently in early access on steam.

 The game starts with you waking up on the beach of a deserted island with virtually nothing, and it is up to you as to how to progress, as you fight against biting cold, wild creatures, starvation, skeletons, and giants while the everpresent threat of a dragon circles you overhead.

As you progress thorugh the game you collect raw materials, these are mined from rocks, picked from the landscape, or taken off defeated animals or foes. These materials are used for the crafting of various tools, weapons, armors, and even structures to help turn your basic survival into total thrival as by the end you are the master of the island. Odly one of the greatest ways you progress is by building bigger and better backpacks to carry goods in as high end items require lots of components.

At present there isn’t much story in the game except what can be gleaned by looking through the beastiary. But more is being added with every patch. And devs plan to add additional story through the use of a journal system or perhaps notes found at various locations.

Speaking of the devs, the game is being built by Signal Studeos, the group best known for the XBLA “Toy Soldiers” series of games. Their attempt at building a game in Unity is admirable, but only time will tell if they can tame the system into doing the tricks they want it to perform. 

I have to give them props for jumping head first into the mainstream PC gaming masterrace’s kiddie pool that is the early access environment; a place as equally filled with bullies, trolls, and pee as you may expect.

 At present they are doing a good job of listening to the community, taking community suggestions and prioritizing community requests, also they post regular updates, patches, and vlogs showcasing the game’s development. Currently they have plans for more enemies, more items, in game magic, improved story, and eventually the ability to fight that dang dragon.

As far as survival games go, this one is fairly unique in that it is attempting to blend itself not with some form of post-apocalyptic state, or zombies, but rather with a fantasy setting.

It should be noted that this game is in deep early access (v.0.6.0) and there is still lots of planned content that has yet to be introduced into the game. I bring this up because my current experience is somewhat lacking, the game plays well, but doesn’t feel quite complete.

Don’t get me wrong, in comparison to all the other early access survival games, this one stands out as a gem amongst its buggy incomplete rivals, but It doesn’t really hold my interest. I don’t feel like the story is complete enough for me to even get a basic picture of who I am and what I am doing other than trying to not die.

I suppose the goal is to fight the dragon at the end but what is my motivation to do so other than to kill him before he kills me, the game progress feels slow, and the game is difficult in single player due to enemies sometimes spawning in reasonable numbers and sometimes not. Gathering resources ends up feeling grindy, there is really nothing special about the sound, and high end content currently only consists of walking for hours, lost in the woods to find hard-to-find place X to maybe kill a rare spawn Y who may drop a rare item Z.

What I want from this game:

1. More story, tell me who I am, give me a reason to be, a reason to fight, a goal to strive for; what is the conflict, the threat, the tension of the story that hangs over me? Right now just surviving gets old.

2. more fantasy aspects, I hear magic is planned which is good, if your going to call yourself a fantasy game you need fantasy elements. Having a dragon and undead is good, if a bit cliché, but that;s what fantasy is today, so grab your wizard hat, pick up your dwarven axe, and add some goblins, caves, and dungeons to the game that have valuable treasure horded away in their depths.

3. more customization, I mean this in items, in structuers, in character creation, in everything. This is a multiplayer game, I don’t want to look the same as another guy, hold the same weapons, and live in the same house.

4. a map, this island is huge and hard to navigate. I get that this may be part of the allure but think about giving me a map that I can optionally build and must fill in as I explore, that way I can find my way back to the cool places and not wander for hours looking for them again (like the monolith, found the blasted thing once and then couldn’t ever find it again). If you make it a buildable and an option then the hardcore players won’t feel forced to use it, and the casuals will not feel like they are always lost when you have so many sights to see, Win win right?

Now on to the scores:

Now its time for the totals.  (two score catagories, general and in genera)

Story/Characters/Dialogue: D / B

Not much story, no characters to interact with in the non-violent talking way other than other players, who you may often interact with in the violent non-talking way. But there is more here than other survival games have as they didn’t just tell you the story was “… zombies…”

Gameplay/Interface – C / B

The game is simple enough to understand, the interface works, and there are no real falaws or bugs, and it doesn’t feel too sticky or too awkward. Yes it could have more, but it really doesn’t need it. Impressively (for an early access indie game) most collisions, items, and movements work just fine.

Graphics/textures/animations/visuals/art = C / B

This game looks decent. It’s not a triple A title with a huge team working on it, and frankly for an indie game it looks good.

Sound/music = D / C

The sound is decent, its properly timed and located, and there doesn’t appear to be any music. This may be an artistic choice as the game does try to make you feel alone and isolated as you hear the waves crash against the nearby shore while the wind wistles past and wolves howl in the distance, but its been done before and this game adds nothing new.

Panache: Meh

Clearly the devs do care about this game and are working hard on it. Though it doesn’t yet feel like its all come together. Frankly it feels a bit like just aobut every other survival game I’ve played, and this game has the chance to do more with its inclusion of the “fantasy” genera.

Learning Curve: Mid/high –

Not really a game you can just pick up to play and have a good time in 10 min; this game takes lots of work, a bit of grinding, hiding indoors at night, slowly gearing up, and eventually heading out just to get helplessly murdered by furys (my first bear encounter… and there were four…) . But the recent updates have made the game more forgiving and atleast now you can find your corpse and collect all your lost goodies after your terrible death at the hands of an entire sleuth of bears.

Overall: general score: D+/C- / Contextual score: B

Not a bad game in its current state, it just needs more, and with the team doing what they are it should become a decent game in short order.

Definitely

So… Should you buy this game?

If you like survival games then you likely should

If you like fantasy games you should consider this

If you download the hardcore and realistic survival mods for your games then you should

This game is decent, even in its current state. I am excited to hear that the Devs are working to implement many of the things I want fixed the things I had problems with. Should they accomplish this, then Savage Lands will be a good all around game. Even at present it is much more polished and playable than many of the survival games out there.

I’ve been your host RedMage, never stop gaming.

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Don't Let The Dog Bite You on Your Way Out

Hello people who still read.

The past few days have been spent slowly collecting parts to rebuild my bicycle. I have a 1980 CCM Corsa 10 which I refurbished about ten years ago and recently just gave it another working overhaul. Nearly everything except the frame got replaced this time. And without proper tools (not a good idea) this took several days.

So after a few days of working with screwdrivers to take the tires off and pry out the old rotted rubber and put the new stuff on I decided to take it for a victory lap around the neighborhood.

My first thought - "wow, this is a lot faster than walking"

My second thought - "hey look a dog"

My third thought - "What the heck!"

As a dog came sprinting out of someone's side yard alongside the bike. It soon ran directly in front of me and I slammed on the new breaks trying to avoid the dog. I managed to not hit it, but the dog decided to take my sudden stop as an opportunity to sink its teeth into my right calf, drawing blood in three places and leaving seven other deep bruise impressions.

I was unable to find the owners nearby and didn't want to call animal control who would likely put the animal down. So I hopped off the bike and used it as a barrier between me and the dog. Together we walked for a quarter mile, with the dog being held at bay by my bike which I was using as a shield. Eventually the dog got bored and left me to hobble home. I asked several nearby neighbors if they knew the owners of the dog but no one did.

Now this brings me to the point of my whole story, modern law regarding animals makes sense but is also grosely unfair. Should I have called the proper authorities, the dog would likely be put down, a fate it did not deserve. But then again, a dog cant just go around biting people as that is a public hazard. Furthermore it would not be fair to hold the owners fully responsible as who can ever be fully responsible for the actions of another being (even though if they knew it was capable of biting random strangers for no reason they should either train this out of it or keep it in a place where it cant do so).

So in the end nothing is resolved. I cleaned the wound and crossed my fingers that the dog didn't infect me with anything. I don't have the money to throw away on a "could have had rabies" doctors visit as I am still quite unemployed. And I spent the day hobbling around as my leg throbbed its way along. I never found the owners, and likely never will. I could have checked the dog's collar, but I wasn't gonna put my hands near it after already being bitten hard. But most of all I'm confused and mildly annoyed. I have been physically hurt, possibly requiring medical treatment if this gets infected, and who is to blame? What can be done? And why would a dog just run up and bite someone in the first place?

Early Success AKA Seis de Mayo

Hello, I'm back.

I apologize for the delay. I spent most of last week helping a friend move which ate up all my time and energy. This week has mostly been spent building short animations for videos. I am getting noticeably better at audio and video editing, as well as animation building.

One thing that I'm struggling with is my early and not resounding success. The KSP video went up and got a real number of watches on the YouTubes. I am happy for the hits, the likes, and the positive feedback, but almost no one who watched it saw any of the other videos (and I don't have enough of those yet to boot).

This early success got me excited before I realized that I won't likely have success like that again soon. And to make matters worse, for all the hits I did get 3/4 were using a form of Addblock (which is a fantastic plugin that I also use) so I got very little money for it on top of those adds being worth nothing for the days I had traction.

To put things in perspective: my Delver video with around 40 hits made me about $2.50 because the adds on those days were worth good money. But the KSP vid with around 700 hits has only made me about $.05 due to the adds being worth very little. In addition I nearly made the mistake of asking people to turn off addblock to help support the vids, which along with asking people to click on adds turns out to be against the terms of service for Google AdSense.

This makes it quite hard to actually make money via videos. Much harder than I had expected, as that eliminates around 3/4 of the potential profit, which is then split between you and Google, further reducing the content creator's cut.

Well, I still have several more months to continue this experiment. And I'm in the process of becoming a Steam Curator as well so that should help. Maybe things will turn up in that time.

New attempt at a slogan: Never stop gaming